A new movement, that then creates a political party to implement its values, needs to take material form. A movement with the protection of human dignity at its heart. We are now at the point where we need to consciously create 'space to be a full human being' via boundaries of law and norms.
For example, if your business model depends on surreptitiously spying on people and aggregating their data, and then selling it, and you are using manipulative algorithms to addict them to your product--then you need a new business model. It should not be legal. We don't reward crack dealers with social capital and we shouldn't reward digital crack dealers either.
Consider, crack dealers wouldn’t occupy their niche were they not in some way serving a system benefitting elites. They have their role as much as anybody else. The public face of elites calls them a scourge and puts on a big show of wrestling them to the ground. That’s because righteous indignity plays well, and these dealers are kept too powerless and dependent to expose the duplicity of elite complicity.
There's a key piece of your equation missing here. Eastwood's Stranger wasn't emotionless; he simply didn't express his emotions or let anyone else know what he was he thinking, which is pretty smart in a world full of passionate murders who set themselves up for ruin by exposing themselves. Consider that the Man With No Name realizes that braggart Ramon always shoots for the heart, so he protects himself by, in some incredibly literal symbolism, guarding it with a steel plate.
What's ruinous for America is that people don't realize this and instead prefer the remorseless robot version of the Man with No Name. He also seems emotionless because we live in a world where feelings trump reason and must be constantly expressed as argument killers and thought-terminating cliches.
IMHO, you could make a better case for Popeye Doyle in THE FRENCH CONNECTION. When he shoots the Frenchman's assassin in the back on the stairs to the elevated subway, the cop acting as creative consultant said, You can't do that; that's murder. The director said, Popeye would, and the image became one of Hollywood's most famous movie posters. That idea of "good murder" vigilantism--despite the historical cowardice of shooting someone in the back!--is more likely what lead to Bronson, et al. as well as cops thinking it OK to murder around 1,000 people a year.
I hadn't thought before about the possibility that the steel plate in the gun duel scene in Man With No Name was literal symbolism. If it was intended, that was brilliant.
I also find your reflection about Popeye Doyle interesting. Definitely another iconic image that has lasted through the years. These things live on in our subconscious mind, I think.
I certainly hope we have a new romantic movement with some power But unfortunately the people with money the oligarchs who influence society with the tool of money are hard to beat.They run media empires and fund it.I see this as connected to the environmental movement and nature taking on the polluters, the climate change deniers.This detached personality also detaches themselves from the real world and in turn the natural world.
You left out Spock. I believe the idea behind Vulcans was not that they bred out emotions but that they had learned to control emotions. And Spock was identified as ‘the most human’ by other characters and as fans.
Point being - there is an important distinction between someone who deeply feels but controls and someone who does not feel. Seems to me the problem with social media is the inauthentic - people who express without actually feeling.
Visiting Los Angeles from my home in the Rust Belt, I’m just being exposed to the Waymo self-driving cars for the first time. Impressive technology perhaps, but it seems their entire purpose is to eliminate livelihoods and the whole human element from the transaction. I hate where our society is headed. I’ve had some of the best random conversations of my life with taxi drivers, who can support themselves and help feed a family. Add another livelihood that is heading for extinction — along with photographers, lab technicians, graphic artists, writers. Makes me glad I’m old, I will be spared the worst of it.
In defence of Eastwood's acting - he has challenged his persona as a deadpan-faced cowboy more than once as a director, most famously with Unforgiven, but also in Bronco Billy. Unlike him, the technocrat class you describe is incapable of self-reflection. Personally, I'm also worn out by the awful, untrained acting that plagues so many otherwise good screenplays today. If only a mass of untalented TikTok and Instagram D-list hustlers, cast in movies for their looks, or the sake of the "neurodiversity" movement or DEI agenda, came across as mildly entertaining as Eastwood's cowboys, cinema today would be on another level.
