Freedom

Freedom is so often applied in the political and economic domains in terms of external freedom, such as in speech or action—things that a state can regulate, a boss can forbid, and a religious cleric can excoriate—that internal freedom is often overlooked. We live in a collectivist world of states, businesses, universities, and religious organizations so it is easy to overlook interior freedom. In viewing ourselves in terms of groups, we are subject to the artificial constraints of group-think. Individualism is often conflated with lawlessness and licentiousness. Rather than tread over the tired individualism versus collectivism dichotomy, however, the interior of the mind, and in particular the sort of freedom that is possible therein, can be distinguished and yet related to exterior freedom that tends to be characterized by the constraints presented by political, economic, cultural, and religious systems in which we live. I contend that expanding interior freedom can expand political freedom in a way that strengthens democracy rather than results in anarchy. 

Nietzsche’s notion of freedom as the ability of a person to create values must surely seem foreign to us. We tend to embrace the tenets and strictures of moral codes and principles without realizing that they can and have been used as virtual clubs by people who resent the strong. Relatedly, Sartre saw freedom as being able to exist without being defined by others. Presupposed in having the freedom to create values (and define oneself) is the freedom to question, which Socrates advances in the dialogues, and Marcus Aurelius’ idea of freedom as having mastery over one’s own mind. Nietzsche refers to just such mastery as a person can achieve over one’s most intractable instinctual urges as strength (i.e., power), which the weak lack and therefore resent. Whereas a repressed passion can still influence a mind, and thereby restrict its freedom without it being aware of the influence, a mastered urge is utilized by a mind and therefore does not restrict a mind's freedom. In fact, the mastery of a hitherto  constraining unresolved issue makes it possible for such a mind to create values that do not support, and may even undercut or contradict the passion's interests. This instantiates an increase in freedom internally.

The shift to an emphasis on externals in conceptualizing freedom is evinced in Kierkegaard’s notion of freedom as having and using the courage to take responsibility for what one has chosen. Typically, responsibility is assumed to point to, and even require an exterior dimension to freedom; freedom should not be used in a way that results in other people being harmed. By implication, freedom is not merely creating values, defining oneself, and mental mastery by reason (Plato) or the most powerful instinctual urge (Nietzsche). Kant’s view of autonomy, as voluntarily obeying the moral laws that one’s use of reason as set for oneself, is also internal and yet connotes responsibility. It is out of love for the moral laws, rather than as a result of being forced by an external power to obey one’s own (moral) laws that freedom is exercised. To Kant, reason has absolute, or undefined value because it is by reason that rational beings assign value to things. More typically, however, responsibility implies or pertains to speech, decisions, or actions because they can harm other people. Mills, for example, viewed freedom is as being able to think and live any way as long as it doesn’t harm other people. Responsibility applies in voluntarily not saying or doing something that could be expected to harm other people (and animals, and perhaps even plants). Moral questions as to responsibility’s coverage emphasize the external dimension of freedom.

Some conceptions of freedom are almost completely oriented to the external, such as political, economic, social, and religious constraints on a person's freedom. For example, Marx advocated greater freedom of workers from economic exploitation by the owners of the means of production (i.e., the capitalists). Lao Tzu, on the other hand, had emphasized the natural flow, or Tao, with which human freedom should be in harmony. Lastly, Foucault stressed systems of power as being in conflict with freedom. Although external constraints unquestionably impinge on freedom, the concept of freedom is not based on constraint, so externally-oriented approaches can be seen as partial at best. To be sure, even though the interior-oriented conceptions depict freedom itself better, even they proffer a partial view because the world around us affects our freedom and should thus be included in a full account of human freedom.

In modern times, overstating the interior dimension is rarely done. Instead, the political and economic senses of freedom, and therefore constraints on freedom, are typically emphasized more than the sense of freedom as internalized mental mastery over oneself as a self-defined creator of values. Cognitive and perceptual constraints of economic, social, political and even religious paradigms may not even be realized consciously, yet the contours of which arguably forestall value creation by individuals. Even the salience of group identity can eclipse people from creating our own values, especially values that contradict or even invalidate one or more of the collectivist paradigms.

The tilt toward the externals may facilitate and even protect the stability of a collective, but this comes at the cost of a partial view of freedom itself because constraints and even responsibility in the sense of respecting them are not integral to freedom itself as a concept. Ironically, an electorate full of individuals capable and aware of value-creation may be capable of a more stable democracy because the contours of public debate would be wider. If such breadth exceeds the terrain of a particular assumption underpinning a paradigm, then value creation by individuals could make assumptional analysis more likely in public debates and discourse. I submit that such analysis, referred to as critical thinking, would strengthen democracy and therefore render a society more stable rather than more susceptible to anarchy.

For instance, during the unduly long campaign season of the 2026 U.S. congressional election, the simplistic platform that ending the “Iran War” would drastically lower oil and food prices was not put in a wider context in which structural economic consolidation of several industries would be subject to critique, from which a policy prescription of anti-trust law enforcement to restore market competition could have been proposed and debated. Not enough people created or resurrected the value of economic competition for the public discourse to be broadened. Instead, debate centered on the impact of the so-called war on higher food prices and especially the higher price of oil. The political freedom exercised by the electorate was unduly limited because no candidates for congressional office broadened their policy proposals, as may have been the case had enough people widened the public discourse by creating or resurfacing values such as those highlighted by Adam Smith. 

Generally speaking, individuals creating and giving voice to values besides those already well represented in the public square increase the political freedom of an electorate, and thereby strengthen a democracy. Rather than viewing the internal and external dimensions of freedom as dichotomous, a synthesis can be envisioned such that encouraging people to create their own values, rather than simply take those established and enforced by collective power-structures, can actually strengthen a republic rather than pull it apart at the seams. This prescription is in line with Hegel’s theory of progressive freedom through history by means of successive antitheses and syntheses. This dynamic can take place within a democracy.

Retail-Speak American Style

Hidden or overshadowed by U.S. President Trump’s coined term, fake news, American retail’s utterly contrived, and thus fake jargon went unscathed by consumers in first few decades of the twentieth century. Even nonverbally acknowledging the verbiage spewed out by employees and even front-line managers in a retail store or coffee shop as if the jargon were legitimate subtly enables and thus extenuates the sordid trend. Were enough customers to question and even object to the “corporate correct” lines, perhaps the feedback would move its way up managerial hierarchies and result in cleaner, more transparent conversation at the store level. To the extent that business culture pervades a society, changes are greater that the verbal artifice will be received as if it were real, and thus a valid way of communicating. Perhaps the more general question concerns the extent to which linguistic artifice saturates American culture and has even come to be viewed as genuine. The subtle influence of business culture in America may be vastly overlooked.

Perhaps the most contrived verbiage utilized strategically by retail managements is, I do apologize. Especially fake is the corporate apology when for your inconvenience is added. That the customer has been inconvenienced by a managerial decision that is in the financial interest of the company without the manager being willing to compensate the customer in any way for the “inconvenience” renders the word itself, as well as the apology, utterly fake. It may even be considered to be passive aggressive, especially if the manager could offer to compensate the aggrieved customer. An apology is not in itself compensation, even if it feels good to hear the word, but such a feeling should not lead to the conclusion that the apology is genuine. In fact, customer-service employees, such as at call centers, are trained to apologize for virtually anything because apologizing is free. In a pro-business societal culture, customers may leap to the conclusion that even such an apology, even when a company wrongs a customer and the management could compensate the person for the harm or cost but refuses, is genuine. The astute customer might reply, unfortunately I cannot accept your apology because your company has not solved the problem but could do so. The use of the word unfortunately is just as fake as when it is used by an employee or manager as if the outcome were unfortunate also for the company, which is not the case because it benefits financially by not solving the problem or compensating the customer. 

