“What has been so apparent in the modern history of the family will be no less apparent in the future histories of profession, university, labor union, and all other forms of association in our culture. Deprive these entities of the authorities over their members through increasing centralization of political power in society, and these associations, like the extended family, the church, and the local community, must shrink immeasurably in their potential contributions to culture.”

— Robert Nisbet, The Quest for Community

One’s outlook on the political movement of humanity is primarily founded on their linguistic perspective—how they interpret words such as nationalism, liberalism, freedom, individualism, etc. For in each of these, where some see potential for dark devices, others see devices for hope. Where some discover disorder, others find the necessary checks on centralized authority. It is the question of the function of state in relation to society.

Whereas the state serves at the function of individuals, society serves at the function of individual associations. This is a great distinction, for the culture of man is dictated not by internal machinations and the structure of the individual, but by the quality of space between men, determined by their common ties. If the state is personal and comprised of individuals, then a society is interpersonal and comprised of communities.

The popular understanding of the world today is founded on the peculiar concept of political culture, that which fuses a state’s historical traditions to its cultural institutions and values. In reality, however, there is no state culture because culture is a tool of society, created through man’s voluntary association to man. When the state absorbs what once contained culture, it can only become contract. This is because a state is incapable of creating a singular unity, but through the dissolution of warmer unities instilled by entities outside of its control.

It has been suggested that nationalism has the potential for both unification and fragmentation, of which liberals of course prefer unity, meaning one world-nation. This ideological interpretation of the word nation debases classical definition. Proponents of singular nationalism see fragmentation as threatening because it serves to break up countries and governing body. Liberals therefor would define any political setting in which liberal academics might find a multitude of conflicting authorities as a state in disorder. But this conception of fragmentation is really just pluralism. It is absurd to assume that normative ethics cannot exist in society without state interference. A legitimate society exhibits redundancy in its authorities through the associative ties in which one man can have many masters—be they in the form of state, church, guild, family, or others. This is the purest form of separation of powers; for the separation of powers existing solely within a state entity is in fact the same centralized power given several names under the same authority so as to give off the illusory comfort of a false separation.

Globalization is commonly described as a process by which increasing interdependence and communication between states and varying parts of the world lead to shared experiences and common identification of global issues. Suggesting that globalization is a facet of democratization, many follow Steven Spiegel’s reasoning that it “brings human rights, and, ultimately, global peace, because democracies are not generally at war with each other,” in keeping with the esoteric philosophy of Progress as emphasized in Frank Fukuyama’s End of History. In it, Fukuyama posits that “the apex of human political and social development is reached by successfully democratizing,” leading the world into  a population of “peaceful, democratic, economically interdependent states.”

These self-described progressive ideologues may admit that the defense of national and cultural identities in fact create conflict, thereby contradicting ideas of easy momentum toward globalization, but they are generally quick to add that cultural defense plays a minor role, often suggesting that the conflict is actually rooted in the aftermath of colonialism or the social and political experiments following World War II. In this way, they define fragmentation as a sort of stunted political growth or regression into past eras, discarding cultural defense as a merely anomaly in the course of any consideration of regress stemming from Newtonian predictions of politics in straight lines. It is delusive because, as Reinhold Niebuhr said, “to explain all evil as simply a reversion to the past is like describing individual insanity as simple a reversion to childhood.”

Similar is the always disregarded concept of society in economic discussion. Economic society is that in which the cultural symbols of freedom are ever suffering under the political invasions of freedom. Economics are presently discussed with heavy emphasis on a perverted definition of individualism, which less considers the individual than the individual in their relation to the state, requiring a dissolution of all associative institutions that are not under the direct authority of the state. The presumption is that the wants and desires of the state and the individual are one and therefore anything that benefits the state must innately benefit the individual. But the resistance to so-called free trade does not find its source in imagined fearful states. One need not look further than the North American Free Trade Agreement to see that states have shown that they are generally uninterested in fighting the absolution of their laborers into huddled, international workforces. Indeed, states are often the progenitors of such movements. Instead, the resistance exists in the domestic labor unions, where community is found in the association of the culture of labor. Indeed, it is labor unions who typically serve as the most vehement opposition to free trade policies. The state itself has never been opposed to entangling alliances in its entire history.

