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Alec Walen, on Blaming those Incited to Riot
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AuthorDavid Shoemaker
AuthorDavid Shoemaker 
A forum for discussing Philosophy, Ethics, and Academia
A forum for discussing Philosophy, Ethics, and Academia
AuthorDavid Shoemaker Here, at Public Ethics.
The principal problem with your analysis is the breath-taking ease and clarify with which you assign blame and righteousness. I recommend to you instead, as closer to the truth, Dostoyevsky’s Father Zossima’s assertion that we are all individually to blame for every one and for all things. Speaking of himself he says, “If I had been righteous myself, perhaps there would have been no criminal standing before me.”
The problem with our depictions of politics and the creatures that inhabit it is that it is, by its very distance, so easily fictionalized. I myself in this current mix of hysteria and fantasy find it difficult to find anyone, inasmuch as I can make anyone out at all, that is not to blame.