The underlying brain sickness behind the corporate apology can be detected when, after replying, unfortunately I cannot accept your apology, the customer is treated to yet another apology! With such passive aggression (i.e., in the sheer disregard and thus disrespect of what the customer has just said), the angered customer could also be repetitive: Unfortunately, I cannot accept your apology. Astonishingly, even that statement may be insufficient to stop the verbal diarrhea on the other end. Perhaps the line of apology as an appeasement strategy is so entrained by supervisors that the underlying pathology triggered in the employee lies in the brain’s reversion to a primitive, reptilian stage.

Another, not so passive aggressive, instance of fake managerial jargon in retail is the fake greeting as a customer enters a store. When done by security guards, however, any greeting is inherently passive aggressive. Translated into real meaning, such a greeting as welcome means Just so you know, I’ll be watching you. The managerial decision to fuse the two roles of greeter and security guard at the entrance of a store reveals not only a basic disregard for the comfort of customers, but also an unconscious sadism, wherein the infliction of discomfort and even pain in another person gives pleasure to the culprit.

The sheer fakeness of greetings by employees and store managers when customers are entering a store even before they are oriented to the new surroundings can be seen in Starbuck’s corporate directive to have store employees say Welcome in to customers as they enter, as if welcome and come in make any sense fused together. An astute customer could reply, Greetings! Such a way of saying hello is so stilted that it can communicate the acknowledgement that the communication is utterly contrived and fake rather than genuine. Perhaps the way to eventually end the linguistic managerial fakeness is to give employees and store managers a of their own crap in return. The exchange of genuine and fake, from customers and employees, respectively, is unfair to the customers, as it is insulting to speak genuinely only to receive trite, contrived pieces of company jargon, especially if every employee is utilizing the same words.

A third instance of contrived jargon concerns a retail company’s managerial decision to revert to Happy Holidays immediately after Halloween, as if the words Thanksgiving and Christmas were toxic even though both holidays are official U.S. holidays and thus completely legitimate in all of the member-states (each of which recognized both holidays, at least as of 2026). To single out two major holidays as if they constituted cups of bland, generic water is not only dogmatic, but also passive aggressive against Americans who legitimately express positive sentiments about either or both of the two holidays. It is interesting—meaning ideologically convenient—that on the day after Christmas, the same employees who had been saying Happy Holidays suddenly can’t stop saying, Happy New Years. The fact that not every American celebrates every holiday does not invalidate any of the official holidays; nor does the fact that some people dislike an official holiday. 

It is arrogant, even presumptuous, to demand that other people refuse to acknowledge an official holiday that a person dislikes. In enabling this sordid, even pathological mentality by substituting the passive aggressive “greeting” Happy Holidays for Happy Thanksgiving and Merry Christmas, retail managers, whether in stores face to face with customers or in corporate management, do not realize that the appeasement is both enabling and passive aggressive. The astute customer could think of an equally generic response to convey a refusal to accept the squalid subterfuge as if it were not actually hostile and ideological. Perhaps Have a happy 24 hour period may be sufficient to convey the acknowledgement of the unsuitability of the generic holiday “greeting,” but something else equally generic and more oriented to holidays may be better suited as a reply. “Wishing” employees Happy Holidays for every other holiday is one possible tactic. 

If the generic holiday applies to Thanksgiving and Christmas, then the same greeting applies to Independence Day, Veterans Day, Memorial Day, Labor Day, and Halloween. After all, some American Black people object to the first holiday due to slavery existing when the Declaration of Independence was announced on July 4, 1776, some Quakers may object to Veterans Day and even Memorial Day, and some rich industrialists in labor-management disputes might object to Labor Day. Evangelical Christians may object to Halloween due to its devilish connotations, preferring instead All Saints Day on the next day. Is the name of every American holiday to be forbidden in retail settings just because at least somebody objects to a given holiday? It is unfair to capitulate to only the detractors who harshly accost people who mention Thanksgiving or Christmas by name. In doing the bidding of those detractors, retail managements take sides ideologically and even impose the ideological bias on customers whose mention of either or both of the two legal holidays is entirely legitimate and therefore should not be countered with Happy Holidays as a virtual slap on the face. Astute customers may dismissively retort, also in passive aggression, Of course you do, as well as wield the Happy Holidays club themselves on every other legal (and other) holiday.

The extent to which retail managers in stores and even at corporate headquarters engage in what is really passive aggression in the guise of appeasing customers so not to lose any has not been made transparent to the vast majority of American consumers. Taking Happy Holidays superficially at face value enables the grinches who have lashed out verbally at employees merely for saying Happy Thanksgiving or Merry Christmas. Employees and managers alike should have replied, Thanksgiving (or Christmas) is a national holiday in the United States. The corporate path of least resistance can itself be problematic, especially if enough consumers in America become aware of the sheer manipulative artifice being utilized in the retail sector and are offended by the ungenuine, scripted replies by employees and store managers. Resisting the generics with generics may cure the patient or at least shift the disease to defense.

Higher Education: Far from Christianized

How might universities that are affiliated with a Christian organization, or “Church,” apply the values enunciated and illustrated in the gospels in ways that distinguish such schools as specifically Christian? Do academic administrators at colleges and universities that are formally affiliated with Christianity apply the preachments by Jesus in the New Testament, let alone ask the question? At most, the question, when asked, is usually answered in terms of increasing financial aid, but in the gospels Jesus is not oriented to programs, but instead to interpersonal relations, specially as bear on the marginalized or outsiders in general—the proverbial last being first and most people who regard themselves as first, as last. How might faculty members who delimit their application of academic colleagues to scholar who are on the same faculty, hence at the same college or university? An unlikely example of a Christian values being applied by a professor at Yale, a university whose privileging of exclusivity and thus exclusion is well ensconced (and known) can be contrasted with the organizational culture at the Roman Catholic Church’s official university in the United States. Any cleric administrators at the Vatican who regard the Protestant denominations, or sects, as instances of compromised Christianity might want to take note of the contrast between the Catholic University of America and Yale.

Prime facie, the Catholic University would naturally be assumed to be saturated with Christianity and thus with the value that the gospels’ Jesus places on universal benevolence as the essence of human love, whereas Yale (and Harvard) would be supposed to be diametrically opposite. My years of experience at both of those Ivy League universities supports such a conclusion, for the faculty and non-academic managers whom I regularly encountered both as a student (and then visiting alumnus) at Yale and a visiting research scholar at Harvard seemed to relish excluding people deemed to be inferior or outsiders even if they had a formal affiliation with the university. Treating some insiders as if they were outsiders has been ensconced in the organizational cultures of both Yale and Harvard.

So when Kenneth Minkema, director of the Jonathan Edwards Center at Yale’s divinity school, taught a seminar on Edwards at the university’s rare-book library, I, as an alumnus auditing the course, was stunned in 2025 when Minkema favorably answered the request of a poor, local woman as she happened to pass by the seminar room in the library. “Yes, you are welcome to join us,” the professor told her. She did, and in fact asked a decent question at the end of the two-hours. Obviously, the university codifying Minkema’s compassion into a university open-door policy would not be practical even just in terms of seating, but as a genuine, specific act of compassion for a humble outsider who relished learning (Margaret happened to attend many visiting lectures on campus, as they were open to the public), the Yale professor applied his Christian faith in real time and quite practically in his vocation as a college teacher. Coincidentally, I was on campus that term doing research on the relation between self-love and Christian love (caritas) in Pierre Nicole’s essay on the topic, and was incorporating Edwards’ stance on the sin of self-love. It is indeed possible to take leave of a narrow self-interest that is encapsulated by an exclusionary organizational culture and spontaneously reach out to an outsider in humane compassion that does not hurt the person emotionally.