I know what you are saying. It is just that there are so many trying to be artists, actors and entertainers now. Did you see “I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore”? Or “Poor Things”? Or”The Brutalist”? “The Clouds of Sils Maria”? We do have some great filmmakers and actors out there and I think it is getting better and better…I also started the remake of “The Leopard” recently and it is breathtaking…Sterlin Harjo here in Oklahoma is a great filmmaker…well all the best. Good talking to you.
Have you heard of Clifton Duncan? He is a really talented classically trained Broadway actor, currently heading up the Thomas Sowell-inspired project at Substack https://cliftonduncan.substack.com/. He has been writing about how difficult is to get a good role these days because of nepotism, and too many folks who luck out and simply wants to “make it” in entertainment. I'm not saying we don't have talented directors and actors today, Robert Eggers is probably one of the most interesting filmmakers of our time, but as social media has lowered the bar for so-called "fame", the flood of people without any merit or shred of personality, especially in acting, which required the ability to perform both on screen and on stage, has sent the essence of the craft down the drain.
Sorry to be so chatty, but about the value of the stage, I never knew John Cazale was a stage actor until I saw the documentary I Knew It Was You and I realized he is absolutely one of the all time greats as well as one of my top favorite actors ever...over & out, My Friend...
No! Excellent! Something new to get into…I will check it out right away…many thanks…Holy cow! You are so right…I forgot about Robert Eggers! I just saw Nosferatu…had seen The Witch and The Lighthouse both and thought they were ridiculously good and totally insane! Glad I smoked that weed beforehand because it really took me away…I will watch anything with Robert Pattinson in it by the by…Cronenburg’s “Map To The Stars” comes to mind…I also saw the silent version of Nosferatu before I went to the theater for the new one because I am crazy and had to have that under my belt as prep work…I will look forward to reading your page here so I can benefit from what you know…p.s. Sterlin Harjo has a new TV show filming here in Oklahoma called The Sensitive Kind with Ethan Hawke and it ought to be pretty good…he is a sweet and sad storyteller…hope your day goes well! p.s. I know you weren’t disparaging directors and actors…I can totally relate because I rag about it all the time viciously…but you know how folks are…they will eat anything…many thanks for the good times today!
You're right about Pattinson. It took me a minute to warm up to him, but his performance in Tenet (of all things) really won me over. I had high hopes for Mickey 17, and enjoyed him in it, but overall it was disappointing.
I’m glad you like him too. Interesting. I thought it would be a goodie with that director. Devil All The Time (fucking scary as hell) was one I meant to mention at the top of my list and Cosmopolis, Good Time, The King and The Batman, Bel Ami I saw by accident, and I have not seen Tenet so glad you called my attention to it. I never stop loving these apeshit stories and storytellers…enjoy your evening, Jamie!
Re: Mickey 17, Ruffalo (who I generally like) doing Trump just wasn't something I felt like I needed in my life. Sci-Fi has always been about social and political commentary, but I like it better when it's a step or three removed from everyday reality.
IIRC Tenet was pretty polarizing (I enjoyed it). It's like peak Nolan, but if you thought Inception was great, you'll probably like it. And even if you don't enjoy the story, the visuals are fantastic.
First, Eastwood often played other characters--Paint Your Wagon and the Which Way films are prominent examples.
Second, this type FAR predates Eastwood. Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin were playing it to great acclaim decades before, as was Humphrey Bogart. The essential appeal of such characters was the evident effect of PTSD, a common problem among WW1 and WW2 vets, and their appearance in pop culture as heroes coincides with the World Wars.
Leone supposedly based this character on Toshiro Mifune's samurai in Yojimbo - it seems like Kurosawa's influence on many American and European directors was in the ascendant for several decades. George Lucas was one of them. The "mask" Darth Vader wore appears to have been based on samurai battle helmets. (Albeit simplified.)
If anything, one of the most frightening characters in 70s film is Joel Grey's Emcee in Cabaret.
