I don’t want a seat at the table. The table is full of oppressors. I want a blanket and a pillow down by the ocean. I want to rest.
Tricia Hersey, Rest Is Resistance
5: The Political is Personal (continued from previous post)
Accepting the usefulness and validity of the conclusions drawn in Part 1, means that we have to look at more than local networks, structures, aggregate data pools, and “biopsychosocial indicators of health”—we also have to look at the decisions made and the actions taken by specific organizations and specific individuals. Oppression persists not simply because it is structured into society but because there are specific parties who create those structures, who maintain and reinforce them when they are challenged, who profit from them, and who sign the papers that ensure many of us will die so that a very few of us can expand the assets held in their portfolios. To riff on the quote attributed to Utah Phillips, the forcibly impoverished and dispossessed aren’t dying, they are being killed—and those doing the killing have names and addresses.
But, wait, we know who these people are in our local municipality. In fact, we’ve personally interacted with many of them. Especially during the “systems-wide health and homelessness response” the City of London initiated when a coalition of frontline workers (#TheForgotten519) successfully challenged the City’s power, their ability to control the public narrative, and the priorities they were setting.
- We met representatives and personal hoarders of vast amounts of (stolen) land and wealth (like real estate developers, the heads of local “Business Improvement Areas”, and bankers);
- We know many of the municipal bureaucrats who manufacture homelessness and death via legal technicalities, bylaw amendments, selective enforcement protocols, and budget choices;
- We know many of the non-profit bosses who are happy to follow the money and engage in increasingly punitive actions against the most vulnerable people they claim to serve in order to satisfy the demands of the rich (White benevolence was well-represented, as was Christianity);
- We also know the doctors and healthcare professionals as well as CEOs of health institutions who reject harm reduction, who make mad money from the Opioid Agonist Treatment industry, and who generally hate impoverished people whose access to healthcare has been criminalized (I vividly remember the then-CEO of the hospital asking if we really needed to implement anti-oppression practices because, “everybody can just be nice to each other”—when she was speaking, I was thinking about everybody I knew who had died from stupid causes, like easily-treatable blood infections, because they were kicked out of the hospital [for self-medicating their own pain because the hospital wouldn’t give them pain meds] then beaten by security guards and told to never return).
They people responsible for manufacturing homelessness and producing premature and preventable deaths are well-represented the table. They chair our working groups. They control most of our sector’s funding. They set the priorities and define success for most organizations. They control the narrative that is fed to the public.
If they find us especially useful or troublesome (in a way that prevents them from ignoring us altogether), they invite us to a spot at the table. There, we can either have our best efforts to create change channeled into programs that better suit the priorities of those who hoard stolen wealth or we can be given a treadmill to run on in order to try and arrive at our goal of meaningful, anti-oppressive, structural and deeply personal change. Run fast, run slow, run often, run rarely, it’s up to you. But when you’re on a treadmill, you’re never going to make any forward progress. Eventually, you’ll just tire yourself out. And that’s the point.
Observing this, leads us to a conclusion that is deeply uncomfortable to middle-class Liberals who like to imagine that we all want the same things, that we all have the same priorities, and that we just need a bit more education (more research!), and bit more bridge-building and connecting to get us to a better place. This is not the case.
6: Reckoning with People, Power, Charm and Evil
But none of this should surprise us. We’ve all studied the theory. We’re all post-Foucault. I’m sure that everyone with a degree in Social Work has written some kind of paper analyzing hierarchical power dynamics and how the relate to this work. We’re all intersectional now. Yet, once again, we arrive at a massive disconnect between the theory we find compelling and the ways in which we navigate interpersonal relationships. Why is this the case?
For a number of reasons, only some of which, I will highlight. In part, we arrive at this disconnect because power is seductive and people who have it are immersed in that aura. In part, also, because those who rise to places of prominence often have some kind of charisma or charm that inevitably impacts you when you have the opportunity (nay, the privilege!) of speaking with them face-to-face. It turns out that the most efficient neoliberal death-dealers (much like the most effective anti-capitalist life-givers), are really good at making you feel seen, heard, acknowledge, and appreciate. Not only that, but they are good at convincing you that they care about the same things as you, that they have the same priorities and values as you, and that they really do want the same outcomes as you. I know this from personal experience. Spend any time with successful politicians or CEOs of nonprofits and healthcare institutes or chiefs of police or real estate millionaires and you will discover that they can be charming in the very same way as successful gang leaders, higher level drug traffickers, and predatory men. I’ve seen otherwise kind-hearted and intelligent people be seduced by all them. I, too, have been led down the proverbial garden path on more than one occasion. It turns out that in a lot of instances, the devil is seductive, not because he encourages you to unleash your Id and gratify all your forbidden desires, but because he makes little old me feel so gosh-darn special.
