The most important, most urgent matter in the world now is for people to see other people justly. And for that to be, the knowledge of Aesthetic Realism is necessary. People need to learn that there is a fight going on in everyone all the time between the desire to respect the world and the desire to have contempt for it. Knowledge of this fight is a national and world emergency—because people need to know that all cruelty arises from contempt, and contempt is very ordinary. For instance, contempt has a person feel important thinking someone different from oneself—of another race or religion—is inferior.
“As soon as you have contempt,”Mr. Siegel wrote, “as soon as you don’t want to see another person as having the fulness that you have, you can rob that person, hurt that person, kill that person.”*
I respect this writing very much. This relation between the very ordinary, everyday thoughts a person can have, and the outward depravities that we see increasingly in the news, is incalculably important. Racism is not in a separate world from other cruel manifestations of contempt. The central fight in every person, which I've seen goes on in me all the time, has to be understood, studied, for people to feel proud of our thoughts and our effect on other people, and for the brutal injustice that is racism to end. That can happen through the world study of Aesthetic Realism, which is so needed in 2017.Contempt is the cause of crime, racism, terrorism, bullying, and economics that sees human beings in terms of profit and has a few people be very rich and millions of others poor. Yet contempt is also what has a person not listen when someone is speaking, or sneer smugly in one’s mind at someone for what that person is wearing.
* See James and the Children, by Eli Siegel