Interesting observation. IMHO, Grey's sharp white face morphing mad-eyed in the mirror remains one of the strangest, eye-catching openings scenes in modern cinema. Norman Bates on crack, if you will. The first five minutes are Fosse at his best, a man who clearly appreciated the threat and power of sexual attraction in all its forms, especially dance. You can also probably thank David Bretherton for the visual snap and pop of that moment. Certainly didn't expect to read about it here. Bravo.
Really, very interesting. I teach compassion cultivation and your argument really fits with what I've seen over the past several years. With regard to our inner sense of the other, we are either closed off in arrogant self-esteem or fear (me-focused); or we're open to letting others into our inner conception of reality (we-focused). Compassion training is designed to bring us to the we-focused mindset. It involves opening yourself up to emotions -- intially a little uncomfortable, but later much more positive.
What I've found over the past couple of years is that it is almost impossible to get students. Is it that we fear experiencing emotions, or is that we denigrate them? Or is it that we've become entirely me-focused? I'm not sure but I find it interesting that people report record levels of loneliness and yet seem to be afraid to let others into their thoughts, let alone their lives. My conception of this is that social media, with its emphasis on self-presentation, has made us focus on ourselves to a very unhealthy degree.
One other thing that comes to mind is how many people are on some kind of mood-suppressing medication. I'm not saying that many people don't benefit from them, but I do think the prevailing attitude in our society is that emotions are dangerous and need to be suppressed.
This is going to sound a bit pedantic, but it's not cooperation I'm advocating for -- it's understanding.
Feeling compassion for someone doesn't meaning letting your guard down. It's not an action, it's a state of mind. Compassion is simply the urge to help. It's based on a recognition of the human condition we share with the one suffering. But it doesn't always mean acting on that compassionate urge. It's extremely helpful in this difficult moment because it keeps us from dehumanizing those threatening us. Dehumanizing the other leads to a cycle of retribution which is self-defeating -- as Gandhi is supposed to have said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Having said that it is very, very difficult to open yourself up to the humanity of the other when you feel under attack. People get there though when they recognize that seeing the humanity of the aggressor doesn't mean forgiving them, lying down for them, etc. It simply means understanding that they have the same kind of inner life as the rest of us -- one dominated by wanting to move away from suffering and towards happiness -- and that, for whatever reason, they are tragically confused about what happiness actually is and how to find. People act the way they do because they are subject to causes and conditions, not because they are born as inherently evil. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I can't see any other way out of the cycle of retribution other than recognizing our common humanity.
Sympathy is entering into the same feeling/ inner life
Compassion is respecting the person, “believing” the person’s emotional experience (Latin “passios”), and “sitting” with them in solidarity (thus “com” (with) + “passios” (experience or suffering in the generic sense)). It’s having a person’s back without any presumption about understanding the feeling, entering into it, or condescending to “help” with it. It’s presence. “Word Salad” by Erickson is an excellent example of compassion being, first and foremost, respect, solidarity with a person’s emotional experience, and radical lack of presumption. Solidarity includes not making them wrong or trying to talk them out of it but rather joining them in a neutral way.
Recent research indicates convincingly that ultra processed food is bad for our mood. What exactly was found and how we can learn to lead a healthier and more enjoyable life should be in all the headlines…
One point that got glossed over in this otherwise excellent essay is labor conditions were improved by militant labor unions over many years of struggle, maybe they were romantics but the point was they had to really fight it out. It wasn't just some vibe shift.
Unfortunately we seem like we're going to have to do all that over since those in power want to bring us back to the late 1800s and so many in this country have been propagandized into thinking it will benefit them.
Unfortunately it takes a steely resolve to fight off the oppressors steely resolve.
