Eric doesn’t want his friends to have kids, for the sake of other, less fortunate kids, I typed, appalled. I recalled some Max Schelar I’d read, in which he wrote about the shift from “love thy neighbor” to “love mankind”; the shift, for Scheler, was a violent one, born of suppressed envy. It was difficult, but possible, to love a specific, individual person; but it was literally impossible to love “mankind.” One could “love mankind” while hating every real person he knew. One could “love the environment” and do the same. The move from loving real people to “loving” abstractions was in reality a shift from love to hate. Eric did not love mankind; Eric simply hated his neighbor. He did not love “kids”; he simply hated kids and didn’t want any more of them to exist.
Eric, following his liberal arts school ex-girlfriend, was so full of impotent hatred for the people in his life that he had no choice but to love “the less fortunate”; then he could use “the less fortunate” as a new bat to beat people over the head with, as opposed to his old bat of pure nihilism.
Jordan Castro