For the most part (although there are always exceptions, and they seem increasingly frequent these days), evil doesn’t flourish by unmasking itself and revelling in the utmost forms of public torture, slaughter, and blood-drenched devastation (like what Israel is doing in Palestine right now). This act of masking is certainly the case with neoliberalism which has grown, in part, because it is so good at pretending like its form of evil does not exist. Thus, as mentioned in Part One, neoliberalism takes that which is evil and calls it commonsense, calls it fiscal responsibility, calls it entrepreneurialism, calls it governance, calls it a best practice.
We are, therefore, solidly in the domain of that which Hannah Arendt refers to as “the banality of evil.” Observing Adolf Eichmann on trial in Jerusalem for running the administration that operated the death camps during WWII, Arendt concluded that, holy shit, these genocidal motherfuckers, were just businessmen doing business things, dull paper-pushing bureaucrats, and all-around everyday men. You know, the kind who interrupt you, who stare at your tits more than your eyes, who explain your area of expertise to you, or who treat you like you’re invisible if they don’t think they can get anything from you. To quote Biff Loman, these men are “a dime a dozen.”
However, as Bettina Stangneth shows in her response to Arendt, these dull bureaucratic, paper-pushing death-dealers, these everyday men, are, nevertheless, still a lot more intentionally and insidiously evil than Arendt suggests. They may be banal, but that does not mean there is not calculated element to the harm they inflect on others. When it comes to building careers that require the mass manufacture of suffering, they really do lean in. And a good many of these everyday men (and women) experience jouissance from this.
Liberalism is ill-equipped to deal with a conception of evil that comes as close to home as this. This is by design. Today, enlightened Liberals distinguish themselves from deplorable Conservatives precisely because they (claim to) disavow a black-and-white binary form of judgmental thinking which brands some people as “evil.” This doesn’t mean that Liberals don’t still engage in mass-scale violence—both Liberals and Conservatives drop bombs on Afghani wedding parties, both Liberals and Conservatives sell munitions to Israel in order to assist with genocide in Gaza, both Liberals and Conservatives put refugee children and pregnant women in cages or jails at the borders, both Liberals and Conservatives enrich themselves by colonial ecocide, both Liberals and Conservatives manufacture homelessness and further dispossess the already impoverished, both Liberal and Convervatives invest in (and manage!) the oil companies that have been manufacturing genocide in Sudan for decades, and so on and so forth—but it does create a narrative wherein Liberals are able to imagine that they are good people while maintaining, strengthening, and profiting from death-dealing systems and structures (Conservatives are more inclined to use religion—especially Christianity—to achieve this goal). Thus, the Liberal eradication of evil is, first and foremost, a way of denying the evil that is inherent to Liberalism, from its founding to the present day. Hence, the passivity it mandates upon any who wish to take genuinely transformative action (as I discuss in this post).
But, hold on, Dan, someone might object at this point. I’ve met a lot of these real estate developers, municipal bureaucrats, nonprofit bosses, and healthcare CEOs and, I gotta tell ya, they really do mean well. They give more money to charity than you’ll ever see in your life! And, sure, sometimes they have to compromise to try and meet the needs of everyone in our community (including rich people who are people, too, Dan!), but that’s just how politics work in TheRealWorldTM and not in some imaginary utopia. To riff on Winston Churchill, Liberal capitalism “is the worst form of government, except for all the others that have been tried!” You’re being over dramatic and divisive, Dan. If you really want to be a change-maker, you need to recognize these things and play nicer with the people who have the real power to make a difference (you catch more flies with honey than with vinegar, Dan).
There’s a lot to unpack there about philanthrocapitalism, tone policing, extractive abandonment and the impacts of charity versus mutually liberating solidarity, the medicalization of deviance, the limits that those who profit from the status quo always wish to impose upon the possibilities imagined by those they dispossess, and the illusion that genuinely transformative change only comes from the top down instead of rising from the bottom up (that’s the same old “trickle down” or “makes all boats rise” lie that capitalism has been selling us for decades), but my focus here is on the day-to-day reality of evil.