What I encountered for a week while I was at Catholic University of America after having been invited by its new president to do my research there (I was by then retired from teaching) was antipodal to how Minkema responded to Margaret at Yale. Even though the librarians at Catholic University knew that their head boss, the president of the university, had invited and approved me to be in residence that semester expressly to do academic research and write, and even though the university library’s holdings were modest, the librarians refused to allow me access to online books and articles. An associate provost told me that people who had been at the university for decades were not comfortable with the new president’s practice of inviting scholars to campus. That both that provost and the librarians, and even the university’s president himself, reneged on getting back to me on the issue of being able practically to do research, which required access to online books and articles, not so subtly informed me that I was indeed not welcome; I was an outsider. So, I decamped from the university after just a week.

Enough employees, whether academic administrators, cafeteria workers, or librarians, had been in lockstep in how they treated and regarded me as an outsider not deserving the respect that is appropriate for a scholar at a college or university that I was able to unpack my sleeping MBA degree and diagnose the organizational culture and, furthermore, to marvel at how distant it was to Christian values and praxis in the gospels.

Therefore, it is ironic that the Catholic Church’s university in America was actually so anti-Christian, whereas a Yale professor had been able to transcend his university’s culture and act on the basis of his Christian faith. In the Gospel of Mark, the disciples repeatedly miss Jesus’s points whereas outsiders, such as a woman at a well, grasp what Jesus is trying to convey. The rich man who hosts Jesus refuses to give up his wealth to follow the Son of God, and yet a meagre fisherman leaves his boat behind and follows. The Way into the presence of the kingdom of God turns the world on its head. How many “Christian” colleges (or divinity schools) have a supportive organizational culture to instantiate Jesus’s preachments in the gospels? 

Both as a student and returning alumnus at Yale, I found the culture at its “Christian” divinity school to be very ideologically and theologically intolerant, and students studying the Hebrew Bible there told me that they felt like outsiders in that “Christian” ethos. So too, the librarians at Sterling library were oriented to excluding rather than being inclusive, especially ideologically. A nonacademic library-security manager even threatened to block my access to the library because I had suggested to the librarian’s secretary that the security guards who regularly walked (noisily) through the main reading room ask loud, talkative students there from local universities to be quiet. The manager, whom I had not met in person, sent an email so hostile and accusatory that even one of Yale’s policemen wanted to “have a word with her.” Yet even after that, manager sent me another threatening email and the librarians looked the other way. Even as an alumnus, I was deemed an outsider by non-academic employees/managers. The librarians at Widener library at Harvard were no better, and relished distinguishing visiting research scholars who were still teaching (or even emeritus) at other universities from those of us who were not, as if the Ph.D. degrees of the latter were thereby invalid. 

Even in spite of the authentic Christian faith evinced by the professor of the Edwards seminar at Yale, I would say that neither Harvard nor Yale is likely to absorb the Christian way of relating interpersonally any time soon, especially toward outsiders and even insiders who are treated as outsiders, and I would say the same thing about Catholic University of America even though, unlike Harvard and Yale, greater Christian expectations apply to that university because it is formally affiliated with Christianity. Put another way, at least the faculty, librarians, and non-academic employees at Yale and Harvard are not being hypocrites, unless, however, they happen to be at the university’s “Christianity-oriented” divinity school.  

San Francisco’s Frameline Film Festival: On the Negative Impact of the Castro’s Culture

Ideological intolerance may not be typically thought of as stemming from a psychological pathology from unresolved emotional problems, especially if the ideology is classified under “political speech.” Even so, the vehemence with which flashes of hostility are unleashed by an intolerant ideologue against people objecting to the person’s ideology and thus to it being imposed as if it were God’s eternal truth is plainly psychological. Volunteering at a film festival in San Francisco in late June, 2026, I was the receiver, or lightening rod, of such vitriol from two attendees and the festival’s manager who oversaw the volunteers because I had unwittingly made statements that violated the dominant ideology not only at the festival, but in San Francisco moreover. In business schools, it is well known (or should be well known) that an organizational culture can reflect a wider culture in the organization’s environment. A toxic local or societal norm, which reflects values, beliefs, and even assumptions held by a sufficient proportion of inhabitants to gain a “critical mass,” can infect organizational cultures within the locality or society. I contend that this dynamic applied to the Frameline (LGBT) film festival in 2026 and the wider the Castro (gay) district of San Francisco then, where the festival was based. The same overreaching ideology and hostile defense mechanism were salient both in the non-profit organization and, extending beyond the Castro neighborhood, in San Francisco itself as well as in at least some of the suburbs.

On my first shift as a volunteer, and I agreed to volunteer at all so I could include some examples of “gay cinema” in a forthcoming book I was writing on film as an excellent medium for stimulating philosophical and theological thinking, I casually mentioned to two young women who had just seen the film that was shown during my first shift that I was impressed that the film has two lesbian sex scenes. Even though my tone was that of a compliment, one of the young (presumably lesbian) women angrily declared to me, “That’s heterosexual sex!”  as if her fact trumped what was merely an opinion on my part. “No,” I slowly retorted, “a sex scene with two vaginas is not heterosexual.” To my shock, the two women dismissed this fact by stating, as if declaring a fact of their own making, “No, it doesn’t work that way.” Translation: two vaginas without any penis in a sex act is heterosexual if one of the women self-identifies mentally as a man, which was the case in the film. The context of my remark was that I came slowly to the realization during the film that the sex scenes involved two vaginas rather than a vagina and a penis. My position was that a person’s mental state does not impact the label on whether a sex scene is homosexual or heterosexual; a (real) penis and a vagina, and, technically, penetration of the former into the latter, are requisite to a sex scene being classified as heterosexual rather than homosexual. That ideological fervor can overreach so much, even to contradict such well-established labels as homosexual and heterosexual (and violate even common sense!), means that a vulnerability exists in the human brain, and therefore human nature itself, with respect to ideology in relation to facts. In other words, the fact/value distinction is vulnerable to values overruling facts.

I was stunned during the ensuing week when I discussed the conversation with other people. A handful, all under 35 years old, pushed back against my rather obvious claim that a sex scene centered on and involving two vaginas (and no penises) is not heterosexual. One college student said, “It could be.” Plain and simply, she was incorrect. Tellingly, people over 40, on the other hand, were as stunned as I was regarding the pushback I had been encountering. “That’s just crazy,” an 88 year-old gay man said in referring to the assertion that a sexual act between two vaginas (and no penis) is heterosexual. The human mind seems to be too weak, at least in the case of ideologues, to put the brakes on an ideology when it has gone too far in a person’s mind. Psychology is in the mix. One young man who actually had been awarded a Ph.D. in natural science repeatedly shouted at me at a coffee shop as if he were regressing back to his childhood, “You’re an idiot! You’re an idiot!” He could barely control himself emotionally. The arrogance that is in ideological idolatry can be so powerful in the mind that it malfunctions without even realizing it. The impact of ideology on a mind’s self-regulatory features deserves much greater attention both in scholarship and the public square. 

