A Matter of Trust

[_honorentheos]

I still question that the problem at all scales requires militant opposition where we are recreating the climax of Reservoir Dogs. And I would argue failing to differentiate between the actions of individuals puts us on a path of inevitable social upheaval at the scale of the supposed problems due to the lack of trust issue brought up in the article and the OP.

Viewed this way, the individual issues of judicial obstruction become the actions of specific politicians on a specific issue and it seems anyone who has a sincere concern with the actions around that issue ought to find ways to be actively engaged in the public space in opposition to it. Get focused and be active. But that isn't the same as viewing the world as a war between so-called leftists and Trumpists.

Personally I think the problem is that we inherently reduce overwhelming issues to scales we can manage. But all too often we do that by removing complexity. I think the OP begins to make a case for maintaining complexity and nuance at smaller scales, and not letting the urge to be reductive become one's default way of engaging political issues. No one individual is capable of defeating climate change, the threats to liberal democracy, cancer, bad rush hour drivers who don't know how lanes work and the bad writing in season 7 of the Game of Thrones TV series. Becoming hyper-focused on trying to hero one's way forward on every issue means every person one encounters who uses a plastic straw, voted for a Republican candidate, smokes, drives slow in the inside lane, or (mini-spoiler warning I guess) sends a suicide squad north of the wall that gets deus ex-machina'd out to safety because time and space warping dragons are the antagonists in one's personal heros journey rather than people doing whatever it is they do. And they probably view you as the antagonist in their heros journey because of reasons that make perfect sense to them, thus the Reservoir Dogs stand off.

I don't think it's so much a prisoner's dilemma as people not getting how small they are, and acting appropriately. It is in the aggregate of many acts of civil discourse and behavior that civil society exists, not in the few heroic grandiose gestures of someone destined to save the world from the times in which they find themselves living.