On the other hand, I can still recall vividly a time when I actually believed that others were down in the holes. Why? Because as a committed Christian or Unitarian or Marxist or Trotskyist or Democratic Socialist or Social Democrat or Liberal, I understood the way things really were. And they didn’t. The only way they could be yanked up out of their own holes was to reach up and let me [and all those like me] pull them out.
Then I bumped into John and Mary. And then William Barrett. William Barrett with his “rival goods”. Barrett in particular propelled me to existentialism. And that eventually drew me to one or another of the “post-modern” narratives: deconstruction, semiotics, post-structuralism.
All mangled together with the thinking of folks like Nietzsche, Wittgenstein, Schopenhauer and Richard Rorty.
On the other other hand, might I suggest that a concern of yours may well be that I yank you down into a hole more or less analogous to my own?
You resist mightily of course because you have so much invested psychologically in your own objectivist/idealist intellectual concoction.
Indeed, it took me years and years to finally abandon my own rendition of this frame of mind.
I thought at first that I was liberating myself from both philosophical realism and political idealism. And up to a point I was. But as I get closer and closer to the abyss, I become increasingly more aware of the price one pays for that.
And here I am all but paralyzed in confronting things like Trumpworld.
Instead [running out of time] I’m now left with two options:
1] finding folks who are down in the hole with me – commiseration
2] finding folks who can yank me the hell up out of it – something analogous to the “comfort and consolation” that they sustain