I agree, but see it a little differently. Using the much-maligned but useful Myers-Briggs categories as interpreted by the Keirseys, we seem to be very much stuck in an intuitive-thinker (NT) cultural dominant personality type. Going back at least as far as to "House" and "Breaking Bad" and "The Big Bang Theory," people with social-interaction deficits but savant-level detail abilities have been in ascendance. This is greatly at odds with the dominant Sixties personality type, which I would argue is the intuitive-feeler (NF) type. Our culture has shifted remarkably, and the explanations are many and diverse. I would contend that the most influential drug use of the eras--LSD in the Sixties vs. ADHD or even meth in this era--probably contribute to this. This is how we get to a "the cruelty is the point" mindset in half the United States in 2025, I think. My two cents' worth.
Much maligned? Try thoroughly discredited. The Myers and Briggs were exposed as complete charlatans, but their tests were cheap so business customers didn’t care and used them anyway.
Hello, Barry? Cite the literature, e.g. a journal article, in which it was thoroughly discredited. I know it's out there, but I am interested in where you learned this for my own edification.
Cite the literature, e.g. a journal article, in which it was thoroughly discredited. I know it's out there, but I am interested in where you learned this for my own edification.
Hmm. I don’t see a relationship between the Hitchcock characters and Dirty Harry/Terminator. But I do think Elon Musk is more closely related to the Leopold and Loeb stand-ins from ROPE (justifying their crimes as high-minded experiments because they’re smarter than the rest of the sheep) than to Darth Vader (who is, after all, a religious man).
Super interesting and I love the romanticism backlash against tech bros comparison. I disagree with the Clint focus though. In Dirty Harry his actions are always motivated by a grounded morality, stepping up to do what he can to effectuate justice in a world of cowardice and capitulation. Also true in High Plains Drifter and even elements of the Dollars Trilogy. In Magnum Force he literally fights the sociopathic excesses of the vigilante cops. And Unforgiven is the crowning masterpiece of all of this.
Many of the people (in England) who worked for the end of the slave trade, abolitionism, and the betterment of factory workers' lives and working conditions were evangelical Christians. Their beliefs led them to act in ways that were compassionate as well as socially progressive. A few decades later, novelist Anna Sewell did something similar via her book (written for adults) Black Beauty. Because of her influence, carriage and draft horse harnesses were modified to eliminate the bearing rein (which others have described better than I can; it was extremely harmful to horses). The RSPCA was founded because of her advocacy for the humane treatment of animals. Sewell was a committed evangelical. (Think: John Wesley, not the white supremacist "evangelicals" who are currently so dominant in Washington.)
While I understand why the Romantic movement has been posited, and also get its aesthetic power, it seems to be less of a player in the reforms I've mentioned, and more of an influence on the revolutions of 1848 and various ethnonationalist movements. I'm not altogether sure that, say, Charles Dickens was a Romantic. And his novels helped effect some lasting changes for the destitute, as well as the poorest of the working class.
My hero is Benn Jordan. If you don't know about him, he's a musician with a unique eyebrow who is using his tech savvy to create tools that mess up A.I. training (he calls it Poisonify). Services like Suno or Udio let you "extend" music from a sample to something A.I.-generated; Jordan shows how he can protect music from this by encoding it in a unique way, causing the A.I. to spit out total garbage. It's weirdly exhilarating and makes me hopeful we can erect meaningful barricades against the corpo swine that are ruining everything.
I once came across a roadside sign that read:
I have a pet termite.
I named him Clint.
Clint Eats Wood.
🤭
A new movement, that then creates a political party to implement its values, needs to take material form. A movement with the protection of human dignity at its heart. We are now at the point where we need to consciously create 'space to be a full human being' via boundaries of law and norms.
For example, if your business model depends on surreptitiously spying on people and aggregating their data, and then selling it, and you are using manipulative algorithms to addict them to your product--then you need a new business model. It should not be legal. We don't reward crack dealers with social capital and we shouldn't reward digital crack dealers either.
Consider, crack dealers wouldn’t occupy their niche were they not in some way serving a system benefitting elites. They have their role as much as anybody else. The public face of elites calls them a scourge and puts on a big show of wrestling them to the ground. That’s because righteous indignity plays well, and these dealers are kept too powerless and dependent to expose the duplicity of elite complicity.
