The Chinese philosopher Mencius (371-289 BC), who lived shortly after Confucius, observed that “…when the personal life is cultivated, the family will be regulated. When the family is regulated, the state will be in order. And when the state is in order, there will be peace throughout the world. From the Son of Heaven down to the common people, all must regard cultivation of the personal life as the root or foundation.”
What did Mencius consider to be “cultivation of the personal life”? He perceived it to consist of the acute development of four senses: of humanity, of shame, of courtesy, and of modesty. It all boiled down to “individual self-perfection.”
I would like to suggest to my friends in the community that too many of you are not cultivating your personal lives. You feel yourselves liberated from, or beyond, age-old standards of respect for others--what we used to call the Golden Rule; and for this, you have no shame. You justify to yourselves that you are entitled to do whatever you want, because…well, you can self-justify anything, including robbery, violence and even murder. You boast of your masculinity and strength, when real men have no need to do so. And when this way of thinking seizes an entire community, it becomes all-permeating, self-perpetuating, even normalized, exposing an imperfect community that preys upon itself. Sociopathy and criminality become embedded. Those who seek to remain governed by traditional moral codes are ostracized and made to feel like “the other.”
I realize of course that no one likes to be lectured to, especially by someone with as many flaws as I. Still, the truth must be stated, for, in Oakland, truth is a rare commodity. Our elected leaders and progressive influencers seldom speak truth, preferring instead the cliches that are levers to power. They make excuses for the rampant absence of self-cultivation in their community, blaming the mayhem on anything and everything except what is truly its root cause: the absence of personal cultivation. They suggest that mayhem is a natural response by a people marginalized and kept down. I am here to suggest that this is a dangerous falsehood. We all struggle with what Life throws at us. Not a single one of us has it easy. Yet most of us manage to conquer the lowest demons of our natures. We choose not to resolve our problems on the necks of others, who did not cause them and are not responsible for solving them. We realize, as Mencius did, that we’re all in this together. Otherwise, our culture--the “state”--cannot endure. And neither can our city.
Perhaps the community does not wish for our culture or our city to endure. Maybe they think the culture is so rotten, so evil that it deserves to be torn down, so that a more perfect culture can be built upon its ruins. Certainly, this is what people like Carroll Fife, Pamela Price, Sheng Thao and Nikki Bas preach.This is the sort of nihilism we hear from far-right insurrectionists like Steve Bannon. It’s what Donald Trump means by “drain the swamp.” It is also what the far left means when they say “By any means necessary.” In other words, if what they desire can only be achieved through the total destruction of existing institutions, then so be it.
But there’s another saying: “Be careful what you wish you, because you may get it.” When two equally powerful groups, left and right, are determined to destroy everything in their path, there can be only one result: mutually-assured destruction. The far-left wokes surely must realize that they can never obtain what they want without ferocious resistance from their opponents. Sanity would suggest that if the far left abandons the more absurd of their demands and compromises with their opponents, they might actually get some of what they want. But this is something that, psychologically, the far left is not prepared to do. Instead, it’s “my way or the highway.” This is why they have forced this struggle upon us.
The irony is that if the community truly reformed itself along the lines Mencius outlined, a great moral movement would arise from within it that could transform America. And I think this is why the demagogues of the left are so resistant to admitting their failure. They don’t really want a transformed America. They want a dictatorship in which they, the woke left, can impose their racial and ethnic intolerance upon everyone else. Beware those who claim to speak in the name of morality who behave immorally, for they aid and abet the most immoral among us.
Steve Heimoff