In addition to mental states, ideological fervor and even intense flashes of anger do not trump cognitive definitions. The sheer presumption in contradicting definitions, even more than the flashes of anger unleased on me, is what really shocked me because I had never encountered such overreaching of an ideology. Such presumption is like arrogance on stilts during a flood, and yet strangely such an ideologue’s mind is unaware of the overreach and its presumption. Besides the blatant distortion of the word “heterosexual” beyond recognition such that it could be applied as a label to homosexual sex acts in a film, the vengeance of the two young lesbians complaining about my “inappropriate” statement—the very word, inappropriate, signals subjectivity—added insult to the initial injury of being so blatantly disrespected. But for their ideological fervor having reached the level of idolatry, the two young women could have left the theater without feeling an instinctual urge to harm me. Pleasure from inflicting pain on another person is garden variety sadism, and, according to Nietzsche, the original function of punishment before moral responsibility came to be associated.

Cicily Singh, who managed the Frameline (LGBT) festival’s volunteer corps that year, instinctually reacted to the women’s complaint of my “inappropriate” statements ideologically, meaning with much prejudice because she held the very same ideology as the two women at the theater. For Cicily wrote a hostile, accusatory email to me without even having contacted me first to ask what I had actually said to the two vindictive young women. “The film contains a lesbian sex scene,” and then my explaining, “because there are two vaginas,” is in no sense inappropriate, especially at a gay film festival! Ironically, it was Cicily’s email that was inappropriate. She must have been very ideologically and, relatedly, emotionally incensed, for she was sufficiently impulsive to send me the harsh, accusatory email, which contained an implicit threat that my continued involvement at the festival was then on thin ice, in time for me to read her message while I was en route to my last shift, rather than only once it had been completed. Ideological idolatry and the related emotional state can confound rationality, and thus thinking strategically. I unilaterally activated the implied threat and implemented it myself—"that’s called taking the initiative.”[1] I quickly wrote a brief rebuttal and turned back (to do my own work!) rather than continue on to the theater to freely give my labor to such a resentful, too ideologically-driven group of people as were evidently running the film festival. Afterall, this point must be made perfectly clear: saying that a sex scene is not heterosexual because it is centered on and delimited by two vaginas is not inappropriate; in fact, it is an accurate statement, and entirely fitting at an LGBT (gay) film festival.

It is important to situate both the two young lesbians and Cicily in the local gay culture of San Francisco, which I at the time may have been very distinct from the gay cultures in other cities in several respects—all in excess. To be sure, I have no empirical studies to cite to support my conjecture. From my own observations of the distinctive sub-culture, my impression is that gay men under 50 or 60 years of age in the Castro district were both more ideologically fixated and angrier at people who opposed their sociopolitical-linguistic ideology than were gay men typically in other large cities in North America and Europe. San Francisco “Pride” had arguably gone too far in its ideological intolerance and aggressive vindictiveness not in pushing back against heterosexual anti-gay prejudice but, rather, against non-acceptance of the “woke” ideology and agenda, and in particular the linguistic dogmatism. Home-grown ideology, rather than opposition by evangelical Christians to homosexuality, had become a problem in the Castro (gay) district by 2026 as evinced by the presumed entitlement to overreach and to lash out in anger so to verbally attack anyone who is an obstacle to the overly expansive sense of self and the presumption to declare facts out of what is actually ideological opinion. The advocates and defenders of the “woke” ideology had taken the place of the evangelical “Christian right” of the 1980s in claiming truth for themselves out of what was in actuality opinion. The ideological intolerance had shifted from the hard right to the progressive left since the twentieth century. That virtually none of the gay inhabitants of the Castro were probably conscious of having taken their own ideology too far both in its content and its vehement defense can be taken as an indictment on the human brain itself, and, more particularly, on its ability to perceive going too far.

After having quit the festival after the second of my three shifts, I voted with my feet on the day after the festival’s closing night by not going to downtown San Francisco to watch the gays in their parade; I had heard and witnessed too much hostility and self-righteousness in that sub-culture for its advocates to deserve being watched performing “on stage.” I will not furnish several examples of the toxicity manifested as hostility and even aggressiveness within the subculture—the dysfunctional psychology mirrors and likely even augmented or intensified the anger and vindictiveness that I encountered at the Frameline film festival. By analogy, the more general heating of the temperature at the Castro arguably contributed to the “heatwave” that I encountered at the film festival. During that very week, in fact, scientists were making precisely this argument in regard to the heatwave then occurring in Europe—the temporary El Nino was not the driving force behind the record heat.

Several contributory factors can be identified to account for the impact of the toxic Castro culture (i.e., global warming) on the film festival’s organizational dysfunction (i.e., the heatwave). Firstly, the harsh rudeness and abject inconsiderateness, and even cruelty, with which gay men in the Castro commonly would intentionally not show up for previously-arranged (sex) date without even bothering to cancel because suddenly another man is available for sex. A guy not showing up, without bothering to cancel, at a meeting place (e.g., my place or yours) previously agreed with another guy was called “flaking,” and the disrespect in particular and the passive aggression more generally were severe enough psychologically to cause strong anger. Similarly, the language that Castro men typically used in rejecting unwanted overtures by other men for sex, such as “you’re fat” and “you’re old; you don’t belong in this bar,” doubtlessly caused outrage. Rather than being emotionally hurt from prejudice locally against homosexuality, too many gay men in the Castro were slicing into other gay men there too often and too deeply. It is as if enjoying being cruel had become engrained within gay culture. It may be that the ideological anger that was directed to me at the festival was fueled at least in part by the legitimate anger and even rage caused by gay men there. It is not as if such intense anger simply dissipates on its own; rather, it seeks openings.

Secondly, I learned from two long-time residents—two friends of mine—that the gay employees in the Castro who worked as bartenders and servers (waiters) had a reputation by 2026 for being rude, and even hostile, to customers—ruder than in other areas of the city. In the Castro, tips at fast-food (i.e., counter) food-places, bars, and even coffee shops were, according to several gay men and at least one resentful employee at the coffee shop, Poesia, required rather than up to the discretion of the patrons. “It’s the Castro standard,” a young gay man sitting with a friend at a table near mine outside at Poesia’s street-level café said in scolding me for having just objected to the petulant, hostile employee who had angrily chastised me for not tipping on coffee orders, which, by the way, the customers picked up at the counter and returned after use to a plastic bin. The self-righteous, immature gay man sitting near me then dismissively walked away from me with his friend while making it clear to me that he was laughing at me for having insisted that tips are not required anywhere, even in the Castro. In other words, the “standard” was wrong, and employees of the various establishments were wholly without justification in tacitly punishing regular customers who do not tip on every occasion. That tips were by then solicited prior to any service in many food establishments everywhere is nonsensical enough; that the self-interested employees at the cash registers in the Castro retail district blatantly looked at the screen to see if customers were selecting tips is unseemly. That an employee would then lash out at a customer for not designating a tip prior to service and thus before the quality of service can possibly be assessed, as if tipping were required, is beyond the pale and thus points to a dysfunctional business climate.

It is possible that at least some of the employees’ hostility toward non-tipping customers was due to pent up anger from having been rudely and even cruelly treated by other gay men in the context of “hooking up” for sex, and from other sordid behaviors discussed below. My larger point is that the vindictiveness of the two young women in the theater and the accusatory hostility of Cicily can be seen as not so isolated as they may prime facie appear.  

