Daily writing prompt
What principles define how you live?
My most important principle is personal autonomy in how I express myself publicly.
I don’t join tribes or activist groups, raise money for them, or let them speak publicly for me. Likewise, throughout my working life and retirement, I have been able to avoid writing to publish something another party wants said.
I do have what a notable psychotherapist Paul Rosenfels said in the 1970s (he should be better known but was associated with an East Village organization in NYC called the “Ninth Street Center”, and some of his ideas may sound a bit like Judith Butler’s) called an “unbalanced personality”. That means I tend to operate, especially with public speech, as a “lone wolf” and insist on following goals defined by me, not others in some sort of tribe.
Back in the middle 1990s (after turning 50 years old) I authored and self-published a book, the first of a three-book series called “Do Ask Do Tell” (check Amazon) which dealt in large part with the “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy regarding gays in the military (finally repealed in 2011) . The content was supported by my own experience with a college expulsion in 1961 and then my own somewhat unusual military service stint from 1968-1970. Writing and then supporting the book gave me more sense of purpose than I had ever felt as a younger adult, because the content was indeed mine.
The danger of carrying this life strategy too far may be that I will articular intellectually constructed opinions about other issues where I don’t have “lived experience” with those groups who feel affected or oppressed by some particular public policy, and don’t have “skin in the game” (indeed the title of an important 2018 book by Nassim Nicholas Taleb), and set an example that is bad for the public if scaled to far by others. Non-profits and legitimate political organizations and campaigns could be hollowed out, leaving politics and actual getting elected to office to polarized extremists, when too many individuals won’t “take sides”.