The Egocentric Humanitarian
A letter to a younger version of myself
9/6/2024
It may sound bizarre, presumptuous, or even demeaning to feel one’s politics being reduced to mere symptomatology. It may feel unfair to be asked to consider one’s politics to be born less from humanitarian concern and more from egocentrism and its many drivers.
This is an essay that, unfortunately for anyone as sensitive as me, will be an uncomfortable read. I hope that by the time you’ve finished reading this that I will have, at the very least, made a reasonable case for the utility of discomfort.
And, all cards on the table, my greatest ambition of all for this small collection of words is that it compels just one person out there to acquaint themselves with the possibility that their politics are more of a symptom of their inner condition than a symptom of their actual appreciation of real-world circumstance.
I believe that this is why, when asked, so few people can name which river and which sea it is that Palestine will be free between; why so few of us so desperate to ‘close the gap’ can cite a single Indigenous voice on the matter; and why so many of us consider our political fixations to be important demarcations not of our practical ambitions for the world, but merely as identity codes.
I am going to write, here, in a way that I would write to myself, were I able to be both 33 and 20 years old at the same time. If I patronise you, know that I patronise myself first and foremost. This is a letter to a version of myself who would never have listened anyway.
I am not at all surprised by the horror that has unfolded over the past however many months in Israel and in Palestine. If you are surprised, and I mean this with respect, then I can only assume that you are at the very beginning of your journey here.
We all had to begin this journey at some point, and while I welcome you to the table and encourage your involvement, I do so warily and with thinning patience. It is important to very briefly outline the context:
I walked my dog in those mornings in the week after October 7 past torn-down hostage posters, day after day wondering why so many of my contemporaries’ humanitarian fixations were not with the hundreds of thousands of Syrians dead at the hands of Assad only a stone’s throw away, the Uighurs in China in re-education facilities or the women in Iran having acid thrown in their faces for appearing in public un-scarved. The bombing campaign in Gaza had not started. Friends were liking and sharing Instagram posts and infographics ‘explaining’ the reasons why Israel had created a situation for itself in which Hamas had had no option but to rape and mutilate civilians, execute families in their beds, and drag people back into the tunnels beneath Gaza.
In the eight months since, Israel’s retaliatory campaign to Hamas’s declaration of war has seen an estimated 20,000 Palestinian civilian casualties, and an increasing number of otherwise ‘normal’ people confidently referring to the rape, murder, and hostage-taking of Israeli civilians as an ‘act of resistance’ to a ‘colonial oppressor’.
It requires absolutely no understanding of the history of the Levant, the Arab-Israeli conflict, or the reasons behind the tragic predicament that the Palestinian people have found themselves in, in order to express very real and very potent outrage at the humanitarian crisis that has unfolded.
Any suggestion of the possibility that these horrifying civilian casualty numbers are resultant from anything other than Israel simply being an evil genocidal oppressor are more often than not yelled down by an angry mob of incredibly disturbed and outraged social media slaves on the right side of history.
Now, I know first-hand that it can be difficult to behave with patience, integrity, and trust when we are drawn into a conversation or set of circumstances by our emotional faculties.
It is not a land dispute that compels most of us into the Arab-Israeli conflict at the moment—it is pictures of Israeli women with blood teeming from their bottoms as they are piled into the backs of trucks; it is images of children’s lifeless bodies being dragged out from under the rubble by weeping parents covered in dust and blood.
While I and many others have been part of this conversation for a long time, the majority of you were mobilised into a reaction to a centuries-long geopolitical event from the comfort of your home by images of depravity being beamed up at your face from a screen in the palm of your hand only recently.
You must understand that while your impulse to intervene—to tell others what is and what is not—comes from a noble-feeling and morality-guided place, it may be simultaneously ignorant and dangerous.
Don’t be offended: note the word simultaneously.
You can be a good person and ignorant. You can be a good person and a smart person and be ignorant. You can be simultaneously a wonderful person and a person who is learning about a thing at the same time. If you are learning about a thing from the ground up you are by definition, in that certain area, ignorant. Please do not take yourself so seriously as to presume yourself to be above ignorance. Ignorance is a state reserved, uniquely, for all of us. An appreciation of one’s unique ignorance is an appreciation that will mitigate the damage that one’s zeal, left untempered by honest self-appraisal, will have.
