"In short, America should learn humbly to accept its own vulnerability..."

[Gravitycollapse]

Which is something we never have learned. We refuse to learn.

Slavoj Zizeck on the possible worlds post-9/11:

We do not yet know what consequences this event will have for the economy, ideology, politics and war, but one thing is certain: the USA, which, until now, perceived itself as an island exempt from this kind of violence, witnessing it only from the safe distance of the TV screen, is now directly involved. So the alternative is: will the Americans decide to fortify their 'sphere' further, or to risk stepping out of it? Either America will persist in -- even strengthen the deeply immoral attitude of 'Why should this happen to us? Things like this don't happen here!', leading to a more aggressivity towards the threatening Outside -- in short: to a paranoiac acting out. Or America will finally risk stepping through the fantasmatic screen that separates it from the Outside World, accepting its arrival in the Real world, making the long-overdue move from 'A thing like this shouldn't happen here!' to 'A thing like this shouldn't happen anywhere!'. That is the true lesson of the attacks: the only way to ensure that it will not happen here again is to prevent it happening anywhere else. In short, America should learn humbly to accept its own vulnerability as part of this world, enacting the punishment of those responsible as a sad duty, not as an exhilarating retaliation -- what we are getting instead is the forceful reassertion of the exceptional role of the USA as a global policeman, as if what causes resentment against the USA is not its excess of power, but its lack of it.

These are haunting, prophetic words, relevant to recent events involving Syria. The United States has never accepted its place in the World. We are always in opposition and our intervention is always only upon reaching a tipping point (a red line, if you will) instead of a consistent deploring of violence and death. So we see the benevolence of Americans is one fortified against most atrocities. But it is this tipping point, when reached, that unleashes the flood gates of "correction." Not an international correction but our own correction. Thus, in asserting our ethical authority, we become international police. Not grimly and with heavy hearts but with precisely the opposite. We love asserting this authority. We love fortifying our ethical isolation in order to maintain the illusion that we are actually isolated.

[highprincipleswork]

1. Now that would something like emotional and psychological maturity!

Humility

Vulnerability

The ability to mourn and accept, as well as to strike out when necessary.

Those would be good, healthy things, sorely lacking in so much of our history.

But human, nonetheless.

And without this, hubris, arrogance, something like a disease.