Thirdly, the hostility of non-supervisory employees at retail establishments in the Castro went beyond resentment due to a presumed entitlement to be tipped by every customer regardless of service. For example, a young Black gay man working at one bar, “440,” presumed himself entitled to demand of certain (Caucasian) tourists what their purposes were in visiting the city. Another employee was reported to have told one such tourist who complained about the first employee’s invasiveness, “We do screen certain customers.” Of course, well-to-do tourists usually appear very suspicious, and may even need to be strip-searched.  This story gets even better. At least one tourist that know of told the employee at the front door, “It’s none of your business why I am in San Francisco.” Not to be outdone by a mere prospective customer, the employee abused his discretion by blocking that tourist’s access to the bar for having been rude. The tourist subsequently reported that the other employee and several young gay customers drinking beer just outside the bar chastised the tourist for being so stupid as to be rude to an employee of the bar. Because the tourist had not been at all rude, the multi-pronged attack was excessive, and thus can be taken as yet another “data point” indicative of the excessive anger and hostility in the Castro district. I suspect that the same ideology that I came up against at the film festival was in play in the attack on the tourist. Furthermore, the anger and vindictiveness that I encountered may have been excessive in part because the “temperature” in the Castro was excessive.

The position of the city’s Board of Supervisors—San Francisco’s City Council— was that screening tourists is not the job of local businesses, and the statement, “It’s none of your business,” is not rude, especially when it really is none of the employee’s business!  The outrageous presumptuousness in the Castro’s culture can be calibrated by the reality-check by the city’s own government. Of course, the likely negative impact on the city’s revenue from the wholly unjustified screening of certain tourists at a local business during a year when tourism was down was not lost on city hall. Even so, the egregiousness displayed in front of the “440” bar is not unlike that which insists that a sex scene involving two vaginas is heterosexual rather than homosexual.  

Fourthly, evincing even more hostility that the employees and even customers at “440” bar, a Black gay young man who worked as a bouncer at another bar, “The Mix,” put at risk the elderly Caucasian victim of a violent attack that had just been committed by two Black gay young men as they were walking out of the same bathroom stall (likely sniffing cocaine). Those two young men did not feel the need to walk around the victim, who was waiting in line at the bathroom, in spite of there being enough space. Instead, they decided to walk through the old man, who, after having been thrown and slammed into a nearby wall, notified the bouncer and another employee of having just been attacked, and called the emergency number of the local police, who of course wanted the address of the bar, but the employee in front of the bar checking ID’s refused to disclose the address to the victim and the police on his phone, so the victim walked outside in front of the bar and continued the call there. The two attackers, tipped off by an employee, I suspect, that the victim was on the phone with the police, went outside to verbally threaten the victim for having called the police. Astonishingly, the Black bouncer was within earshot of the threats and yet he body-blocked the door so the victim could not seek safety inside the bar, in spite having been attacked. In fact, the bouncer let the two attackers back inside the bar! That bar’s organizational culture was clearly very toxic, and the two young gay men who had been in the same stall in the bathroom clearly had excess anger. Any prejudice against gays (or Black people) by outsiders cannot be blamed; the excessive aggression was within the gay “community.”

Fifthly, perhaps the most toxic aspect of the gay culture in the Castro, and thus the source of the most intense anger, which could easily feed into hostility towards people who do not subscribe to the dominant ideology, concerns the severity of dysfunction in how too many gay men there thought of and handled their romantic relationships—not just “hooking up” for sex. It may be that Castro “standards” were too dogmatic in being presented as requirements. We encountered this above concerning tips, which were most definitely not required. A much more toxic “requirement” commonly accepted by gay men under 40 in the Castro was having to accept the imposing by a gay man on his boyfriend and even husband of a right to have separate sex (i.e., excluding the boyfriend or husband) with other men even with romantic attachment because, as this was explained to me rather dogmatically, “everyone here does it.” The obvious emotional discomfort felt, while the separate sex would be going on, by a boyfriend or husband who is in love with the person engaged in the sex with someone else may even be dismissed by the selfish and callous person in the convenient ideological belief that he has the right to impose separate romantic sex because everyone else in the Castro was doing it. Besides taking an obvious toll on the emotional intimacy and trust in the relationship in which coupling would otherwise naturally take place, both the decision to impose exogenous “making love,” as if such behavior were justified simply because many gay men were doing it and subscribed to the underlying “poly” ideology, and the callous disregard for the boyfriend’s or husband’s obvious emotional pain doubtlessly caused deep emotional hurt and anger in the boyfriend or husband that would not easily dissipate, but would instead seek out openings to erupt in misdirected and thus excessive anger, such as I encountered at the film festival. In fact, I encountered cases in which the ideology “justifying” the imposition of a polyamorous (i.e., more than one romantic love) relationship caused young men whose partners victimized them by the imposition to deny any such discomfort or hurt feelings, let along anger. One man in the Castro said to me, “I don’t mind that my boyfriend is having a separate romantic sexual relationship.” Interestingly, when I asked a few much older married gay men how they would feel were their respective husbands to announce upcoming romantic sex with an old flame, those men admitted, albeit hesitatively because they knew the polyamorous ideology was dominate then in the Castro, that they would have a problem if their respective husbands said that an old flame would be coming to town the next week and sex would occur. “Yeah, I’d have a problem with that,” a man who had been with his partner for thirty years in an open relationship. Honesty with the courage to go up against a dogmatic ideology is a virtue. In contrast, feeling obliged to “stuff,” or repress, and even deny the very existence of deep emotional discomfort and anger because discomfort is disallowed by the ideology that insists that there is nothing wrong with separate romantic sex, so any discomfort in the partner left out would be unjustified, and thus inappropriate, and perhaps even unfair to the partner having the separate romantic sex! Everyone does it in the Castro, so why should I have to put up with his discomfort and even anger? The level of psychological toxicity in such “reasoning” is astounding. Pent-up emotional pain and hostility would be entirely natural, whereas the imposition would be selfish ideological hubris that cares little if anything about the feelings of other people.

That ideology comes with at least two internal flaws. Firstly, it backs up its approval of the imposing of a “right” to have separate romantic sex by championing the polyamorous, “multiple loves,” relationship. But as a bisexual woman pointed out to me in the Castro (as I was trying unsuccessfully to ask her out), “In a polyamorous relationship in which more than two persons are in the same romantic relationship, every party must freely consent; to affirm that outside romantic sex should be accepted, and thus is legitimately imposed, is just an excuse to cheat.” There was undoubtedly a lot of cheating on boyfriends and husbands in the Castro, as if gay men have such overwhelming sexual urges that polyamorous sex and even affairs outside of even such a multi-person relationship should be tolerated even by boyfriends and husbands. Enough heterosexual men with strong sex drives have nonetheless managed to be faithful sexually inside of marriage that manly lust cannot excuse gay men who cheat on their boyfriends or husbands.

Secondly, the ideology behind the imposing makes use of the proposition that a widely followed societal custom (i.e., “Everybody here does it”) is ethical (“Everyone here should do it”) because it is widely accepted. This is an invalid argument. David Hume’s naturalistic fallacy is precisely the error of inferring from even a common practice that it justifies ethically rather than is merely descriptive. To treat a descriptive norm that is as a should just because the norm exists is an erroneous move in ethics. Ethical justification, such as by an ethical principle or theory, is necessary to get from is to ought.

