A misunderstanding about the concept of balance prevails in our society. Society would have us believe that balance is somehow a natural phenomenon: rain falls, plants grow. A person dies, a person is born. And so on.
In the same vein, a percentage of the population that is poor is balanced out by the percentage that is rich, and that combined percentage is somehow balanced out by the percentage of people who are somewhere in the middle.
This is a naturalistic fallacy, however. We “see” balance in nature because we want to see it; we believe, with reason, that our lives depend upon it. However, conflict is the rule, and balance is less than the exception. In nature and in all human endeavor, balance is neither a natural state nor a natural phenomenon. Rather, in any form, it is fought for, whether against society as a whole or against elements of it, in light of the fact that everything that exists resists balance, rather than hastening it.
Development as a human being is generally considered to require some element of balance. If a person is personally “imbalanced”—for example, living a turbulent or unstable homelife, constantly in financial straits, plagued by mental illness, or generally ruled overmuch by emotion while remaining estranged from intellect or vice versa—that person will most likely not excel outside of her particular sphere. This is by way of saying that the idea of balance has value in our society.
Those who are able to balance emotions such as desire, ambition, and pride with intellectual qualities such as inquisitiveness, observation, and deduction, possess the potential to excel where “imbalanced” individuals would falter. Moreover, those who are further able to overrule any remnants of ethical consideration, conscience, or dissent they may have gathered incidentally along the way—shedding them as a snake sheds its skin—are encouraged to make the most of their potential in any direction they choose, as long as that direction preserves society’s overall status quo—rich, poor, and in-between—rather than endeavoring to alter its fundamental nature.
Such balance as is produced by this tacit agreement is dependent on a certain level of self-awareness on the part of the individual, and a desire to “go outside her comfort zones:” to be challenged and pushed towards areas of achievement that are new to her and that put her skills and balance to use.
So, in order to obtain personal balance, these individuals actually create types of imbalances against society. Or put differently, they actively further imbalances that already exist. They are not concerned with finding or creating actual balance—in which anything is equal or any actual calm exists—within society.
This is not because they don’t want true balance in society (although they would not), but rather because they believe that the current state of society, which demonstrates the exact opposite of actual balance, is, in fact, balanced, and in such a perfect way as to allow exceptional individuals such as themselves to succeed. This success comes by nature of being able to strive for an internal type of balance: balance between what they want out of life and what they actually get out of it, regardless of “what people think” or indeed what they themselves think.
In this way, anyone overly preoccupied with “maintaining balance” by not pushing themselves or pushing against the prevailing idea of “balance”—i.e. passive acceptance of “what is meant to be” coupled with the ethical inhibitions of common morality—is limiting their ability to actually achieve any sort of balance, whether with a society in which true balance does not exist, or with themselves. They are resigning themselves to be always at the mercy of the demands of that society, such that their own desires are held as secondary to those demands.
Without some component of self-fulfillment and self-realization along these lines, balance in any form is a totally impossible ideal, reserved only for those who seem to have “the time and the money” to act on what they know will give them a sense of balance: feelings of freedom manifested in the realization of desires.
It is true that an increased level of financial and temporal freedom lends itself to the fulfillment of personal desires to some extent. However, this state of affairs is reinforced if not created and recreated by the unwillingness of “ordinary people” to place their goals, dreams, desires, and ambitions—whether societally implanted or not—on the “front burner” of their lives and to instead focus on what society expects of them: resignation and acceptance that endless deferral, struggle, loss, and insecurity are “just the way life is.”
If the destruction and reshaping of this state of affairs were to become somehow a priority in the mind of those who generally cling to “balance” as an ideology, perhaps after a long and costly battle we would see some true elements of balance enter into our societal sphere, i.e. more people positively engaged in their lives, less poverty, less crime, less mental illness, fewer suicides, fewer wars, less time spent on addictive behaviors, etc.
As it is, the “balance” between those who excel and those with mediocre and unfulfilled lives continues to justify the self-absorption of people with “the time and the money” to dedicate to personal fulfillment. In the shadow of their taut (and taught) disdain for “everyone else” who does not seem able or of adequate character to excel, the rest of us continue to wait and hope for balance to prevail “as it always has” (read: as it never has) without fighting for it, while beginning to actually take comfort in the belief that the disdain of our betters is warranted—that we are in fact lazy, unambitious, and undeserving of anything resembling emotional and personal fulfillment in this life—and in the hope that some conveniently eternal spirit will succeed where our mind and body failed.
The Future Begins as Soon as the Old Ways are R̶e̶f̶o̶r̶m̶e̶d̶ Destroyed
I’m having trouble processing the political situation in this world today, and, coupled with the difficulties, uncertainties, and fears of my own life, I’m losing hope.
New video footage of law enforcement killing a Black person surfaces so regularly, it’s as though the police’s strategy is to just keep ramping up the murder until the public becomes numb to it. Are the acquittals intended to send the message that the people will never win? How much absence of justice will the people accept until they “accept” the fact that there is no justice?
There are only two possible responses to this absence: giving up, or resistance. The system wants us to give up. The families and friends of the victims of police violence want us to resist.
Of course I would like things to get better, to calm down, to carry through to some kind of justice. But I know they aren’t going to, not without a fight, a mass struggle. Black people, simply by existing, by living peaceful lives, by struggling and surviving and doing what needs to be done, threaten the narrative of white supremacy in America. And so, more are being killed. This is to say nothing of those African-American voices that speak up clearly and unequivocally against this narrative, those African-American bodies who actively put themselves between the oppressor and the oppressed.
As more resistance rises, more people will die. It is the way of resistance, and it is hard to hear our consciences whispering it into our inner ear. “Things will get worse before they get better” is only one way of looking at it. It is not so much that conditions in society must get much worse before “society starts to care” about racist violence. The bulk of American society doesn’t care and generally isn’t going to. Those who say they care aren’t going to do anything about it, while the rest of American society is openly racist. We mustn’t wait for this society to start to care.
A clearer picture would be, “a thousand good guys must die in order to take down one bad guy. And then the fight has only just begun.”
This inescapable, dialectical fact scares me. As much as I want the revolution to happen, this type of continued destruction and death scares me into wishing it wasn’t necessary, wishing there was a safe way out for all of us. I just don’t know if there is. I don’t want anyone to die.
But I don’t see anything changing anytime soon. Body cameras will “malfunction.” Training will be flawed. Community policing will prove to be the idealistic liberal fantasy we already know it is.
People will advocate for these reforms, and while they are being tested on the flesh of Black bodies and proven ignominious failures at addressing the core problem, more lives will be lost on the road to real change, the road to revolution.
My sadness comes from knowing I will probably not be there to see it. But my hope is that humans of the future will be readier than we are, more knowledgeable, and more aware that the destruction of the current social order and financial system is a worthwhile goal if it means the creation of a world in which a person gets shot for being a racist, and not for being a race.