The state has the power to consume associations, but is incapable of creating them. The lone individual, as well, is incapable of creating associations because the very nature of association requires not only the associate but also that to which he is associated. To be sure, it is through the associations of groups of men that the state even comes into existence. It is wholly unreasonable to think then, after the dust has settled in an absolutely globalized society, that the state will ever place new symbols and associations where it has dissolved those of the old world. But once society is entirely a composition of the sprawling state and its  servile masses, each individually connected to it but not each other, who, then, will be capable of creating culture? Or will culture and society simply cease to exist in the face of the new totalitarianism we once affectionately described as liberalism?

The state cannot create power, it can only take it from the institutions to which men have volunteered their allegiances. It does this by first eliminating the associations between the individual and those middling authorities to which they submit themselves (because of their belief in their share of the culture of those authorities.) Finally, it places itself in a position through the absorption of previously designated institutional responsibilities, in order to become the new associated object of individuals’ desires. As it amasses the natural divisions of power, it in turn multiplies its own. And with every new authority it consumes, not only does it become the greater object of the individuals’ respective directions, but they also become the lesser subject to its own. All the while, the state convinces these subjects that they are not losing anything, but that through it they are gaining the power formerly held by their associative communities. This flawed logic is construed from a confusion of power and freedom. Of course, if the state is that which is the source of individual power, then, as Thomas Jefferson once said, “the State with the power to do things for people has the power to do things to them.”

In this way that the idea of an immanent, natural Progress unfolds completely not to the exception of totalitarian hiccups, but instead to the rule of their perpetual roar. If state Progress is a timeline and history is its momentum, we have no manner of determining if the state we end up with will be the result of upward or downward momentum. Perhaps, then, the hiccups were democracy?

While new conservatives such as Nisbet suggest that this confused brand of individualism is the true source of globalization, thus culminating in the destruction of community, it is the destruction of self which inevitably proceeds from the loss of community that is of greatest importance.

We are social creatures. We find meaning in our associations because they serve as reflections on our own nature. Man apart from society, which I believe is really just the democratic state of community, is lonely. And apart from our associations with others, we have no reason to improve. For what use is language without someone with whom one can communicate? What use are the labels and words which define property without a boundary separating what is yours from what is theirs—when there is no them? And without ownership, what is the purpose of labor—what can we hope to attain and what can we hope to keep when we have not the language to call things ours nor the comprehension to understand the importance of such language?

A man adapted to a world without society is a man alone in the world. Without the ability to empathize with others by association, he loses his ability to empathize with himself: for what is empathy, but the recognition of certain aspects of oneself in others? And if others do not exist in the form of associations, how can one recognize those aspects of common humanity in themselves? The fabric of humanity is therefore inevitably found in its associations.

If man tears away at the very fabric of his self, that which makes him human, in order to prop up and aggrandize the state, because he believes the state when it tells him that its power is his freedom, does there not come a point when there is no fabric of self left, all of it having been sewn into the state? The future of humanity posited by those who believe progress is the gradual tearing away of boundaries may end up surprised when they find that those boundaries do not stop with the lines of a political map, but continue deeper until they’ve ground away the flesh and bone which constitute the very individuals they originally sought to protect.

When the state stops functioning at the service of man and the plurality of men, and instead they must submit themselves to the function of it, they lose themselves in it to the point of their own negation. And once men cannot be told apart within the vast, collective machine of state, absorbing all old ties into its faceless masses, the only purpose left for the machine will be to run itself.

We have the greatest opportunity the world has ever seen, as long as we remain honest — which will be as long as we can keep the attention of our people alive.

— Thomas Jefferson

Let’s get out of here, you and me.