In the Castro, the naturalistic fallacy likely stems from self-righteous egoism that treats self-interest as normative. Just because so many young and middle-age gay men in the Castro who were in romantic relationships also had separate romantic sex outside of the relationships does not mean that because the separate romantic sex is ethically justified because such sex is in someone’s self-interest. For someone to inform a prospective boyfriend, “I will have sex with my friends (including old and current flames), and if you object, I’ll just have sex with strangers and risk your health.” A prospective boyfriend should run, not walk, from such abject coldness befitting a psychopath. Such disregard for the feelings of a prospective boyfriend may even include the motivation for pleasure from the infliction of emotional pain. Furthermore, a fear of commitment, which can stem from underlying severe emotional problems that have not been processed and resolved, may draw on the power that a person has in a relationship to enforce the demand that separate romantic sex be accepted. The use of separate sex as a weapon to emotionally distant a boyfriend or husband points to severe emotional problems even if the neurosis is ubiquitous in a city’s sub-culture and thus misconstrued by its residents as normal rather than pathological.

Aside from relationships, a particularly squalid sexual “tactic” practiced on the Castro and regarded as “normal” and thus as acceptable involves casual sexual “meet ups.” According to two sources, a gay man using another man who is only mediocre physically attractive to the man for foreplay—for sexual arousal only—to be followed by lying that something has come up and “to be continued later,” but then once the man has left, inviting a more attractive man over for the actual sex. This squalid practice goes on even in the city’s gay Marshall Beach, near the Golden Gate Bridge, where oral and anal sex occur on the sand, out in the open. A less attractive guy may be used only for arousal, then once that has taken place, the guy is discarded and a more attractive man is immediately sought out and secured for anal sex, even as the “warm-up” guy is still there and sees that he has been unceremoniously replaced. Beyond the intense self-centeredness, the sheer callousness is obvious in such a set-up.

The prolonging of adolescence, given the adamant refusal to deal with past emotional distresses and the widespread occurrence of drug or alcohol addiction, has arguably played a role in keeping the Castro’s sub-culture dysfunctional. Even “cheating” has also been conveniently and erroneously imposed as being “normal.” Such sordid norms had arguably come to enjoy default-status by the mid 2020’s, and it is precisely in being given the status of the status-quo that even highly dysfunctional mentalities and practices can be deemed imposable. Such flagrantly callous arrogance on stilts, as if during a biblical flood, suggests that a clean sweep was desperately needed in the Castro to clear away the hubris. Bad air!

In conclusion, the narrow ideological judgmentalism and the ensuing hostility toward (mis)perceived threats at the Frameline film festival in 2026 was in sync with the toxic sub-culture in the Castro district and aggravated by there being so much accumulated anger and hurt feelings there. Lashing out at people who do not subscribe to a dominant ideology that is rigorously enforced by passive aggression can be an easy opening for pent-up anger from other things to finally erupt, especially if an ideology shames that anger from being directed at its source. In terms of further study, investigating how the Castro’s heavily ideological culture and excessive built-up baseline of anger and hostility impacted the selection of films to be included in the festival in 2026 might reveal not only how narrow the festival’s ideological coverage actually was, but also just how reflective Framework was that year of the local sub-culture. How many films were selected that are critical of young “trophy whores,” for example, whose respective older “holders” live with their respective real romantic partners even in another country and yet the promiscuous young men who are selfishly being held at a distance presume to impose separate romantic sex, even with the “primary and secondary” in the other country on a prospective real boyfriend?  Would a gay film director even make such a film? What about a film that shows “warm up” guys being lied to so sex with a better-looking man can ensue? In other words, what would a truly diverse gay film festival that is honest look like? Would the problem of gay men ruthlessly turning on each other be covered? If indeed homosexual love can be just as healthy, self-confident and trusting, and thus emotionally intimate, as the romantic love between a man and a woman can be, then the squalid elements of the Castro culture have no excuse for being permitted by the gay men themselves. I do not believe that ideological aggression is inherent in gay culture and psychology, but is instead an aberration that can be treated even when it becomes ubiquitous in a gay district of a city such as San Francisco. Ideological idolatry should not be allowed to mask undergirding psychological pathology. As I wrote to Cicily Singh regarding the two young women (paraphrasing here): “Clinical psychology is not one of my academic fields, so I am not equipped to triage a young person who is emotionally troubled and thus triggered by a perfectly acceptable and thus appropriate statement. Best of luck.” That was my way of quitting while at the same time criticizing the passive aggression by passive aggressively “socially distancing” myself from an ideologically driven presumptiveness and hostility by reducing it to psychology.

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1. Quote taken from the film, Avatar (2009), masterfully delivered by Stephen Lang as Colonel Miles Quaritch. “Reprising” his role in the sequel was so outlandish in terms of the rationale for the reprisal that the sequel itself could be said to be less than credible in terms of its narrative. In other words, the rationale put that film under water. 

Intimidation in Retail: The Case of San Francisco

Visuals are an important ingredient in consumer marketing, so it is surprising to come across retail managers who are so purblind as concerns the latent yet obvious passive aggression in some of the visuals that those managers themselves approve in the name of security. The espoused, yet utterly fake claim that customer experience is improved by the added sense of safety—the actual underlying motive lies in loss prevention—is typically outweighed by the very human negative experience from being intentionally intimidated by passive-aggressive visuals. It may be that such managers, frustrated by high rates of in-store petty theft (i.e., “shoplifting”), are unconsciously taking their latent aggression out of the customers as a group. Even if not, the lack of judgment is palpable from the visuals themselves. It is no wonder that an increasing number of customers prefer shopping online.

The chain of Safeway grocery stores is a case in point. One store manager admitted to me that the subcontracted security company hires from “the ghetto,” meaning that the young security guards may themselves need to be watched. I was discussing one such guard, who had been standing just inside the interior entrance gates watching customers entering the aisle-area of the store as if we were suspects. The young man’s hostile facial expression was such that I instinctively took out my phone, which triggered him. “You better NOT be recording me, BRO!” he threatened. According to the store manager, the guard should not even have been standing in the entrance gate (as shoplifters typically do not bring and deposit merchandise inside stores, and watching people enter means missing people leaving). Even though the manager told me that the subcontracted guard would be dealt with, on my next visit that very same guard stood next to the cashier as I was about to pay for groceries; I left without the groceries or paying and reported the serial guard to the company. The manager, who had admitted to me that he had authority in the store even over subcontracted employees, had failed to hold the guard accountable, given the guard’s sordid, unrepentant attitude. The manager also told me that the guards were not supposed to cluster together, given the overdone visual, yet I witnessed just such a clustering a week later. Apparently latent visual passive-aggression, likely intended to intimidate, is not worth preventing in retail management. 

Sheer irony: Three security guards under a customer-service sign at a Safeway store in San Francisco.

At a Vons grocery store in downtown Long Beach, California, customers leaving the store must hand receipts to a security guard and then take the paper back in order to tap it to an electronic device that opens a gate allowing customers to exit the store. Presumably those customers who decide not to purchase an intended item must justify themselves to a guard in order to be let out of the store. Simply stated, this goes too far and yet strangely customers put up with the invasiveness such that it could become status quo, and thus the default not to be questioned. The passive aggression in the active involvement of security guards misleadingly dressed as police and the control-of-movement, if to become characteristic of society, would render it as saturated with latent hostility and severe distrust. 

