Redemption

Why fix yourself when you can fix the world?

Jun 20, 2026

“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.”

— The Egocentric Humanitarian, 2024.

A good thing

There is nothing quite like a code of conduct, is there?

We create basic tenets that we expect others to uphold while hiding our own violations through self-deception or lies.

We create laws in response to events or dynamics that cause harm. Rules, or behavioural expectations of others, are as responsive to something in need of fixing as they are pre-emptive of repeated transgressions against communal security.

In other words, while we can’t undo the past, we can try to protect the future.

This is a good thing.

A bad thing

As far as we know, our species’ capacity for self-reflection is unique.

There is nothing special about being able to remember past events. Bottlenose dolphins can remember the unique signature whistles of other dolphins for decades after being separated.

Humans have emotional relationships with our memories. Pride or pleasure derived from a past action will encourage its repetition. Pain or shame will encourage us to avoid whatever may have produced them.

But if the impetus to address the past is a response to the pain it causes, it may be important to consider what the codes of conduct we invent in response are really being created to achieve. While we may believe that we’re attempting to design a better future, how can we really know the extent to which these new rules are merely an emotional salve?

More importantly, if our emotions are entirely personal, how many of the codes of conduct we impose are really attempts to control our own pain by controlling others’ behaviour?

There are far too many ideological proscriptions being delivered in response to shame narratives. There are far too many behavioural expectations being enforced by those who have inadvertently generalised their own personal pain. There are far too many people whose emotional problems are deceptively presenting as political solutions.

This is a bad thing.

Comets or Eye Floaters?

But we are social animals. We share our pasts and our futures. We develop codes of conduct around avoiding further iterations of a past whose pain, like the tail of a comet, stretches for years beyond its main event. We scoop that painful dust and write messages to each other with it—warnings, rules and expectations designed to inoculate the future.

When a comet crosses the sky, we expect all of humanity to be able to gaze upward and experience it in relative uniformity.

The medical term for an eye floater is myodesopsia. These are the tiny spots or squiggly lines that occasionally drift across our vision—tiny clumps of protein, or collagen, that form inside the clear, jelly-like fluid known as the vitreous humour of the eye. As light passes through the eye, these clumps cast shadows on the retina, which we then perceive as moving specks, strands or squiggly lines.

People have recorded the experience of eye floaters for millennia. Long before ophthalmology provided a medical explanation, ancient societies observed these unusual shapes moving across the field of vision and developed their own language for describing them.

Greek and Roman writers used the term muscae volitantes, meaning “flying flies,” to evoke the drifting, unpredictable forms that seemed to move whenever the eye attempted to focus on them. Some cultures attributed these visual effects to supernatural forces, treating them as signs, omens or communications from the divine.

Ancient Indian Ayurvedic writings also contain descriptions of dark, insect-like forms appearing before the eyes. Healers understood such symptoms through prevailing theories of bodily balance and prescribed treatments intended to restore harmony among the body’s humours.

Although these interpretations emerged from spiritual and pre-scientific systems of thought, they reveal a longstanding awareness of floaters and a persistent human effort to explain a visual experience that modern medicine would only understand much later.

The experience of myodesopsia is entirely personal.

For much of my teens and twenties, I mistook myodesopsia for comets.

I think that this is more common than most of us care to believe.

Transference

Transference occurs when we take one uncontrollable element, often from the past, and subconsciously superimpose its emotionality onto a present fixation. We find ways to take control over pain or shame, imposing expectations upon people, events and dynamics that we believe we can exercise some force over.

For example, in 2022, a psychotherapist responded to some remarks I’d made about my relationship with my then-partner by asking me questions about my parents. It quickly became apparent that the feelings I was experiencing, and the trouble they were causing, were manifestations of my subconscious transference of one past dynamic onto another. I was attempting to take control over resurfacing feelings within a relationship that had little to do with those feelings’ origins and weight. My girlfriend was playing a role created by my parents. I was expecting her to remedy the harm they’d caused without even realising it. I had created a code of conduct for a person in the present, designed to compensate for past transgressions.

Many Westerners of my generation were raised in the hopeless shadow of a culture whose every success has been presented as having arisen from some form of theft. That many of us stand on the shoulders of the conquests of our forefathers is beyond question, as is the very real possibility that so much privilege comes at the cost of so much suffering.

Having been raised to consider themselves living, breathing testaments to inequality, many young people seek to address the past by fixing the future. We become zealots. We love a code of conduct. We transfer the colonialism, the apartheid, the genocide or the white supremacy of our shame narratives onto other entities. And then we join the hunt. To purge “the zionist entity” is as much of a purification ritual as the toppling of a Captain Cook statue.

Most of us don’t even know we’re doing it. We attend to wounds whose origins we intellectualise through the vernacular of modern political activism, bandaging them with remedies we convince ourselves are as moral as they are practical.

It’s all rather ironic. This transference depends upon an expectation of dominion. The modern hospital for wounded centuries prescribes a medicine for the correction of the world that assumes the very power we’re desperate to atone for. This medicine is for people who can control history, direct institutions, correct societies and determine the moral character of the future.

From this expectation comes a peculiar relationship with inherited shame. We imagine that we possessed control over the past and therefore bear responsibility for its crimes. We imagine that we possess control over the future and therefore bear responsibility for preventing their repetition.

Transference narratives are expressions of this perceived power. Colonialism, apartheid, genocide and white supremacy become emotional templates that can be superimposed upon present events, allowing the individual to act upon inherited pain through a contemporary object. The code of conduct that follows appears humanitarian because it promises to protect the future. It also grants the person enforcing it a sense of control over the shame produced by the past.

Ancient peoples may have been less prone to this particular form of transference because they possessed little expectation that history would submit to their moral direction. A floater could be interpreted as an omen because the world remained governed by forces beyond the observer’s control. The modern Westerner sees the same private disturbance and mistakes it for a comet whose path must be charted, explained and redirected.

There is an irony here. Those who engage most intensely in this transference often understand themselves to be resisting power. Yet their belief that they can identify the moral meaning of history, assign its roles to the living and impose rules capable of redeeming the future arises from an extraordinary experience of power. The emotional reaction against dominion becomes one of dominion’s most characteristic products.

We love a code of conduct because we find it easier to wipe a comet from the sky than a floater from our eye.

Puppets

Joshua Dabelstein

Jun 12

Yesterday one of my partner’s colleagues, a PR specialist, made a passing comment about the rise of the social media advocacy in the wake of tragedy.

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Puppets

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