Anyone who is capable of honest self-reflection and critical thinking understands that the "self-made man" is a myth of our culture; that anyone who amasses a fortune does so on the backs of many other people whose work made it possible, and found the opportunity to do so because of the circumstances they happened upon by chance of birth, conditioning and sheer dumb luck.

And it's worth highlighting that this is also true of all other personal circumstances, including those that people in this slice of the online community might take pride in. One doesn't for example become aware of the manipulations of the powerful and the deceptions of the media because they are particularly smart and virtuous, they do so because they were lucky enough to find information from others which helped them form this understanding, and because their personal conditioning allowed them to take that information in and let it inform their worldview.

Similarly, one doesn't wind up opposing capitalism because of any personal specialness or righteousness; one finds themselves opposing capitalism because they happened upon socialist ideas after having meandered through a life which gave them the conditioning necessary for them to seriously consider those perspectives and take them on board. If their life had unfolded differently, through no fault or virtue of their own, they never would have happened upon those ideas, or if they had they would not have been receptive to them.

I said "Anyone who is capable of honest self-reflection and critical thinking" above, but even those gifts come upon us largely by sheer dumb luck, brought to us by other people in the form of information and conditioning throughout our lives.

My point is we're all just kind of muddling our way through this thing, and our successes and failures (by whatever metric we measure success and failure) are due more to the unfolding of humanity's collective consciousness than any brilliance or defectiveness on our own part.

Obviously we must all try to do our very best with the hand that we were dealt in life, but it's probably a good idea to harbor some compassion for those who don't get it as right as we do in our eyes. We were all born into a world saturated with propaganda and dominated by abusive systems, and ultimately the degree to which we are able to see our way around in that world says as much about how good or bad we are as a seed landing on rich or sandy earth says about the quality of the seed.

Reading by Tim Foley.