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Hearing this morning that Beto O’Rourke is running for the office of president of the executive branch of the national government of the United States prompted me to wonder what motivates someone such as Mr. O’Rourke. I can, I think, sort of empathize with someone who seeks political office for the purpose of helping to reduce or simply to restrain the reach and power of the state. But I cannot begin to empathize with someone who seeks political office for the purpose of using state power to ‘do good’ for others.
I do understand the lust for acclaim, fame, and material wealth that often are the spoils of power. I condemn this lust as immoral, but I understand it. What I don’t understand is the lust to ‘help’ strangers by using force to prevent them from doing A, B, and C, and to compel them to do X, Y, and Z.
I cannot comprehend how any human being fancies himself or herself to be intellectually and ethically fit to order peaceful people about. Seriously, if I try to put myself into the head of someone such as O’Rourke or Bernie Sanders or Donald Trump or Chuck Schumer or … I discover that I cannot do so. Successfully putting myself into the heads of such power-seekers is, for me, no more possible than putting myself into the head of a grizzly bear or a speckled trout. These creatures differ from me so fundamentally that I can only wonder at what motivates them and what it must be like to be moved by such motivations and to see the world as they see it. I have no idea what motivates them, and I cannot imagine what it must be like to possess any such motivations.
And just as I, perhaps out of ignorance, thank the fates for not making me a bear or a trout, I thank the fates for not making me whatever is the humanoid creature who seeks power over others.