Evil, like goodness, runs through all of us. We cannot pretend it away or politely avert our gaze and refuse to acknowledge or confront it simply because we wish to be branded as “nice” or “non-judgemental” or “loving.” And evil almost always comes mixed together with other traits we call good or virtuous or harmless or (as I’ve been emphasizing above) charming. Any child who has suffered abuse from the hands of a parent or relative has been forced to struggle with this: the uncle who sexually abuses you is also the uncle who buys you ice cream and comforts you when you fall off your bike; the father who beats you is also the father who tends to you when you are sick and takes you on vacation in the summer; the mother who lets her boyfriend rape you and refuses to believe you is also the mother who makes your birthday extra special every year; and on and on it goes. Sexual abuse, physical abuse, handing a child over to an abuser, all of these acts are surely evil and yet the ones who engage in them also frequently engage in acts of big love and tenderness.
the same is true of those who are manufacturing homelessness and large-scale premature and preventable deaths amongst those whom the wealthy have robbed and cast out. As the corporate media reminded us when the CEO of United Health was summarily judged, found guilty, and executed on the streets of New York City—yes, okay, that guy’s decisions led to innumerable families being annihilated, untold pain and suffering, and countless premature and preventable deaths, but, damn, that guy is not just “some guy.” He’s Brian (#sayhisname) who really loved his wife and kids! And I’m sure he did. I’m sure Brian’s friends thought he was a great guy. I’m sure Brian was charming af. Plus, during the Pandemic, Brian helped set up the Provider Relief Fund to keep the healthcare payment system rolling when it was on the verge of collapse. He wasn’t a monster. He was a paper-pushing bureaucrat, a businessman doing business things, a banal, everyday man—who happened to run one of the most death-dealing institutions in lands occupied by the United States.
And, okay, when the mainstream media of heteronormative patriarchal, racial capitalism shows this kind of “himpathy” to professional death-dealers like Brian Thompson or others like or cops who rape Indigenous women, or White boys who shoot Black churchgoers, or White nationalists who get to talk about how much they love muffins and cats when they are interviewed by the New York Times [LINK], we have to deconstruct this presentation and ask why some people are presented as oh-so-human and others as oh-so-not. This line of criticism is valid and important. However, we are mistaken in our deconstruction readings if we conclude that all the people doing the oppressing are not oh-so-human. Of course they are. And of course, oh-so-human people are capable of doing oh-so-evil things. As Susan Sontag observed after studying the Holocaust, “10 percent of any population is cruel, no matter what, and 10 percent is merciful, no matter what, and the remaining 80 percent can be moved in either direction.”
Which then leads me back around to my opening observation that specific organizations and specific individuals in our specific context are responsible for creating, maintaining, and profiting from this environment wherein large-scale impoverishment and dispossession is produced and premature and preventable deaths abound. Yes, they are developers, and bureaucrats, and Executive Directors, and CEOs, but, yes, they are oh-so-human and can be oh-so-loving, and still, yes, their actions in this regard are oh-so-evil.
At this point it is important to emphasize that some kinds of oh-so-human evil, cannot be reformed, redeemed, salvaged, or saved. Some kinds of evil can only be fought, resisted, and eradicated. Slavery, for example, is not the kind of thing you can redeem (in the original Greek being “redeemed” literally means being bought out of slavery; i.e. emancipated). But it makes no sense to argue that slavery, itself, could be emancipated. We can only emancipate people from slavery. The same applies to other things. For example, rape culture cannot be salvaged—it can only be terminated and replaced by something like a nurturance culture. These are particular obvious examples. Where people begin to get uncomfortable is, again, when we bring this kind of analysis into the day-to-day reality of power dynamics within our local setting. And what I have concluded after decades of struggle is that there are also some people who are beyond any hope of being reformed, redeemed, salvaged and saved—and we must also then resist them and fight them, and, most especially, disempower them by all possible means. In particular, both study and experience have taught me that people who are situated in places of power who are simultaneously greedy, cruel, and smug will not be swayed by any intellectual or moral argument and can only be forcefully disempowered.
7: Greedy, Cruel, and Smug
What does it mean to be greedy? What does it mean to be cruel? What about smug? And how do these attributes interact with one another to create a trifecta of evil?