There's a key piece of your equation missing here. Eastwood's Stranger wasn't emotionless; he simply didn't express his emotions or let anyone else know what he was he thinking, which is pretty smart in a world full of passionate murders who set themselves up for ruin by exposing themselves. Consider that the Man With No Name realizes that braggart Ramon always shoots for the heart, so he protects himself by, in some incredibly literal symbolism, guarding it with a steel plate.
What's ruinous for America is that people don't realize this and instead prefer the remorseless robot version of the Man with No Name. He also seems emotionless because we live in a world where feelings trump reason and must be constantly expressed as argument killers and thought-terminating cliches.
IMHO, you could make a better case for Popeye Doyle in THE FRENCH CONNECTION. When he shoots the Frenchman's assassin in the back on the stairs to the elevated subway, the cop acting as creative consultant said, You can't do that; that's murder. The director said, Popeye would, and the image became one of Hollywood's most famous movie posters. That idea of "good murder" vigilantism--despite the historical cowardice of shooting someone in the back!--is more likely what lead to Bronson, et al. as well as cops thinking it OK to murder around 1,000 people a year.
I hadn't thought before about the possibility that the steel plate in the gun duel scene in Man With No Name was literal symbolism. If it was intended, that was brilliant.
I also find your reflection about Popeye Doyle interesting. Definitely another iconic image that has lasted through the years. These things live on in our subconscious mind, I think.
I certainly hope we have a new romantic movement with some power But unfortunately the people with money the oligarchs who influence society with the tool of money are hard to beat.They run media empires and fund it.I see this as connected to the environmental movement and nature taking on the polluters, the climate change deniers.This detached personality also detaches themselves from the real world and in turn the natural world.
You left out Spock. I believe the idea behind Vulcans was not that they bred out emotions but that they had learned to control emotions. And Spock was identified as ‘the most human’ by other characters and as fans.
Point being - there is an important distinction between someone who deeply feels but controls and someone who does not feel. Seems to me the problem with social media is the inauthentic - people who express without actually feeling.
The Vulcans learn to suppress their emotions. There are episodes in the original series where that comes up.
Visiting Los Angeles from my home in the Rust Belt, I’m just being exposed to the Waymo self-driving cars for the first time. Impressive technology perhaps, but it seems their entire purpose is to eliminate livelihoods and the whole human element from the transaction. I hate where our society is headed. I’ve had some of the best random conversations of my life with taxi drivers, who can support themselves and help feed a family. Add another livelihood that is heading for extinction — along with photographers, lab technicians, graphic artists, writers. Makes me glad I’m old, I will be spared the worst of it.
Every journey of a thousand miles starts with a taxi driver complaining about the economy.... I totally agree with your post!
In defence of Eastwood's acting - he has challenged his persona as a deadpan-faced cowboy more than once as a director, most famously with Unforgiven, but also in Bronco Billy. Unlike him, the technocrat class you describe is incapable of self-reflection. Personally, I'm also worn out by the awful, untrained acting that plagues so many otherwise good screenplays today. If only a mass of untalented TikTok and Instagram D-list hustlers, cast in movies for their looks, or the sake of the "neurodiversity" movement or DEI agenda, came across as mildly entertaining as Eastwood's cowboys, cinema today would be on another level.
I know what you are saying. It is just that there are so many trying to be artists, actors and entertainers now. Did you see “I Don’t Feel At Home In This World Anymore”? Or “Poor Things”? Or”The Brutalist”? “The Clouds of Sils Maria”? We do have some great filmmakers and actors out there and I think it is getting better and better…I also started the remake of “The Leopard” recently and it is breathtaking…Sterlin Harjo here in Oklahoma is a great filmmaker…well all the best. Good talking to you.