At a Safeway store in San Francisco, customers using the self-check-out area must tap in order for a gate to open out of that area. Just outside that gate, sometimes as many as three security guards cluster to present a redundant display of intimidation, for they too are dressed to look like police employees. I submit that the managerial urge to dominate customers, even by using hired guns (literally), rather than to serve customers should be better studied in business schools, for the urge to control has arguably gotten out of hand at too many retail companies. If the latent hostility and over-control are allowed to reach a critical mass, a societal culture could be characterized in such terms, eviscerating connection that would otherwise exist between social animals like humans.

Even coffee shops are not off limits to overdone passive-aggressive visuals. Police should be mature enough to have the good sense to limit their number when they enter a small coffee shop to order and pick up coffee, for it is obvious that a lot of guns and uniforms in a small area are uncomfortable to customers who have not been in prison. The passive-aggression of guns should be obvious, especially given the incidence of abuse of power by police in the United States and the lack of accountability on police forces. Where, it may be asked, are the store managers in all of this? They err in judgment in favoring a sense of store safety and deterrence over providing customers with a comfortable in-store experience. Starbucks has been particularly guilty in throwing customer comfort under the bus in order to appease police. At the very least, the latter could leave their weapons in their squad-cars. 

Too many police in a coffee shop at once, as the store manager looked on in spite of the obvious discomfort of the customers.

One coffee shop in San Francisco that I walked past once even had a security guard wearing what looks like military (or police) heavy gear (or bullet-proof vest!) just inside the front door. Even if “people off the street” are a problem, the militaristic (or police look-alike) visual is antithetical to “chill” coffee shop culture; the sheer fact of being overdone should not go below the radar. Where intimidation is so obviously the intent, potential customers should indeed keep walking, for no innocent person deserves to be intentionally intimidated, especially in spending money for a product. The irony is that on the window facing outside was a poster urging love; just inside stood the security guard intimidating people entering the coffee shop. Intentional intimidation by overdoing visuals is antithetical to love, and yet there were the two visuals, back-to-back. 

Love may well be love, but just look inside the window and the door! San Francisco, the self-vaunted city of love, was only a patina of its label by 2026 in the retail context.

The impact on a society’s culture of this trend of presenting a visual overabundance of store guards as police and even giving them control over gates inside stores is in need of study. The related impact on the psychology of individuals is also important. Moreover, the individual-organizational-societal nexus should not be minimized. The uptick in store security-presence in the early-to-mid 2020s was no doubt due to a surge in shoplifting (stealing merchandise), but this does not justify either in moral or psychological terms the collateral damage that is done culturally and to the psychological well-being of individuals while in public.

The only security guard in a small grocery store in San Francisco closely watches customers paying while tcustomers in the aisles are presumably free to take what they like, unobserved. Where does shoplifting take place?  At the cash register? The store manager refused to intervene.

The impact on a society’s culture of this trend of presenting a visual overabundance of store guards as police and even giving them control over gates inside stores is in need of study. Perhaps more subtle, but no less dysfunctional both in terms of human psychology and the reputation of a city is severe rudeness when it becomes the norm among nonsupervisory employees enabled by their immediate supervisors. 

I am by no means a regular frequenter of bars, so the bar culture is not particularly well known to me, so I reported the following incident to the Board of Supervisors in San Francisco to obtain a more official reaction than my own to the conduct of employees that I had recently encountered at the entrance of a bar there. Just outside a bar, I encountered a regular employee, rather than an employee hired specially as a bouncer, who in spite of my advanced age demanded to see an ID, which I provided. He then demanded to see inside my laptop computer case even though the dive bar was not a dance club and this happened before 9pm. As he was looking in the case, he demanded to know, "What is the purpose of your trip to San Francisco?" That he assumed that I was visiting was strange enough; that he said that I was rude in telling him that my purpose was none of his business and therefore he was not going to allow me to enter the bar as a result was beyond the pale and utterly unacceptable, according to the city's Board of Supervisors. That the employee was acting as de facto security means that this was yet another manifestation of the presumptuous over-reaching by retail security in a business context in San Francisco. In my report to the city government, I added that when I had returned to speak to another employee of the bar who was then outside the entrance, that second employee, after repeatedly ignoring my initial statement that I had not objected to the bag-search, scolded me for not agreeing to the search. "You should not expect to be let into a bar when you refuse a bag-search." That employee's mental state could therefore stand to be scrutinized, for he had blocked out my initial statement, going on a lie told by the first employee! As if being corrected for blatantly ignoring an entire sentence were not enough, he presumed to have confidence in his opinion that saying "none of your business" is rude, so rude in fact that the original employee had been justified in baring me from the bar. The Board of Supervisors' clerk was stunned when I reported this. "It's not rude," he said emphatically; "It was none of the employee's business! Saying 'It's none of your business' in itself is not rude." That more than one of the bar's employees allowed their personal feelings to warp their judgment and perception of what is actually rude and yet presumed themselves to be omniscent, without there being a supervisor to intervene, permits a damning verdict to be made concerning San Francisco's small-business culture at least with respect to how sordid it had been allowed to become. Being so mistaken and emotionally warped, the two employees were so jejune that they should never have been hired, so the culpability extends back to the bar's manager, and ultimately to its owner. 

A local bar employee who, in demanding to know the purpose that visitors have in coming to San Francisco, dismisses his own presumptuousness and is angered when the reply is, "It's none of your business," as if saying that in itself were rude. He abuses his power by refusing entrance on that basis alone, and no supervisor is on duty at night to restrain the young man from acting out against customers who have and enforce personal boundaries.

All this goes to show the extent to which security services in that city's retail sector had become utterly unacceptable. To say that a power-trip mentality had become well ensconced is a euphanism. Sector-specific and even societal norms can have a tremendous impact on people in their daily lives even if they are not conscious of the source of the stress. "Over-kill," such as in there being three security guards clustered inside a Safeway grocery store, can, if allowed to go on long enough, be regarded as normal by customers whose measuring device has become subtly recalibrated by the sheer passage of time. That a new practice has been allowed to go on and on does not furnish it with legitimacy, and yet, sadly, as the saying goes, possession is nine-tenths of ownership. 

In illegally approving Israeli settlements in the West Bank, for example, Israel's government has been relying on this de-facto natural law; the facts on the ground come to constitute law, such that efforts to change the facts is regarded as an illegitimate usurption of someone's rights. The sheer presumptuousness of treating illegal settlements as legitimate and thus any attempt by the UN or any national government to remove said settlements as justifying military aggression is astounding, and yet how rare it is to hear something like, "Well, you shouldn't have approved the settlements in the first place." 

In San Francisco, the presumptous latant and even blatant hostility in the retail sector evinced through its security human-apparatus had arguable reached intolerable heights (or lows) in 2026. Even if crime were high, the motive to intimidate even innocent (prospective!) customers is unethical, as the actual intimidation, because such customers have done nothing to deserve even the unconscious emotions of anxiety and even of being regarded even in visually as a target. Local norms can indeed be dysfunction and yet go on, and even get worse, like arrogance on stilts during a flood. 

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1. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, #162.