To be greedy is to be possessed by a voracious hunger that cannot be satisfied. Traced back to the roots of the word, the word “greed” speaks of a perverse form of hunger that only makes a person sicker the more it is fed (in the old Greek, this hunger is explicitly called “money-loving” [philargyros]). But feeding this hunger leads the evermore hungry person to cause harm to others. Thus, pre-capitalist cultures often understood greed to be an especially dangerous attribute when left unchecked. In some traditions indigenous to Turtle Island, greed is closely associated with the Wendigo. In medieval Catholicism, it was one of the seven deadly sins. In these traditions, it is especially dangerous, in part, because greed causes a person to annihilate the bonds of mutuality and care that ensure that all people in a community spanning multiple generations are able to grow and flourish. It is a vice that gives rise to other vices—a form of violence that encourages other forms of violence. Unchecked greed grows exponentially into unchecked devastation. Which, of course, is precisely what we are witnessing around the world due to the globalization of neoliberalism and the ways in which it treats greed as an essential, indispensable and virtuous attribute of homo economicus.
To be cruel is to have little or no regard for the sufferings of others and, thus, to be inclined or willing to make others suffer. To be cruel is to be hard-hearted. It is callous indifference. Cruelty doesn’t necessarily entail taking pleasure in pain inflicted on others; rather, it simply means accepting that the sufferings of others are a part of “the way things are” and that, if others must suffer so that you can enrich yourself, well, that’s the nature of life in a competitive, free market where everyone is responsible for investing in themselves as human capital and where there will always be winners and losers. Cruelty is an inescapable element of capitalism. Treating housing as an asset within a wealth management portfolio is a form of cruelty. Gentrification is a form of cruelty. Making the social assistance application and appeals process complex is a form of cruelty. Requiring people to be abstinent, to give away their animal-companions, or to separate from their life partners to access shelter is form of cruelty. Making bathrooms accessible to paying customers only is a form of cruelty. Throwing out people’s belongings, tents, and bicycles because they are camping in a place forbidden by municipal bylaws is a form of cruelty. Telling a homeless woman who cannot walk that she must abandon her wheelchair if outreach workers are going to transport her to a one-night temporary shelter location is a form of cruelty. Kicking a person who requires IV-antibiotics to live out of the hospital for self-medicating pain that the hospital refuses to treat because the person is “red flagged for pill seeking” is a form of cruelty. It is not necessary that any of the people doing these things rejoice in what they are doing. In fact, some may be deeply troubled by the consequences of their actions. Yet they persist in those actions nonetheless.
To be smug is to be self-satisfied, self-congratulating, and self-righteous precisely because you believe that you are superior to others. It is closely related to arrogance, conceit, vanity, pride, and egotism. Smugness means knowing that you know better than others, knowing that you deserve more than others (who thus always deserve less than you), and knowing, a priori, that you are right and they are wrong. It is the sense of superiority and ongoing ranking of others that is a part of what distinguishes smugness from a more positive form of self-confidence. The smug are not easily swayed because, regardless of what you say or do, they already know that they are right and better. Thus, the often-present smirk that arises when advocates try to appeal to their hearts or minds. Smugness goes hand-in-hand with scorn, derision, and contempt.
Now, just as evil runs through all of us, acknowledging our full humanity requires us to recognize that all of us possess each of these attributes to one degree or another. However, when each of these attributes is encouraged to thrive and permitted to feed off the other two, then a true shit-storm arises. It is the valourisation of all three of these attributes in people who possess power that is deeply troubling for us all.
For example, pairing greed and cruelty gives rise to rapaciousness. When you desire to consume or possess or devour more and more (greed), and you do not care about what sufferings this may cause to others (cruelty), then you will lay claim to and forcefully take whatever your heart desires—from the bodies of non-consenting women, to the children of the impoverished, to the health of your labourers, to the homes of your neighbours.
Likewise, pairing cruelty and smugness gives rise to sadism. Believing that you are superior to others, that you are more deserving than them, and that others are contemptible (smugness), paired with a lack of care about the sufferings of others (cruelty), all too easily devolves further into taking pleasure in other people’s sufferings because that further verifies your superiority (and is the sort of thing a superior being—one who is “beyond good and evil” is able to feel). Often there is a sexualized component to this form of pleasure and, it’s true—I’ve seen how cops get off on beating up homeless kids, how some bosses get off on banning Indigenous men from being able to access their programs, and how others like to power trip in one way or another.
Additionally, pairing smugness with greed gives rise to an unleashed and unrelenting consumption of everyone and everything. When you are possessed by an insatiable, perverse hunger (greed), and are convinced of your superiority (smugness), then you become entitled to take what you want, when you want, from whomever you want, no matter what, all the fucking time. You end up with a death-machine that gets stronger and faster and hungrier the more it consumes. A death-machine with no breaks, no checks-and-balances. A death-machine convinced it has the inherent right to consume, devour, and destroy even life itself.
