The Decency of Community

The reason they say America is a country but not a community. It’s various communities together.

Some communities are inherently superior than others. Other communities are superior than other others without inheritance.

This is akin to Plato’s metal people. The gold people rise to the top. The silver people make up the core. The bronze people serve the will of gold and silver people.

Plato saw a problem, however, with the fact that sometimes gold people give birth to bronze people and that bronze people sometimes give birth to gold people.

Plato’s solution was to have kids raised as bastards (related to John Rawls veil of ignorance). Marx’s solution was for workers to align themselves based on capacity to work and from the fruit of their labors to nourish the community.

America’s solution is to label the bronze people as always on the edge of deserving death. “No one deserves a dignified life if they cannot provide it for themselves” is America’s motto. The bronze people born to gold people are noble and gold by relations.

The topology of these relations becomes dogma.

Topology is inherited in the world. Topology is what ties everything together. There are causes and there are effects but both are topological.

For example, intrusive thoughts are thoughts that we don’t identify with as being part of our ego but are, nevertheless, thoughts that we have.

Just like the bronze people in America. We don’t want to have them but we do have them. Let’s call them something that is distinct from what we call ourselves.

Intrusive thoughts are resources for psychoanalysis to see inside your true selves. Bronze people are resources for gold people to do petty errands.

The concept of topology is mathematical. The study presupposes one object that changes shapes but keeps its identity.

The gold people move the bronze people. The movements of the bronze people, in turn, defines the gold people.

The protest and fight of the bronze people in their obedience is a threat to the gold people.

As long as we don’t step on the silver people’s toes, the gold people are then moved by the bronze ones.

Common Sense

Sensus Communis

Sense of Community

All one object that exists in as many citizens within the community.

Any outsider is defined by our esthetic appraisal with special appeal to the well being of the community.

But the outsider is less important, less significant, more trivial, more petty. Topologically the consequences felt by the outsider is no concern for who I truly am.