Have you heard of Clifton Duncan? He is a really talented classically trained Broadway actor, currently heading up the Thomas Sowell-inspired project at Substack https://cliftonduncan.substack.com/. He has been writing about how difficult is to get a good role these days because of nepotism, and too many folks who luck out and simply wants to “make it” in entertainment. I'm not saying we don't have talented directors and actors today, Robert Eggers is probably one of the most interesting filmmakers of our time, but as social media has lowered the bar for so-called "fame", the flood of people without any merit or shred of personality, especially in acting, which required the ability to perform both on screen and on stage, has sent the essence of the craft down the drain.
Sorry to be so chatty, but about the value of the stage, I never knew John Cazale was a stage actor until I saw the documentary I Knew It Was You and I realized he is absolutely one of the all time greats as well as one of my top favorite actors ever...over & out, My Friend...
No! Excellent! Something new to get into…I will check it out right away…many thanks…Holy cow! You are so right…I forgot about Robert Eggers! I just saw Nosferatu…had seen The Witch and The Lighthouse both and thought they were ridiculously good and totally insane! Glad I smoked that weed beforehand because it really took me away…I will watch anything with Robert Pattinson in it by the by…Cronenburg’s “Map To The Stars” comes to mind…I also saw the silent version of Nosferatu before I went to the theater for the new one because I am crazy and had to have that under my belt as prep work…I will look forward to reading your page here so I can benefit from what you know…p.s. Sterlin Harjo has a new TV show filming here in Oklahoma called The Sensitive Kind with Ethan Hawke and it ought to be pretty good…he is a sweet and sad storyteller…hope your day goes well! p.s. I know you weren’t disparaging directors and actors…I can totally relate because I rag about it all the time viciously…but you know how folks are…they will eat anything…many thanks for the good times today!
You're right about Pattinson. It took me a minute to warm up to him, but his performance in Tenet (of all things) really won me over. I had high hopes for Mickey 17, and enjoyed him in it, but overall it was disappointing.
I’m glad you like him too. Interesting. I thought it would be a goodie with that director. Devil All The Time (fucking scary as hell) was one I meant to mention at the top of my list and Cosmopolis, Good Time, The King and The Batman, Bel Ami I saw by accident, and I have not seen Tenet so glad you called my attention to it. I never stop loving these apeshit stories and storytellers…enjoy your evening, Jamie!
Re: Mickey 17, Ruffalo (who I generally like) doing Trump just wasn't something I felt like I needed in my life. Sci-Fi has always been about social and political commentary, but I like it better when it's a step or three removed from everyday reality.
IIRC Tenet was pretty polarizing (I enjoyed it). It's like peak Nolan, but if you thought Inception was great, you'll probably like it. And even if you don't enjoy the story, the visuals are fantastic.
p.s. Bronco Billy is an unforgettable masterpiece you are so right. Forgot to mention.
A few quibbles:
First, Eastwood often played other characters--Paint Your Wagon and the Which Way films are prominent examples.
Second, this type FAR predates Eastwood. Robert Mitchum and Lee Marvin were playing it to great acclaim decades before, as was Humphrey Bogart. The essential appeal of such characters was the evident effect of PTSD, a common problem among WW1 and WW2 vets, and their appearance in pop culture as heroes coincides with the World Wars.
Very much agreed.
Leone supposedly based this character on Toshiro Mifune's samurai in Yojimbo - it seems like Kurosawa's influence on many American and European directors was in the ascendant for several decades. George Lucas was one of them. The "mask" Darth Vader wore appears to have been based on samurai battle helmets. (Albeit simplified.)
If anything, one of the most frightening characters in 70s film is Joel Grey's Emcee in Cabaret.
Interesting observation. IMHO, Grey's sharp white face morphing mad-eyed in the mirror remains one of the strangest, eye-catching openings scenes in modern cinema. Norman Bates on crack, if you will. The first five minutes are Fosse at his best, a man who clearly appreciated the threat and power of sexual attraction in all its forms, especially dance. You can also probably thank David Bretherton for the visual snap and pop of that moment. Certainly didn't expect to read about it here. Bravo.