Then, when you mix all through of these attributes together—which often takes place in people who have power within the current iteration of capitalism because it encourages and rewards precisely these traits—you get people who are irredeemable for as long as they have power over others. What does it mean to be irredeemable? It means to be so far gone into the grip of your compulsions that you cannot but be greedy, cruel and smug for as long as you have the opportunity to behave that way. Power is the great enabler and facilitator of this. Solidarity and genuinely mutual care, tender-heartedness, and humility before those whom you have dispossessed—these things are impossible for as long as you have the power to continue to get what you believe you are entitled to have. You might as well ask someone who drinks compulsively to get sober in a bar during happy hour when someone is buying rounds for the house.
8: And Petty, Too!
Part of what is remarkable about all of this, is just how willing people are to trade the lives of others for such small sums of money. This is why I refer to those who operate in this way as the petty warlords of neoliberalism.
White folx tend to apply the language of “warlords” to those whom they other in exotic, fetishized, monstrous and racialized ways. But warlords are those who “exercise military, economic and political control over a region… typically through informal control over armed forces.” Warlords are associated with “failed states,” illegal and extra-legal forms of violence, forced migrations of the impoverished masses, and a monopoly hold on some kind of resource that grants them great wealth.
But there is a war going on in our own city—class war. As Warren Buffett observed, “There’s class war, alright. But it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.” there is no longer any doubt that neoliberalism is the climactic manifestation of capitalism’s war of the rich upon the poor and everyone/everything else (I say “climactic” because capitalism may, at long last, be giving way to a genuinely new system: techno-feudalism). This plays out not only on a global scale but also in smaller and smaller localities as neoliberalism becomes better networked and all-encompassing (neoliberalism claimed the arteries of global trade and has slowly filled all the capillaries as well so that there is almost nowhere a person can to flee from its presence—to riff on John Lennon’s statement, neoliberalism is now more ubiquitous than god). Strategies developed by the rich in LA and NYC and Rio de Janeiro and Gaza and Birmingham are shared and redeployed by every layer of neoliberal governance.
Thus, municipal bureaucrats in London, obeying the commands of real estate developers, deploy bylaw enforcement officers and cops to initiate forced migrations amongst those who are deprived of housing, to try and push people to ad hoc refugee camps at the limits of the city. They use social workers who are paid by organizations where the Executive Directors and CEOs are invested in carceralism and policing. The police, bylaw officers, social workers, and even some outreach workers—as well as security guards sub-contracted by the City and developers and hospitals—all engage in illegal or extra-legal acts of violence against targeted populations. They steal and trash what little property is owned by the dispossessed, they ban the unhoused from accessing life-saving services, they turn vulnerable community members over to those who will kill them, and they beat the shit out of people seeking shelter behind garbage dumpsters when they don’t pack their belongings up quickly enough to move along. The neoliberal governance of the forcibly deprived of housing and shelter here in London, Ontario, is warlordism.
And it’s extremely petty warlordism. In the racial (and racist) imaginary of Whiteness, a warlord is an African holding an AK-47 who rules a mob of soldiers and who has seized control of a region where a diamond mine, or oil pipeline, or some such thing, operates and they now make untold millions—which they eventually take with them when they flee to France or England after they are replaced by another more vicious warlord. But the banal paper-pushing, businesspeople doing business things, bosses doing boss things, and bureaucrats doing bureaucratic things—the dull everyday men and women of municipal governance—are mass manufacturing suffering and death for an annual salary of roughly $100,000 to $300,000 plus benefits (with a lot more people clustered close to the lower number than the higher number). What a low price to put on the lives of others! What a low price to put on your own soul.
9: To be Disempowered is to be Redeemed: Or, What It Means to Save a Soul
Alright, alright, I can hear someone saying as they roll their eyes, you’re getting carried away again, Dan. I was already getting suspicious when you started using religious terms like “redemption” and “salvation” and talking about things like “evil” and “the devil” (and don’t even ask what I think about your oh-so-divisive “warlord” rant—gimme a break!), but now you want to talk about “souls”? Isn’t this a little hyperbolic, Dan? Are you sure you’ve really left as much of your colonial Christian ways behind you as you think? Aren’t you regressing into precisely the sort of binary thinking that you criticize in others like the hellfire Evangelicals and the “only two gender” fuckwads? Isn’t this all a little too theological? When do we read about “souls” in evidence-based research that has been published in double-blind peer reviewed journal articles? Skip the sermon, I want to see pie graphs and aggregate statistics, goddammit!