Transcending Caritas in Romantic Love

During the High Middle Ages, Troubadour poetry composed primarily in southern Europe included themes including of courtly love, which became associated with marriage. Before then, that institution was associated mostly with property and progeny rather than with romantic love. Interestingly, it was just as love was becoming associated with marriage when the Roman Catholic Church ended its centuries-old gay-marriage liturgy, which, sans property and progeny, was uniquely associated with love (for why else would gays marry?). The irony is that “modern” gay marriage in the West in the twenty-first century may have more to do with sex than love in the sex-centric gay culture of today, though obviously gays are fully capable of genuine romantic love that transcends such superficialities as lust that can be prioritized too highly at the expense of romantic love. Fear of emotional intimacy can exascerbate such misordered concupiscence. Adventurous exuberance combined with this fear need not eclipse more meaningful intimate relations. Indeed, married gays in loving, committed relationships even raise children in loving homes. Although utterly obscene to more conservative folks, such “mixed families” grounded in love warrant respect and even admiration for being based in genuine love even though emotional intimacy can be scary. This is what should be preached from the pulpit. Antipodally, the sex-centric approach to “relationships” in the gay “culture” justly warrants condemnation for being superficial, short-sighted, and utterly self-centered. Yet, whether gay or heterosexual, romantic love need not be selfish. The distinction in Christian theology between caritas and agape is relevant in making this point.

Augustine adopted the notion of caritas love from Plato’s eros (lust)-sourced love that can be directed upward, or sublimated, to eternal moral verities. Augustine replaced those with the Christian deity as the object of eros-fueled passionate love. “I pine for your scent,” Augustine writes in reference to God in Confessions. Such love “comes from below” in that it is based in human nature, yet when aimed to a high object, this kind of Christian love is rendered salubrious, yet not at all divorced from self-love. Eros is a clutching in a desire of attachment, after all. In contrast, the Christian love known as agape refers to God’s self-emptying love for humanity. This utterly selfless love is epitomized by the Incarnation in which God lowers itself to manifest in human flesh (i.e., Jesus). This sort of love is not at all of clutching or attaching; rather, agape is self-giving.

Genuine human love, even in the context of romantic love, can take after agape love rather than merely caritas. To be sure, it is not easy to practice such divine-sourced love in the context of romantic attachment. The heavy presence of selfishness is evinced in romance by efforts to control the beloved even in fits of jealousy. Monogamy in this sense is arguably more toxic than are open-relationships, unless the sex outside of the relationship involves connections (i.e., other loves) that are extrinsic to the couple, for the cost to the relationship in terms of foregone emotional intimacy is very great in such cases. My point is that egoism is alive and well in romantic love. I contend that couples can get beyond such an orientation of self-centric attachment and thereby introduce some agape-like love, which is not based on eros.

Looking out for the best interests of the beloved even at one’s own expense can be thought of as genuine rather than romantic interpersonal love. If, for example, in dating another person the affection is not mutual and the beloved is more taken with another person, then recommending that he or she be with that person rather than oneself even though this goes against one’s self-interest qualifies as genuine, mature love that does not reduce to one’s own self-interest (e.g., attachment). Similarly, if the beloved’s values are different, then recommending that he or she be with someone who shares those values is also in the interests of the beloved even though the temptation might be to convince the beloved to adopt one’s own values. The latter is obviously in line with one’s own self-interest, even though trying to change a person is ultimately short-sighted and perhaps even foolish.

How then can a person more easily apply agape within the context of romance? One way is by practicing the preachment of Jesus of the Gospels that inconvenient compassion is the way into the kingdom of God. Known as “love thy enemies,” this love, which I contend is spiritually more powerful than neighbor-love (benevolentia universalis), is applied not just at the extreme to one’s enemies, but also one’s detractors and even people who have simply but annoyingly been rude. Responding in compassion to their humanity—their human, physical and emotional needs—bypasses one’s ego, which would prefer to tell such people to go to hell. Love for others eclipses self-love. Practicing precisely this sort of compassion is I believe what Jesus preaches in the Gospels as the Way into the kingdom of God. 

Applied to romantic relationships, putting the interests of the other person before one's own instantiates genuine love, whether or not the two are married. While dating, for example, a person could put the interests of the other person first by being honest to oneself that the other person loves someone else more and thus should be with that other person rather than oneself, as painful as such advice would naturally be to give. As another example, a person could confront the other person with the need to get help for an addition, whether sexual or to a drug, even though the other person could end the relationship as a result of the intervention. Generally speaking, putting the genuine interests of a beloved before one's own self-love and romantic self-interest can be contrasted with forging romantic relationships on the basis of what the other person does for oneself, such sexually as is the case in sex-centric relationships.  

Religious Liturgy and the Wholly Other

In the Zhuangzi, how can Zhuangzi possibly know that the fish are happy? To know what it is like to be a bat, a person must be a bat. This is not to say that we disagree with bats. Sonar represents the “sheer otherness” of a bat. In Christianity, how does eternal joy and bliss differ from happiness? Happiness is not a theological concept. There are different kinds of experience, and it follows that they have different kinds of truth-claims. To treat every such claim as the same kind of thing is premised on conflating domains of human experience that are qualitatively different. I contend that the domain of religion is both distinct and unique. Our ordinary ways of describing the world and even ourselves are not well-suited to our endeavors in the domain of religion.

Pseudo-Dionysius, a Christian theologian, made the point that God goes beyond—is sourced, as it were—inherently beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and emotion. According to Montaigne, humans cannot provide truly convincing arguments on any topic, especially theology. “Human reason goes astray everywhere, but especially” in theology. Augustine stressed that revelation must make it way to us as though sunshine making its way through a smoked, stain-glass church window. Hume argues in The Natural History of Religion that the human mind has a great deal of difficulty grasping the notion of divine simplicity for long, and so the mind inevitably starts hanging artifacts on pure divinity that, to borrow a phrase from Nietzsche, are human, all too human. God is angry. God is pleased. God is benevolent. God is just. God even has a human form. God has a mother.

I submit that what any of us think we know about what God does and even what divinity is goes beyond what creatures can possibly know. That faith is premised on belief rather than knowledge is all too often forgotten as claims about God are treated as if they were facts of reason. Religion within the limits of reason turns out to be human, all too human. So too, efforts to reduce religion to psychology, and emotional needs in particular, miss the qualitatively different nature of religion as transcendent in reference to a wholly other. All too often, the legitimate instinctual yearning to transcend beyond the limits of human cognition, perception, and sensibility becomes conflated with knowledge of divine attributes.

In terms of liturgical worship, all too often services can be consumed by speeches by religious functionaries who know so much about God at the expense of time spent by a congregation in transcendence as experiential yearning of the wholly other. This is not to say that it is metaphysical or ontological; not even presence in a religious sense need be conflated with those fields of philosophy. Rather, the yearning itself, as in for example being prefaced by a ritualized ingestion of the divine, goes beyond knowledge and description. Worship, in other words, is inherently experiential, rather than analytical and descriptive. Focusing on a sermon, or even on a ritualized way of getting to an experience of wholly-other-directed transcendent yearning, misses the point of why people gather to worship. All too often, religious services are programmed to a stultifying death by humans who are too interested to leave their imprint. Stepping out of the way to let the divine be present in people’s distinctly religious experience does not come naturally to programmers.

This is not to say that ritual and preaching cannot play a useful role as prep for religious experience; rather, the problem lies in confounding the means with the ensuing experience that can be facilitated by them. Ritual and preaching in the context of sacred space and time, set apart from ordinary life even by stained-glass windows, have great value as means, which should know when to step out of the way and even point to what comes next as more important. In the ritual of the Christian Eucharist, for example, priests could encourage congregants to stay in the pews after receiving Communion because the point of the ritual is arguably merely to prepare for the interior yearning experience of the divine once ingested. This inward experience, back in the pews, rather than the consecration, is the high point of the Eucharistic liturgy. To treat the high point as a short time to reflect while the “dishes” on the “table” are washed demonstrates a fundamental lack of understanding on the role of ritual in terms of worship experience that goes beyond the limits of symbol and ritual.