socks and frustration

 I've been working a little more on the "wood pigeon" colored socks. This is a West Yorkshire Spinner's colorway; I think I actually have most of the "bird" colorways but haven't knit most of them up yet. (I did make the Kingfisher one into socks as part of my mom's Christmas present.

I like this one. The colors are more muted than in many of these self patterning yarns - purples and purplish greys

 So those are good. (I also found the colorway called Blue Tit, which yes, I know I'm 12 inside, but I always giggle a little at that. Maybe I knit those up soon).

....And then the frustration. This was a Guardian story today. I admit I didn't read the whole thing, I noped out when I saw that a lot of Those Guys think "evolutionary psychology" is the new explains-everything theory. I am old enough to remember when the proto-versions of those guys were talking about "sociobiology" in the same way, back when I was in grad school, and I thought it was bunk then. And I realize now: it was the same tired old "blame women for men's woes" thing, because one of the tenets was "women do the choosing in selecting mates and those hussies don't know what's good for them" or similar. Now, granted: sexual selection does seem to play a role IN SONGBIRDS but humans aren't songbirds, not remotely so.

At any rate, I find it deeply tiresome.

But basically, the article in question  is about Elon Musk and people even worse than him (yes, there are a few, I think, but perhaps poised to do less damage because they're not quite richer than God at this point). And my biggest frustration/sadness/ complaint is his apparent belief that "empathy is a sin" and that societies can be "suicidally empathetic" by "caring too much.

And I have a couple of thoughts on this.

 First: if you brand things like empathy a "sin," it means that you are then absolved forever from having to feel it or show it. You can go on your own selfish way, and in fact, feel rather morally superior that you're not down in the mire with hoi polloi who feel that gross empathy for other humans. 

Some people are apparently even trying, somehow, to graft it on to the language of Christianity, which infuriates me. (And of course then over at Metafilter, where I saw it linked, several people took that as license to say "oh look, I knew it, every Christian is rotten all through" and I really wonder if they'd feel comfortable saying that if this bogus philosophy were being grafted onto some minority faith instead....)

And yes, I'm deeply upset at how some people are twisting the faith I was raised in - the thing that has given me tremendous comfort in life while also pushing me to be a better person, and which at times gave me one of the few places I felt welcome, and makes me worry: what if I lose this, too? What if this evil philosophy is all that remains as the small churches wink out over time? Then what?

But the other thing, it's antithetical to something I've learned as an adult, and something I've really felt since the pandemic:

The only thing we have of meaning, the only thing that lasts, the only thing that really matters, are our relationships with other people and how we treat them. You'd think after the isolation of the pandemic more people would realize that but....it seems like rather, a lot of people have forgotten it. (Or maybe most people didn't take the "isolation" as seriously as I did, and didn't go weeks and weeks without human contact?)

But anyway: how we treated people may be the only thing of us that lasts on this earth after we're gone. People at church STILL talk about kind people who were members who passed away 20 or more years ago! Their deeds live on, how they treated people still matters. 

And it disgusts but also frightens me that people are trying to drive all of that away by deeming kindness and empathy bad. We won't have a civilization if we extinguish that.

And I don't know what do do about it, other than "keep on keepin' on" in my own life, but I feel like me, being kind - maybe being a voice crying in the wilderness - won't help much in the face of powerful men with the seductive message of "you really only need to care about yourself, just scrape everyone else off" And I worry what the future world I live in may be.... I hope these articles are overblown, or I hope the proponents of what I'd call "radical selfishness" either (ideally) learn and change their ways, or failing that, have short lives and are then forgotten. But I don't know. Some days it really feels now like The Golden Rule has been changed to "he who has the gold, makes the rules" and I don't know that we can push back against it. And it's all very discouraging and discombobulating right now - discombobulating because I KNOW IN MY HEART more than I know almost anything that caring about other people and helping when you can is the RIGHT thing, and the thing we should be doing. And yet, I see people like that being trodden down and walked over and having their rights violated by selfish, rich (mostly-) men. And again, the old spiritual words: "this world is not my home" ring in my ears.....but I'm stuck living here until I don't anymore, and so I struggle to make sense of it all and try to reconcile what's in my heart with what I see....and it makes me sad.

I guess I believe too much in fairy tales; if this were like a fairy tale we would see some casting down of the proud at this point, and raising up of the humble (I don't count myself necessarily in either group, for what it's worth). But that's not happening and.....maybe some of the early Christians were right, and this world is just a fallen, evil place, and the less you engage with it the better?

It is very hard to know how to live right now.