Hi Harry -

Thank-you. I know it isn't all fundamentalists, all Orthodox, all neo-liberals (in the classical sense, not the American one), or even all anarchists. I've met some sincere and kind people of all those persuasions who were willing to entertain rational debate.

And some, when thrown into the mix, handle it quite well, even though they thought they wouldn't or couldn't.

OTOH, I have met people who sincerely believed they weren't at all racist--until they moved to a place where whatever they were was a minority--then it was a whole different trip.

I think you're correct, I think it is desire, but that desire/thought thing gets so entertwined it's really hard to find the tangles. Cutting the Gordian knot doesn't work when you're dealing with real live humans.

It's something I think about a lot, too, maybe because I studied to be an ethicist, and also follow the history of systems of ideas--I don't know, to tell the truth. Or systems analysis training--you take things as they are and work from there instead of redesigning the parts that you really can't redesign. Sounds a bit cold, but it's not really.

It's kind of neat to find out somebody else thinks about things like that too. But unfortunately, I still don't know the answer.