Loyalists and loners

I'm not sure what Bernie Sanders's politics are, or if Corbyn is the real deal, but the way the right-wing is scampering at the moment you're convinced that anyone who stands for principles-provided they're good principles- will be taken down by the powers that be.

What is the point of principles if one is not concerned about the circumstances in which they are likely to be realized. That, I suppose, has always been the complaint against any idealistic sentiment. But that view is in itself an expression of a monstrous arrogance-for it presupposes a knowledge of causal mechanisms that is beyond the remit of human thinking. Who is to say how things will eventually turn out?

One thing is for sure-I think: those who are compromised, who have 'bought into' the belief that money and power are our ultimate ends, and that self-interest is the fundamental spring of human action, will always try to blacken all that shines. 

What is holy-and such a word is used with remarkable laxity nowadays, as if it was nothing-is the ability to see other people and not reduce them to one's own dreams and schemes of expansion (the settlers), not to view people as a mere means to your own ends. Amo: volo ut sis. There is nothing higher than that, is there? An impoverished view of human beings ends up, invariably, with a shoddy form of politics. 

The appeal of socialism rests, and has always rested, in precisely just this: not 'I', but 'we'; togetherness, not as a mere fact or accomplishment, but a way of looking (looking out and back, 'looking out for').