Let’s run up a tab, get a boat, ruin our credit scores and never return. We’ll just get good and lost for a while until we hit land. And we’ll build our own nation there, free of all these entrapments that make us less human each day. Let’s get back to the romance of living and curse convenience back to that dark little corner in the universe from whence it came. All so that lifetimes from now, if we’re lucky, the benefactors of our great experiment will call us their founding fathers but not know all of our names. (And they will confuse our original intentions in order to create something not wholly unlike what we had been trying to escape all along.)

But I emphatically insist, it’ll have been worth it, even if only for those short, lovely years in which our progeny gets it right. Even if just to see the looks on our country of origin during those years, those flakes who cry “Liberty!” yet deny men that ultimate freedom—to exist as they ought. We will be the bridegrooms of our nature apart from post-industry, throwing off the yokes of our individualistic Abaddon for the honeymoon of our collective spirit and lust for empathy.

I’m chasing my history and finding discrepancies between who I am and who I’ve thought I should become.

I fashioned myself in the image of a spirited warrior from the start, but so many scars later and I don’t know what I’ve gained from all of these fabrications. I was the toddler seeking diplomacy to avoid a fight his brazen confrontation got him into. I was the little boy daring: chasing the assailant, only to shamble back to his mother, wheezing for his inhaler. The youth with the megaphone, then silent and punched, kicked, beaten up and around the neighborhood once that final school bell rang. The enlistee asking for infantry, assigned to journalism. Begging and pleading with the military doctor to ignore my asthma, my twisted spine, my feeble figure. The one at the back of the formation runs in boot camp, struggling to catch up. Eventually assigned to a desk and told that, right here, I was a genius, maybe the best in the service. No awards for valor, no combat deployments. Just a kid serving with all the guys who beat me up in middle school. Doing a poorer job of fooling others than I did myself.

Like nations facing a great loss, all my life I’ve salted my wounds with introspection, following each failure with reflection. But if this boldness was just a face I presented to the world, then whom was it hiding?

My greatest source of frustration until now has been my perpetual attempt to juggle at once the contradicting notions of proud aggression and somber deliberation. I’ve always been ashamed of being a dreamer; thinking as the means and the end was selfish and unproductive. No, I had to do something great with all that thinking.

I could trace it back to that imaginary country I built up as a coping mechanism. When reality put me in my place, I made my ideals grand enough for residency. But what use is he who spends his life in his mind, I thought? I projected in order avoid the humiliation of being satisfied with thought alone. And wherever reality couldn’t ever match the image I’d constructed in my mind, I resented and hated it.

Instead, I couldn’t just be interested in policy; I would have to be a politician. I couldn’t just be a guy trying to figure out how things could be better; I would have to be the one changing them. In order to justify the obscene amount of time I spent thinking, I would doom myself to become the leader of the free world. But the people in the free world aren’t like their iterations in my imagination. And the free world isn’t as free as my mind.

I’m tired of denying myself for the sake of stoic resistance. I’m tired of who it makes me. Some people out there I just don’t have the mercy required to call my brethren. Some people I just don’t want to fight for.

I must be willing to accept the whole of these weaknesses before I can reach the zenith of my strengths. Until then, I’m only bogging myself down in perpetual defeat, entangled in the knowledge that I’m trying to portray someone whom I was never intended to be. All this time and energy used up on creating a convincing enough face, it could all be better spent.

Maybe behind all the skewing of my personal history that led to the invention of myself as a warrior, I’m just the boy who believed he could fly when nobody was looking. I used to paint on the world like a canvas with my thoughts. And to this day, in spite of everything I’ve learned that would have me deny it, I still believe deep down that I did fly. Would it really be so terrible to stick with that? To stop worrying about what’s real and go back to focusing my life on what’s possible?

