I think the thing I hate more than anything else is Authoritarians. The first authoritarian I knew was my father. He grew up very poor and in the streets. He used to tell the story of how once when he had a piece of bread trying to keep it in his mouth as long as possible by chewing it over and over. His mother had come over to America from Italy leaving her other children behind and taking only one son with her, my father. Was he on the streets because she worked? I never asked questions. I just heard that one story of how hungry he was. He only went to school up to the fifth grade.
My mother was the third of 8 children. From the little I gleaned of her childhood her mother used her to take care of the younger children. My grandmother’s first child was a son – a son was very important in an Italian family. Her second child was my aunt who had red hair, again something prized in my mother’s Italian family. Seems my mother – my grandmother’s third child in three years – my grandmother was 15 when she married - was the “tired of this” child who always thought of herself as ugly. At 14 my mother was working in a coat factory.
My father, it seems, was attracted to my mother because in his eyes she seemed like she, a home girl, could provide the family he always wanted. She was attracted to my father because he told her – marry me and you will see the world – he could provide the escape she always wanted.
There marriage seemed one big disappointment. They seemed opposites in every way. The traveled to Arizona from New York where my father took my mother for 4 days, where they thought they might live. My mother told the story of my father becoming homesick, saying he didn’t like being on a street where he never saw a person he knew. So they went back to New York where they lived unhappily ever after.
The thing I couldn’t stand about my father was his authoritarianism, and if I knew the word in my childhood - his Narcissism. There was a lot of screaming and yelling in my house and times when during arguments my father would turn violent against my mother. To me he always treated her as a kind of object.
I think I learned what love is from a book – Erich Fromm’s, The Art of Loving. And I think I learned what a relationship was from Martin Buber: I-Thou. That was relationship. I-It that was what I saw in growing up with my parents. Two disappointed people taking their disappointment out on each other.
From living with my father, I think, I grew to hate Authoritarians more than anything else. “You didn’t shut the oven off, how stupid can you be,” was how he talked to her. He was the boss. He was always right. And what he wanted was mostly what the family got.
In today’s Democrats I see I-It all over again. It seems they are incapable of a relationship with Trump or his supporters.
“If I-It is our predominant attitude, we live a life of monologue absorbed in our own desires and concerns, only concerned with the others insofar as they are useful to us,” I wrote in my book, The Search for Being describing Martin Buber’s philosophy. That’s the Democrats Today to me, absorbed in their desires and concerns – incapable of dialogue – talking about the insensitivity, moral inferiority of the opposition – mistaking their maps of reality as the territory.
“In a relationship of being,” I wrote in discussing Buber’s philosophy, “two people are genuine and affirm each other.” Deplorables, Crazy, Narcissistic and the list goes on. They are right and Trump is wrong. Affirmation of Trump or his supporters – a joke. They don’t have the slightest idea of what Trump’s personality type is – Extraverted Sensing Thinking Perceiving Type and criticize him for traits common to all his personality type.
“Being is found in the between, in the middle ground,” I wrote in my book of Buber’s philosophy, “wherein we make a response to that which addresses us, said Buber. I make the other present by seeing her as unique, as different from me, not as an object of my thought, but rather I try to know her concretely. Nothing conceptual interferes. No categorizing. No labeling. All speech within ceases in I-
From the Democrats we have the opposite: Labeling. Categorizing. Believing their maps of reality are the territory. No wonder the word “relationship” has disappeared from our political life vocabulary.
“In I-Thou relationship there is real listening and real speaking. People surprise one another. There is newness, the unrepeatable, making our response impossible to prepare beforehand.”
I hated the Talking Points Administration of Obama. The Talking points you would hear Obama and then Hillary say in instances like Benghazi. Trump may be crude, at times, but his speech is more genuine. Unlike Hillary, who as a Presidential candidate would spend stretches of time inaccessible to the press, Trump seems always available for a comment whether on a plane or going from here to there. Unscripted. I’ll take crude over talking points any day.
From my chapter on Buber – my go to guy for what a real relationship is: “Even when I disagree with him, I still affirm his right to become what he will become. I accept him for who he is. I understand being is for itself. I can only enter into relationship with it.”
I will never accept the domination the Democrats seek to impose on society – telling us what it is okay to say, to think, to be. I will never accept living in a Stepford America. No one should ever make an “It” of another person.
“In I-Thou relationship I am willing to be open, to freely communicate my being to the other. I don’t have to say everything that’s on my mind. I just can’t let seeming creep in. ‘To yield to seeming,’ Buber said, ‘is man’s essential cowardice – to resist it his essential courage.’’’
A world of seeming, a Stepford America, is what the Democrats seem to want, a country of people afraid to say what they really feel and think because it will offend the tyrannical Democrats like the Squad and where you’ll easily be labeled a racist or a fascist.
“In each particular Thou, Buber believed, we glimpse God.”
In today’s America the Democrats would not have you speak from your inner sense, speak from your spirit, but from the script they have written for you. They won’t let people live by their own values – but insist they must live by the Democrat’s values or be shamed, labeled deplorables. They won’t let you think your own thoughts, but demand you adopt their thoughts about what is right and wrong. Climate change – the discussion is closed one MSNBC host declared.
“Buber believed to the extent we respond to our own Thou, our own nature we live in the spirit.” The Authoritarian Democrats would deprive us of living from our own spirit. Don’t be Inner Directed, be Outer Directed is there alienating message. We will tell you how to behave, what to think, what to feel. Lose yourself is their message.
“The I of I-It is different than the I of I-Thou, Buber said. It sets itself apart from being and speaks from the ego.” God made man free and, to me it seems, the Democrats in their ego seek to impose chains on us – mental chains. You are no longer free to say what you think, to feel what you feel, to do what you think is right. They now will control your life and the lives of all Americans.
The Democrats seek to impose repression. Banish these thoughts from your conscious life. Don’t discuss them, never say them out loud.
“Moral decisions, Buber held, are not easily made. It is never easy or simple to know the right thing to do. Decisions could only be made by looking at the particular demands of each concrete situation.”
The Democrats disagree. Moral decisions are easy according to them and they will tell you what they are. No discussion, no thinking, necessary.
“The forces of the soul are measured, Buber said. We take a leap of faith and direct our energies to a certain path. We learn to live,” Buber said, ‘with holy insecurity.’ There is no moral program, Buber believed, that would save us from walking the narrow ridge. We make truly moral decisions only after much struggle and searching.”
A human being to be a human being must be active, not the passive plaything of any political party or movement. To be human we must live by values we have thought a lot about. We must feel what we authentically feel. We must say what is in our heart and never let any other person or group tell us what to value or what to feel or what to think or what to do. We can have laws in a society, but not domination by those who would take our freedom away from us.
Democrats think they can force an I-Thou society upon us because they don’t have the slightest idea what I-Thou, a life of being, a human life, really is.
I think their Authoritarianism should be opposed.