THE GOBLIN NEWSLETTER 72

I was a hard leftist growing up, not subscribing to any sectarian philosophy. I still believe in a highly modified set of leftist ideals but they have been heavily tempered over the years by my interactions with actual leftists, regular people & the real world. I describe my politics as non-politics, or at least nothing resembling the way political understandings are today. Realism & pragmatism have tempered my youthful zeal & desire to fix the world. Now I don’t believe the world can be fixed & I value other people’s lives in a profound way beyond some kind of idealistic abstraction. My understanding of these things is that things go up in one place, they go down somewhere else, not randomly, but interconnectedly. It is because of this that I feel the need to address billionaires. I became so tired of hearing critiques of capitalism as an excuse for one’s failures that I dismissed any criticism of billionaires as the same thing. I’ve been working on letting go of resentment built up over the years & I think I finally managed to drop my resentment of the left & capitalist critics & have been able to understand & hear the emotional underpinnings of their complaints. The thing that I should make clear is that I don’t believe in a huge systemic fix for things, I believe that capitalism & communism are both highly flawed & their flaws are correlated. If pressed, I believe in a society that has elements of cooperation, freedom, shared values of doing the best with human potential as possible & an attempt at understanding that the human body is made up of all types & that even in an apparently homogenous population there is tremendous variety with individuals. It is because of this understanding that I believe that democracy, while slow, messy, inglorious & inefficient, is the best way to govern any kind of group. It’s difficult because I love glory & grandiosity, but those values don’t have to be carried out by government. Within Democracy, I should be able to actually push for my interests & be heard. It sounds hopelessly Pollyannaish, because I have so much emotional build up over resentment towards the government, but I’m trying something else out, shedding that emotional baggage & moving on.