I’m not depressed by it like I used to be, nor does it dominate me in such a way that I make hasty and inadvisable social interactions out of desperation for connection I know I could never possibly gain from the convenience of my proximity. I guess this is how I know I’m growing up. It used to grip me so hard, and these days I see there is so much more out there than this one feeling — still, in spite of my overall contentment, it is at least one thing that’s missing in my life and no number of accomplishments could serve to compensate for its lacking.

I want to find someone I don’t have to just tolerate, whose company I desire and who makes me want to be something greater than myself. That I expect someone like this exists is another sign of past lessons learned, or maybe my recent optimism.

Life is just far too easy on its own to not find someone who challenges you.

Noemi Mendez led the fast and dangerous lifestyle of every recreational drug addict of her era. Married and divorced at 15, she’d been using since her early teens and had three abortions before 23.

After years under an abusive father and the subsequent lovers she founded in his image, her sense of self-worth had tumbled to the point where personal well-being was no longer a compelling enough reason to change. She resolved to create human life that, precious and dependent on her for its survival, wouldn’t deserve the consequences of her self-destruction.

I was conceived with help from one of her friends—an Irish firefighter who until that point had only served as a Saturday night disco partner. She said later she was looking for a man who wouldn’t stick around and that he met her requirement.

We spent the early years of my life continually moving where ever my mother could find work. Secondary suites, my grandmother’s house, even a recreational vehicle: all of these were temporary residences that shared only their settings in seedy neighborhoods. Inevitably, the thugs from her former life would track her down and we’d have to move again. But she never lost faith in the idea that her hardships would one day make a better man out of me. She always told me in my youth that she was “merely surviving” in hopes that I could live.

Of course, I don’t remember much from these years, save for what family accounts and a few photos tell me. But I like to think my mother’s struggle served in a way as the foundation of my eventual understanding that the impoverished find purpose in various forms of validation. The fundamental confirmation needed by those living in neighborhoods like mine is that they’re a part of something that makes them feel significant, because they’ve been steadily made to believe they don’t matter. Once a part of something meaningful, they can willingly become a force for change not only in their communities, but also in their own lives.

It took my own application of this theory to first recognize the phenomenon, when I coaxed myself out of my humble surroundings and joined the Marine Corps. My experiences as a military journalist in the Third World forced me to reflect on the patterns of poverty that led me. The chance to participate in world poverty as a benefactor and not a victim empowered me and helped greatly in shedding my earlier preconceptions regarding my caste standing in society.

It wasn’t so much that the new surroundings that lifted me from the crumbling infrastructure and lowered expectations of the ghetto, but the new perspective such surroundings spurred. I wanted to be that catalyst for others and have since determined to incite the understanding in others that we as Americans do not have to settle for the conditions into which we were born.

We were only a few yards from the apartment complex when the mugger first struck her. I remember an eerie quiet throughout the attack– there were no words; my mother was silently, stubbornly clinging to her purse as the assailant dragged her across the asphalt. (She told me in time that her only concern throughout the beating was keeping me from recognizing what was happening.) When I looked up at our building, I saw the fluorescent flicker of balcony lights occupied like ghosts by human silhouettes. Our neighbors were watching.

When her purse strings finally snapped, the assailant took off into the darkness. I futilely started after him until my mother shrieked my name in terror and yelled for me to come back.

Resigned and asthmatic, I collapsed next to her, wheezing and weeping into her blouse. When I peered over her shoulder and back up at the balconies, I was paralyzed with rage. Almost every light had gone out as casually as it had come on.

In that moment, I furiously resolved that I would never become the beast who sat idly by and allowed someone else to feel as helpless as I did right then.

Strip away the vanities and pretension and that’s what I am: the consequence of a scared little boy, grown up and fighting. Apathy was the real assailant that muggy night in 1989. What I’ve recognized over time is that even though its manifestation in the shadows in the tower balconies went away in a moment, the residue never left. And it didn’t really start there, did it?

