Blindness
Daily Meditation #133 — 7/5/2022
Elon Musk, Joe Biden, Trump and Jeff Bezos are “hot button” people for discussion among most plebeians in our world.
“I hate that Musk takes advantage of his workers with his hyper-Capitalist views!”
“I hate that Biden is blind to the everyman’s struggles with food and gas but keeps throwing billions at Ukraine!”
“I hate that Trump tried to usurp the American Democracy!”
“I hate that Bezos is raping his employees with low wages!”
And on the flipside, there are frothy-mouthed zealots for each of these people, as well.
“Musk is the greatest entrepreneur and I love him!”
“Biden will usher us into Socialism and I love him!”
“Trump was the best thing for America and I love him!”
“Bezos changed the world with Amazon and I love him!”
Here’s the rub:
None of them are worth worshipping.
And! None of them are worth blindly loathing!
These men are all imperfect — just as you or I are — but they aren’t so imperfect that we should hate them.
When we are buying a house, do we just write down all the best features of it and ignore the fact the roof is 10 years past replacement?
No! Of course not.
Samely, we need to take a piecemeal approach to humans.
Just as Musk is one of the greatest entrepreneurs in history and we can admire these achievements, he arguably is probably not a great husband, as his 3 divorces can attest.
You need to do a better job of balancing expectations of other people. They will disappoint you in some ways but also be appreciated by you in other ways.
Take off your metaphorical “fanboy” blinders, MAGA hats, bumper stickers and other supportive signaling apparatuses and be more objective about those you agree or disagree with.
No one is perfect.
But, also, very few are worth purely venomous hatred.
Follow for daily philosophical meditations.
These are distillations from my coming book “YouDaimonia: the Ancient Philosophy of Human Flourishing.”
