There is largely unknown movement out there. It’s demographic is hard to describe.
It’s not Left. It’s not Right. It can’t be labeled as Liberal, Conservative, Grassroots or Fundamentalist. You cannot fit the members of this movement into one box and expect to know everything about who they are, and what they believe, or agendas they support. I cannot give you a stereotype of who has joined this movement but I can mention a few names: Walt Whitman, Martin Luther King, and Pope John Paul II.
These three, and many others, wittingly or not, make up a radical movement called Personalism which is “a philosophic tendency built on the infinite uniqueness and depth of each person”. In other words, it is a recognition that to be human is not only to be ambivalent at times, but also to have inherent worth. This combination of our humanness makes all of us worthy in our complexity and complex in our worthiness. It makes each and every one of us deeply and completely unique in our thoughts, beliefs and world views, and not always straightforward and consistent in how we manifest them. Not one of us can actually be simply labeled exactly the same as someone else.
However, there is a catch. Our humanness, to make sense of who we ARE, often wants to simplify who we are NOT, which leads us to categorizing ourselves and others into neat tidy groups of like mindedness that either join or oppose us. I understand my worth because you and your group are wrong. I understand my worth because you and your group agree with me.
Personalism which doesn’t divide and organize into any kind of group yet perceives that each and every individual is riddled with nuance, contradictions and hypocrisy, all trying to not only makes sense of their purpose, but to ultimately connect to others. Ironically and tragically, in this process of understanding our purpose and desiring to join with others, we look for a “Them” to find our “Us” and then our purpose is nothing more than spending all our energy defining our enemies in simple and dangerous ways. Please read this important opinion piece called “Personalism: The Philosophy We Need” by David Brooks.
Our individual and collective mental health and well being depends on a movement away from “Us and Them”. It’s been said a million times. We need a We. A WE that recognizes an inherent worth in EVERYBODY that makes up this We. And also to recognise that this We makes up many many, many complex, messy, beautiful, terrible, enlightened, judgemental, compassionate, wrong, right, selfish, selfless, undefinable, definable ‘I”s.