Liberation Matters

I don’t know how I’m supposed to feel when Palestinians thank me for my advocacy, but what I do feel is embarrassment. It unfortunately took me decades to figure it out, but what I’ve come to realize is that my only purpose in life is to stand with and for the liberation of oppressed people. What else is there? Cornel West would say this is my “calling”, but as an atheist I don’t believe anyone is calling me.

Western philosophy taught me not to conflate ‘is’ and ‘ought’, but learning about the cosmos revealed that the scope of what we call reality, be it a universe or multiverse, is ultimately beyond human comprehension; completely contingent on our perspective.

At a very young age, The Twilight Zone television show hinted at this in numerous ways. For example the episode where the couple wakes up in an empty city, only to realize that they are in a play model of a city, having become pets to a child in a race of giant humanoids from outer-space. Experimenting with LSD in my youth helped solidify this understanding by revealing that my senses are unreliable and by allowing me to temporarily transcend my ego and see the ‘me’ underneath the pretense.

All this has led me believe that the survival and thriving of human life and planetary ecology is simultaneously utterly insignificant and the only thing that matters.

We talk about what “matters”. We say, “the work you’re doing matters”, or “it doesn’t matter what they say about you”, or “direct action is the only thing that matters.” But of course what matters is subjective and context-dependent. If one is religious then what matters might be conforming to the beliefs and values of ones religion. If one is a narcissist then the only thing that really matters is their personal satisfaction. Etc.

They say everyone has an existential crisis at some point in their lives, usually in their teens or twenties, when they start to doubt whatever they have been taught or simply previously believed about the nature of existence. I have often said, and repeated up to the very recent past, that I had an existential crisis in my early 20’s and never shook it.

It took a few decades longer than I would have liked, but for the first time in my life I think I understand where the small, raggedy, misshapen piece that is me fits in this cosmic puzzle. A big part of this has been coming to believe that I don’t matter. Not as an atomized individual, anyway. Capitalism, especially the neoliberal variety we have had for the past 50 years, relies on us believing it’s a dog-eat-dog world, and that our top priority should be our personal success by any means necessary. That our ultimate goal should be Ayn Rand’s “enlightened self-interest”. How cynical is that?

Is it any surprise that the world seems to have acclimated to the ongoing genocide in Gaza when it has been beaten into us that it’s perfectly normal and natural, indeed moral, to prioritize our personal well-being and satisfaction above everything else?

I don’t know if any of this makes sense, and I don’t know if I’ll ever find the answer to the eternal question echoing in my head: “how should a person be?” (I doubt it). All I do know at this point in my life is that I can’t think of anything more important than using my relative comfort and security to struggle with those who don’t have it.

So, whether you want to thank me for speaking out loudly and often in support of Palestinian liberation or curse me for my failure to speak out loudly and often for the many other oppressed peoples of the world, at the end of the day I find comfort in the knowledge that I’m trying to be a good human. Sometimes I even feel successful.