Unchecked zeal is a problem. It is the driving force behind every single man-driven problem that ever was.
Do not let zeal minimise the ignorance with which you arrive here. Let that zeal compel intellectual curiosity, self-reflection, conversation, and an acquaintance with the grey bits in between what you know to be true and that which you cannot understand or tolerate. Do not let that zeal pave over your non-understanding with a moral certainty. You will lose any impetus at all to understand what you are talking about beyond feelings of anger and confusion. You will contribute to divisiveness and misunderstanding, and not much else.
You are responsible for your own zeal. Where it comes from, what it affects, and where it’s going.
Old comrades will rattle off irrelevant and romanticised examples of using one’s anger as a vehicle for change, like 'Vietnam’ or ‘Apartheid’, and you’ll take these examples for granted without ever actually reading about the real forces at play that moved history and saved us from ourselves.
Your commitment to righteousness will dissolve any need to understand any fact or opinion at odds with that feeling you first felt when you saw that unspeakable horror on a screen somewhere. Your emotional faculties will turn you into a narrative-bolstering machine, and your lack of integrity will stand in between that narrative and any authentic curiosity regarding the things that make you feel so moved.
I am watching those around me become radicalised not by the facts, but by the space where ignorance and zeal meet.
I know this space well.
I spent my late teens and much of my 20s driven by emotional reactions and repulsions with absolutely no insight as to just how ignorant and arrogant and shamefully divisive my ego-centric obsession with sabre-rattling really was. I waged crusades within crusades—a baboushkan dimensionality dressing my own demons in the clothes of whatever witch needed burning. I partook in cancel culture before understanding why it so appealed to so many of us.
Time and time again the object of emotional stirring—whatever social justice issue or human tragedy of the day it was—became merely a catalyst for my inner and unmet needs to epiphytically attach themselves to. In a sense, I used the suffering of others to find myself, deluded with a self-assured assumption that the advocation on behalf of others can only be, by definition, a selfless act. Quite the opposite, as it turned out.
I entered crusades with little to no real understanding of the circumstances, history, and forces that would have been necessary for me to contribute to anything more than my own injustice complex. Climate change. Closing the Indigenous Australian life-expectancy ‘gap’. Me Too. Black Lives Matter. Indigenous Deaths in Custody. Deforestation. Sexual assault on university campuses. Capitalism (generally). Sweatshop labour. Israel. Name a cause from 2007-2019 and I probably, at the very least, wrote a Facebook status about it and bought whatever available T-shirt there was to buy. I was the guy, beer-in-hand at the party, ready to berate you and belittle you for being on the wrong side of history.
Pretending—or rather, really believing myself— to have been well-read and well-versed in social justice issues was at its best an accidentally manipulative, self-seeking caper, subconsciously engineered by an unfulfilled and unreckoned-with desire for absolution.
Absolution from what? A litany of things, both cultural and personal. We all have shame, we all seek absolution from it, and while it’s a heavy word, our relationship with absolution is so universal that it shouldn’t be nearly as jarring a concept to discuss as it is. It is both fitting and tragic that religious institutions give far more time to the concept of absolution than the rest of us. I would implore everyone to ask themselves what we need absolution from, and how we might be seeking it.
This conversation that I’ve been having with myself about absolution for six years now was kicked off by a simple remark made in my direction by a psychiatrist in an addiction rehabilitation clinic in 2018. Dr Eli, bright-eyed and warm and young, after hearing me rant for god knows how long, coolly responded: “It sounds like you’re on some kind of mission”.
In that moment, I felt angry. I thought my zeal was being denigrated. Attacked. Undermined. I felt insulted that my humanitarian bent was being boiled down to some petty, personal ‘mission’—that some psychiatrist could so smugly reduce my very legitimate concerns about the state of the world to something egocentric.
