It's Seattle. It's raining. And since the specifics of "latest newsworthy outrage" — political, in the arts, whatever — are changing so fast that there'll be at least one new one between the time I draft this post and the time it actually appears on the 'net, I won't even try to remove the cause….
I: The Matinee
He said, “I don’t know. I love the idea of democracy, the hope, yes, I love that. I couldn’t live without that. But the country? You mean the thing on the map, lines, everything inside the lines is good and nothing outside them matters? How can an adult love such a childish idea?”
“But you wouldn’t betray the nation to an outside enemy.”
He said, “Well, if it was a choice between the nation and humanity, or the nation and a friend, I might. If you call that betrayal. I call it morality.”
He is a liberal. It is exactly what Dr. Katin was talking about on Sunday. It is classic psychopathy: the absence of normal affect. He said that quite unemotionally — “I might.”
No. That is not true. He said it with difficulty, with pain. It was I who was so shocked that I felt nothing—blank, cold.
How am I to treat this kind of psychosis, a political psychosis? I have read over De Cams’s book twice and I believe I do understand it now, but still there is this gap between the political and the psychological, so that the book shows me how to think but does not show me how to act positively. I see how F.S. should think and feel, and the difference between that and his present state of mind, but I do not know how to educate him so that he can think positively. De Cams says that disaffection is a negative condition which must be filled with positive ideas and emotions, but this does not fit F.S. The gap is not in him. In fact that gap in De Cams between the political and the psychological is exactly where his ideas apply. But if they are wrong ideas how can this be?
Ursula K. Le Guin, The Diary of the Rose (1976).
II: The New Release
“Dammit, isn’t there a good option left?”
“You’re asking me? The same good option there has always been. The citizens take the responsibility for voting for those who will look out for the welfare of everyone, not just their own special interests. Good luck counting on that, though. They’d prefer someone to ride in aboard that silver starship and save them the trouble.”
[The admiral] started to reply, then abruptly laughed. “We always look at it backwards, don’t we?…. Democracies. Voting. People are always talking about demanding more and better performance from elected officials, but when you get right down to it, shouldn’t a democracy demand more and better performance from the citizens who vote? If they do their job well, then the quality of those they elect will naturally follow.”
“I suppose.” [The ex-Senator] shook her head, her expression morose. “But not entirely true. The leaders have to be worthy, have to avoid the temptations of power, have to be honest even when the people don’t want honesty. Democracy is a team sport, Admiral. If everyone doesn’t play their position well, the whole team suffers.”
Jack Campbell,† The Lost Fleet: Beyond the Frontier: Leviathan (2015), ch. 9.
• • •
I definitely can't remove the symptom. Or side effects of any treatment: I really wish literati and Artistes and "guardians of culture" would stop judging books by their covers (like dismissing all of them that depict spaceships or dragons).
† (open pseud.) Lt Cdr, USN (Ret.); B.S., U.S. Naval Academy, 1978.