[SFPOM] The True Meaning of Unity

Day 4,849, 06:38 Published in USA USA by Elaine of the Snowy Forest


Greetings to my friends and enemies,

I would like to begin by thanking anyone who voted, and giving just a little more thanks to anyone that voted for the SFP so I could get into office.

So, Unity. The top Google definition is “the state of being united or joined as a whole.”. This is only something that we can apply to humans when looked at from specific angles. Metaphysical beliefs aside: I am not you, you are not me, we cannot be a single entity. When people call for unity, they certainly do not mean “we should all be the same”. They are saying “we should work together and not fight among ourselves”. That sounds very reasonable. I love not fighting people. Okay, that’s a lie. I love fighting people because MMA is an excellent sport and hobby. But outside of that I don’t like fighting people. So if working together sounds great, what’s the problem with calling for unity?

Calls for unity are, at worst, political prestidigitation. Politicians of a party with a slight majority will say “We would be making so much progress right now, if only the minority party would stop disagreeing with us. We need to heal as a nation, and move forward to realize positive change”. Naturally, anyone from the minority party will immediately see that the majority party does not want unity, but rather to gain political points by blaming the minority party for refusing their ‘reasonable offer’ of national unification. Additionally, many calls for unity are actually calls to maintain the status quo. This is naturally also unacceptable to any group that is disadvantaged by the status quo, or seeks radical change. The SFP often falls under this category, as we have goals that go against the grain of the mechanical implementation of the game itself.

So, when is unity important? When does a call for unity matter? I think that most calls for unity are performative. When unity really matters, it’s often resulting from a situation so dire that people don’t need to be convinced to unify in the face of it. Calls to unity consequentially only have value when you have hope of changing people’s hearts/minds by the strength of rhetoric alone. And since words are cheap, we see them all the time. As such, unity IS possible in respect to any given goal, but there’s always an “if” attached to it. Unity in defending our country is possible if, and only if, we convince a sufficient number of people that our country is worth defending. But unity is also often unlikely. I’ll never agree with someone in real life that thinks that we should deny anyone access to food, water, shelter, or healthcare.

When people are asking for unity, we need to figure out what kind of unity they’re asking for. What do they actually care about, and whose minds are they hoping to change? We need to figure out the bare minimum we need to agree on in order to exist as a nation and have the privilege of arguing about everything else. As long as we stay unified on those issues, we can be disunified on every other issue (although, naturally I hope everyone else will really come together as a country and agree with me).

May All Be Well,

Elaine of the Snowy Forest