Really, very interesting. I teach compassion cultivation and your argument really fits with what I've seen over the past several years. With regard to our inner sense of the other, we are either closed off in arrogant self-esteem or fear (me-focused); or we're open to letting others into our inner conception of reality (we-focused). Compassion training is designed to bring us to the we-focused mindset. It involves opening yourself up to emotions -- intially a little uncomfortable, but later much more positive.
What I've found over the past couple of years is that it is almost impossible to get students. Is it that we fear experiencing emotions, or is that we denigrate them? Or is it that we've become entirely me-focused? I'm not sure but I find it interesting that people report record levels of loneliness and yet seem to be afraid to let others into their thoughts, let alone their lives. My conception of this is that social media, with its emphasis on self-presentation, has made us focus on ourselves to a very unhealthy degree.
One other thing that comes to mind is how many people are on some kind of mood-suppressing medication. I'm not saying that many people don't benefit from them, but I do think the prevailing attitude in our society is that emotions are dangerous and need to be suppressed.
Compassion is one of those things like cooperation strategies in prisoner's dilemma games.
Cooperation is ideal if nobody defects from the strategy, but fatal if there are any defectors. What we see now is simply the reversion to the mean.
This is going to sound a bit pedantic, but it's not cooperation I'm advocating for -- it's understanding.
Feeling compassion for someone doesn't meaning letting your guard down. It's not an action, it's a state of mind. Compassion is simply the urge to help. It's based on a recognition of the human condition we share with the one suffering. But it doesn't always mean acting on that compassionate urge. It's extremely helpful in this difficult moment because it keeps us from dehumanizing those threatening us. Dehumanizing the other leads to a cycle of retribution which is self-defeating -- as Gandhi is supposed to have said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind."
Having said that it is very, very difficult to open yourself up to the humanity of the other when you feel under attack. People get there though when they recognize that seeing the humanity of the aggressor doesn't mean forgiving them, lying down for them, etc. It simply means understanding that they have the same kind of inner life as the rest of us -- one dominated by wanting to move away from suffering and towards happiness -- and that, for whatever reason, they are tragically confused about what happiness actually is and how to find. People act the way they do because they are subject to causes and conditions, not because they are born as inherently evil. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I can't see any other way out of the cycle of retribution other than recognizing our common humanity.
It’s not either/or. It’s nature and nurture.
Empathy is understanding the feeling
Sympathy is entering into the same feeling/ inner life
Compassion is respecting the person, “believing” the person’s emotional experience (Latin “passios”), and “sitting” with them in solidarity (thus “com” (with) + “passios” (experience or suffering in the generic sense)). It’s having a person’s back without any presumption about understanding the feeling, entering into it, or condescending to “help” with it. It’s presence. “Word Salad” by Erickson is an excellent example of compassion being, first and foremost, respect, solidarity with a person’s emotional experience, and radical lack of presumption. Solidarity includes not making them wrong or trying to talk them out of it but rather joining them in a neutral way.
FWIW, there is no such Latin word as "passios." Try "passio" instead: https://www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus:text:1999.04.0059:entry=passio
Recent research indicates convincingly that ultra processed food is bad for our mood. What exactly was found and how we can learn to lead a healthier and more enjoyable life should be in all the headlines…
One point that got glossed over in this otherwise excellent essay is labor conditions were improved by militant labor unions over many years of struggle, maybe they were romantics but the point was they had to really fight it out. It wasn't just some vibe shift.
Unfortunately we seem like we're going to have to do all that over since those in power want to bring us back to the late 1800s and so many in this country have been propagandized into thinking it will benefit them.
Unfortunately it takes a steely resolve to fight off the oppressors steely resolve.