I guess that’s how I’m sure this social good thing is real for me. That it’s about more than glamorized depictions of defending the weak or helpless. It’s about regaining lost power. It’s about chasing that man around the corner and catching up with him, even if only to look him in the eyes and say, “I know what you are and I’m not going to let you get away with this.” And showing the bored, cynical ones on the balconies that one man was capable enough to do it.

I used to brag about my early activism and how as a teenager I would scale my school building to yell at the student body: Karim Delgado, the lone crusader against injustice. I see it differently now. Why on every occasion had I sought the highest platform to spew my vitriol? Looking back, I remember that I never reached out to the masses or stood among them, instead placing myself at a singular point for their complete attention while I spoke down to them. I wasn’t really alone—I was in the company of my conceit.

What have I accomplished since then? Instead of screaming loudly for attention, I hide clumsily behind my stirred façade of bourbon and isolation, secretly hoping that someone will figure me out insofar that I desire to be figured out. Even then, the discovery I desire isn’t real. That would require too much from me. I want the feeling of coming clean without having to come clean. I want to look vulnerable, complete with those Hollywood tears that roll down like the excess from eye drops.

I’ve sacrificed so much in the wake of this unreality, chances at love and life and all of those simple pleasures that my quest for plastic glory has denied me. Every relationship I’ve ever been in was eventually squandered under the pretense that “the world needs a devoted leader.” But what was I devoted to, really, other than the attention that comes with having your name written in textbooks?

We may not like it or expect it, but as we age, our flaws mature alongside us. We don’t outgrow them; we can only work to reduce their impact. And if we’re too proud to recognize that early on, all we’re really doing in our silence is inviting them to further define us.

Karim: I really wish you would have raised me religious.
Mom: I tried! But you wouldn’t accept that I’m God.

Sometimes the loneliness of not being able to relate to anybody around me is crippling. I spend some nights driving around slowly with my windows down inanely expecting that I’ll randomly stumble across an individual or group who might truly understand me. I realize that this is pathetic at best (and at worst, kind of creepy). This last-ditch effort on nights where I was unable to make any real connection leaves me exhausted and momentarily resigned to the idea that this emptiness is just a fundamental part of who I am. I hide my emotions and doubts well enough in public that others often ask why I’m so difficult to reach. But on these nights when I park back in my driveway at the end of my little exercise in futility I just shut my engine off and cry.

I had decided I wanted to become President when I was six years old and she never let me forget. My mother reminded me at my every weak moment that there was a future out there for me and told me when I was disappointing it. She also told me as often as she could that I was her salvation, her reason to give up the drugs and dealers and late nights and abortions (five, she said she thinks). She depicted for me a contrast of what she was attempting to create in my life and the lacking of which that had existed in so many others.

I was her break from the pattern of ignorance that affected what seemed like my entire neighborhood growing up. So when I tell others that I grew up around crime and poverty, I want to make sure they don’t assume that I feel victimized by that setting. I consider myself to have among the best of childhoods because, despite my mother’s $18,000 a year salary, we celebrated every birthday and there were toys under my Christmas tree every holiday season. Beyond that, she taught me social good. My seventh birthday was spent in a Red Cross shelter, where my mother and I had been volunteering after Hurricane Andrew struck Miami in the worst way. We slept on cots in the shelter alongside all these people who had lost their homes and my mom extended her warmth to everyone in the room. I remember when I was eight being talked into giving my prized Nintendo to a family my mother had read about in the newspaper whose home was burglarized the week before Christmas. “It’s your decision. If you keep it, I won’t be mad at you because I bought it so that you’d be happy,” she said. “But if you gave it to this family, think about how much happier it would make them. I don’t think any of these games could make you feel as happy as giving somebody else that chance would.” My mother spent my childhood ingraining me with the idea of responsibility not only for my own life but the lives of those who might not be as fortunate as me. Above all, I grew up with an immense amount of love.

Everything I am today is due to the love and the hope I was raised around and my wish that every child be granted that same opportunity, regardless of their circumstances. I have a lot to be thankful for and plan on working throughout my life in the shadow of my indebtedness.