Except that I’m not being hyperbolic. I’m being deadly serious. My point of reference for this soul-talk isn’t theology—it’s a gay, French, poststructuralist who dropped acid and engaged in BDSM in sex clubs in San Francisco. It’s one of the theorists most hated by Conservatives and reviled by Christians. It’s my beau, Michel Foucault. In Discipline and Punish, Foucault attests to “the historical reality of the soul, which, unlike the soul represented by Christian theology is not born in sin and subject to punishment, but is born, rather, out of methods of punishment, supervision and constraint.” Which then, of course, leads to one of his most quoted passages: “The soul is the effect and instrument of a political anatomy; the soul is the prison of the body” (emphasis added to both quotes). What does this mean?
Essentially, Foucault’s understanding of the soul is related to his understand of the subject and what it means to be shaped, formed, and subjected as a subject. The neoliberal subject discussed in Part One, is one kind of soul. And because this is a subject who is formed by subjugation (a subject subjected within various disciplinary environments and punished for any deviance), Foucault is correct to see this soul as the prison of the body. The changing of the soul via economic methods, desired by Margaret Thatcher (and quoted in Part One), has now been accomplished. The souls of those subjected by neoliberalism are rewarded for becoming greedy, cruel and smug. Greed, cruelty, and smugness run rampant amongst overseers, bosses, bureaucrats, CEOs, and developers—but also amongst others, even some of the most oppressed, who have bought the lies their oppressors have sold them (cf. Gore Capitalism for more on that). Furthermore, I have stated that people who possess power who are simultaneously greedy, cruel, and smug, are irredeemable. How, then, can a soul like this be saved?
As I understand it, salvation refers to being liberated in the here-and-now from that which oppresses us, which prevents us from being fully alive, which pulls us out of the web of interconnected life that is our world, and which hands us over to death. Salvation for most of us means being liberated from the rule of the petty warlords of neoliberalism. Yet, for those warlords, salvation means being freed from the hold that greed, cruelty, and smugness have upon their souls.
This relates more generally to what Jürgen Moltmann once wrote about oppression. Oppression, he argued (in slightly different language than I am using here), dehumanizes and harms both the oppressor and the oppressed. The oppressed have their lives, children, health, connections to land and water and other nations taken from them. They are forcefully pushed down and treated as sub-human. Yet the oppressor, because their comfort, wellbeing, health, and connectedness to others, is premised upon stealing all of these things from others exists in a vampiric, monstrous state. The oppressed is not permitted to be fully human; the oppressor fundamentally warps and perverts their humanity into something unrecognizable. Thus, for both the oppressor and the oppressed, salvation means bringing oppression to an end. Thus, while what is good for the rich is almost never good for the poor, what is good for the poor will inevitably be good for the rich as well—even if they experience that goodness as a net capital loss.
Therefore, although I have described powerful people who are simultaneously greedy, cruel, and smug as irredeemable, there is still hope for them! Their salvation, just like ours, becomes possible if we succeed in wresting power away from them so that that cannot persist in causing harm to others. Sometimes, just like the fellow who wants to quit drinking but can’t, or the lady who smokes a little more fetty than she wants to no matter how hard she tries to stop, people who are hooked on having power and harming others need an intervention. And then, once they have been isolated from the environment that encourages them to be their worst selves and have, as a result, begun a healing journey, we just need to ensure that they never have power again.
Remember: although these people can engage in acts of great evil, they can also engage in acts of big love. Remember: these are banal, everyday people. Most of them have family members who love them. All of them are able of engaging in some kind of creative expression. Some love to garden. Others love to sing. Let’s make it so that they can do more of that and never again be put in a place where they are enabled to mass produce premature and preventable deaths.
This final point speaks to the importance of working together to create the kind of world where it is easier to be good company to and with others (the central subject of my last book). Neoliberalism creates the kind of world where it is easy to be greedy, cruel, and smug. It damns our souls to hell and implants hell within our very souls. It is the kind of world where those who are more inclined to develop those attributes are also more likely to climb the ranks of power (even though other parts of them may be tender and loving and playful). But we can build other worlds. Some of us are already doing exactly that in our own small ways. You can, too, in your own small way. Use your imagination. Start with where you’re at with those you have around you. Don’t let the bosses and bureaucrats and hoarders of stolen wealth set the limits of what is possible for you. Be playful. Be curious. Try. Fail. Try again. It’ll be so hard and so much fun. It will save your soul.