Two months in a room with nothing but a single bed, a mirror, and the weird shit I made in ‘art therapy with Frank’, made ignoring that remark impossible. The physical and emotional discomfort I experienced in that room, coupled with having no access to a screen, the internet, or even a book or magazine, meant that I had nothing to distract me from myself. I had nothing to help feed my mission—a mission I hadn’t realised I was on until I started experiencing life in small moments without it. I had only myself to think about.
I found a lot of shame and began having conversations with its many by-products. It had manifested in many ways, so much so that I began to notice just how much of my personality, my opinions, my priorities and my proclivities could be traced back to a core feeling of shame.
I have read about ‘ego death’, and had believed myself to have experienced this phenomenon while under the influence of various psychedelics over the years. I no longer believe an ego can experience death, and that the drug-induced experience misleadingly referred to as ‘ego death’ pales in comparison to the reality-check one experiences under opposite circumstances. While the ego cannot be killed, it can be shown a mirror.
Having spent enough time in front of that mirror to feel my reflection almost disappear behind a thousand manifestations of shame, I understand now why addicts kill themselves sober.
I will be a little more specific about my experience of shame, but only briefly, because while the details feel unimportant here, they might provide anyone reading this a basis for identification.
There was, as is typical for anyone having experienced anything other than poverty, ‘privilege’ shame. I felt self-conscious and ashamed, pinballing down the moving aisle of the 333 bus up Oxford Street in my school uniform, hyper-aware that this school tie let every member of the public know that I was worth $30,000 a year to educate. I was reminded routinely as an undergraduate Law student at The Australian National University, that I was a private boys’ school-educated son of a Jewish doctor and an accountant. (Nobody ever just said ‘Doctor’, which took me a decade and a pogrom to consider noteworthy).
I felt desperate to punch my humanitarian, ‘not the bad kind of white male but the good kind of white male’ card the moment I set foot on a university campus at 18 years old.
While we all share similar culture-based feelings of shame, I am sure that many of us, too, carry much more personal and unique pools inside us for shame to lurk within.
I was, all throughout my teens and 20s, increasingly recycling the abuse I had grown up with. I felt grossly ashamed for being unworthy of love, and more shame still for becoming everything that I so hated about my upbringing. This is not the time or place to go into further details, other than to bear witness to the part I eventually played: I found myself abusing those I loved in drunken tirades and blackouts and doing nothing but piss my ‘privilege’ up against every wall between the pub and wherever I happened to be calling home. In short, I felt as much shame for that which I had no control over as I did for my own shameful behaviours. I was a young, volatile addict with absolutely no insight or responsibility for my actions.
And most importantly, I had no understanding of the relationship between these deep shames and my need to write all of the right Facebook statuses, to wear all the right t-shirts, pen all the right articles for student newspapers and left-wing publications, and to feel, with no doubt, by the end of a hard day spent being holier than thou, like a good guy.
We all act so surprised when a good guy is revealed to be just another man capable of corruption, embezzlement, domestic violence, drink-driving, or assault. As a recovering wolf in sheep’s clothing and an unwavering supporter of the MeToo movement, I welcome the de-robing of every man on a mission. I welcome the day in which we are all able to ask ourselves what it is about our own shortcomings that compel us, so unquestioningly, on only the most public and praiseworthy of missions.
I am convinced that if your mission begins and ends with unchecked zeal that that mission it is more a manifestation of an unmet need or unreckoned with inner-demon than anything else. I am convinced that zealous, unchecked politics, are not humanitarian, but egocentric.
In the years since that brief session with Dr. Eli I’ve been forced to confront and wrestle with many of my convictions about myself and my motives. I consider this, today, to be an earned privilege, and a privilege that I feel not shame, but pride in.
You will show your ego to a mirror. You will allow yourself the patience and searching self-honesty necessary to grow from childish and reactionary solipsism into considered maturity—sometimes. You will consider the extent to which egocentrism guides those parts of you that are so much easier to reduce to selfless attributes—painstakingly. You will afford yourself the privilege of becoming a man—sometimes begrudgingly, often fearfully, and ever-slowly.