As different individual men sit in the chair across from me and tell their stories, I cannot help seeing --it's in my character!-- the specific foci and repeating patterns, the blind-spots and places either of intense interest or inattention, what obsesses them and what never occurs to them . In that sense, our characters make our lives.
Heraclitus put it this way: ἦθος ἀνθρώπῳ δαίμων, character is fate.
Heraclitus in Raphael's School of Athens
I am aware that my own character, as described above, is the lens through which I too interpret the world. Because it is limited does not mean it is wrong, but because it is limited and my interpretations have changed in some notable, and somewhat repetitive, respects, I have always tried to separate friendship from agreement.
For example, it would now be very unlikely that I would initiate a friendship with someone who was an admirer of Barack Obama, or thought that mass immigration to America was cool, or believed that equality and tolerance were the highest moral virtues. But especially because I am the one who has altered my views over time, I remain friends with people who do indeed hold versions of the above abominable mistakes. After all, it took me a long time to figure some of this stuff out, so why should I suddenly demand instant enlightenment of them? Plus, given my character and history, it is not unthinkable that my view will change in future.
I ruminate on this when I recall as phrase I once used to describe the Church to Mr Jpnill, my longtime interlocutor. It was he, in fact, who remember that I said it, back around 1980 some time.
The phrase was "organized disappointment." I think I was cleverly --as usual-- referring to the Church's having to deal with the fact that Jesus did not return...and was not likely to. And so it carried on within history and all of history's tragedy, flaw, contingency and such, having shifted its expectation from the Return of the Son of Man to a heavenly afterlife.
It brought to mind another phrase from the 1985 My Beautiful Laundrette, where the dying Pakistani socialist journalist reveals that "the working class has been such a disappointment to me."
All that having been said --a preface in my own mind, really-- I list some of my own organized disappointments.
Catholicism, and Christianity in general, for its betrayal of the peoples of the West in favor of the Third World hordes. Catholicism holds out for the male-female distinction, but otherwise is falling right in with the Zeitgeist.
Contemporary America, for exemplifying most of the things that the Founding Fathers hoped it would not become: a corrupt and tyrannical popular mobocracy. That it would become the racially Balkanized dumping ground of the planet would have been beyond their worst imaginings altogether.
LGBTism, for having abandoned a community built on a shared eros in favor of one obsessed with gender deviance, self-righteous victimist tyranny and unrestrained Leftwing groupthink.
Jews and Judaism, for having abandoned their religious focus in favor of an alienated activist-victim stance seeking left-utopian outcomes that benefit their own tiny ethnic group while gravely damaging the cultures and peoples of their host countries. My default attitude has changed from positive-unless-shown-otherwise to very suspicious.
Whites and Western culture, for having bought into the suicidal narrative and values of the left egalitarian virus and its lethal delusion of "racism", thus making the only thing which could save them the thing which they believe is most criminally unthinkable.
Men, for having caved to the insane demands of their women, leaving both sexes emotionally, in some cases physically, mangled and adrift.
I think that's enough for now for me and my character...with which I have my own disappointments.
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