I agree, but see it a little differently. Using the much-maligned but useful Myers-Briggs categories as interpreted by the Keirseys, we seem to be very much stuck in an intuitive-thinker (NT) cultural dominant personality type. Going back at least as far as to "House" and "Breaking Bad" and "The Big Bang Theory," people with social-interaction deficits but savant-level detail abilities have been in ascendance. This is greatly at odds with the dominant Sixties personality type, which I would argue is the intuitive-feeler (NF) type. Our culture has shifted remarkably, and the explanations are many and diverse. I would contend that the most influential drug use of the eras--LSD in the Sixties vs. ADHD or even meth in this era--probably contribute to this. This is how we get to a "the cruelty is the point" mindset in half the United States in 2025, I think. My two cents' worth.
Much maligned? Try thoroughly discredited. The Myers and Briggs were exposed as complete charlatans, but their tests were cheap so business customers didn’t care and used them anyway.
Hello, Barry? Cite the literature, e.g. a journal article, in which it was thoroughly discredited. I know it's out there, but I am interested in where you learned this for my own edification.
Cite the literature, e.g. a journal article, in which it was thoroughly discredited. I know it's out there, but I am interested in where you learned this for my own edification.
Hmm. I don’t see a relationship between the Hitchcock characters and Dirty Harry/Terminator. But I do think Elon Musk is more closely related to the Leopold and Loeb stand-ins from ROPE (justifying their crimes as high-minded experiments because they’re smarter than the rest of the sheep) than to Darth Vader (who is, after all, a religious man).
Also, you forgot Napoleon Dynamite.
I’m not as optimistic. Black Mirror does a great job of portraying where this is all going.
The Common People episode in Season Seven has nailed what streaming services have become. Coming to a therapist near you....
The standard package
Super interesting and I love the romanticism backlash against tech bros comparison. I disagree with the Clint focus though. In Dirty Harry his actions are always motivated by a grounded morality, stepping up to do what he can to effectuate justice in a world of cowardice and capitulation. Also true in High Plains Drifter and even elements of the Dollars Trilogy. In Magnum Force he literally fights the sociopathic excesses of the vigilante cops. And Unforgiven is the crowning masterpiece of all of this.
Jeff - my apologies. I posted my long reply in the wrong place.
Ha, thanks for the clarification! Although it was super interesting and I'm glad I read it...!
Many of the people (in England) who worked for the end of the slave trade, abolitionism, and the betterment of factory workers' lives and working conditions were evangelical Christians. Their beliefs led them to act in ways that were compassionate as well as socially progressive. A few decades later, novelist Anna Sewell did something similar via her book (written for adults) Black Beauty. Because of her influence, carriage and draft horse harnesses were modified to eliminate the bearing rein (which others have described better than I can; it was extremely harmful to horses). The RSPCA was founded because of her advocacy for the humane treatment of animals. Sewell was a committed evangelical. (Think: John Wesley, not the white supremacist "evangelicals" who are currently so dominant in Washington.)
While I understand why the Romantic movement has been posited, and also get its aesthetic power, it seems to be less of a player in the reforms I've mentioned, and more of an influence on the revolutions of 1848 and various ethnonationalist movements. I'm not altogether sure that, say, Charles Dickens was a Romantic. And his novels helped effect some lasting changes for the destitute, as well as the poorest of the working class.
My hero is Benn Jordan. If you don't know about him, he's a musician with a unique eyebrow who is using his tech savvy to create tools that mess up A.I. training (he calls it Poisonify). Services like Suno or Udio let you "extend" music from a sample to something A.I.-generated; Jordan shows how he can protect music from this by encoding it in a unique way, causing the A.I. to spit out total garbage. It's weirdly exhilarating and makes me hopeful we can erect meaningful barricades against the corpo swine that are ruining everything.
Got served the video yesterday and it's all I can think about lol. Watch the video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xMYm2d9bmEA
In thinking about this character archetype, Kurosawa's film work, by which Leone was inspired, is probably worth consideration here as well.
Please don’t miss this everyone: The rise of end times fascism | Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/ng-interactive/2025/apr/13/end-times-fascism-far-right-trump-musk?