“For every ill in the world,

There is a cure or there is none.

If there is one

Seek until you find it,

If there is none

Nevermind it.” —Mother Goose

I was in a class where the general agreement arrived at mourning over every death that happened every day. I finally had to point out that doing such a thing was impossible and trying would very quickly make you unhappy beyond help. Still, there is the question: when should we not care? When should we care?

For want of a nail the horseshoe was lost

For want of a horseshoe the horse was lost

For want of a horse the soldier was lost

For want of a soldier the kingdom was lost

All for the want of a horseshoe nail.

That this poem is famous tells me we have a misunderstanding about what to care about. To a certain degree you should care about horseshoe nails, or the number of matches in the matchbox, but where exactly the point of not caring is, is a matter of vagueness. The problem of vagueness has a classical characterization that applies to language: if we take one grain of sand away from a heap of sand, we still can call it a heap, but if we keep doing that, we will end up with something we are unsure about, without knowing exactly when we have become unsure! Here the problem of vagueness is not merely linguistic, but ethical. If we don’t take care of little things, at some point those little things will pile up until you find you are a generally uncaring person, and there is no telling when that will happen. What do we do?

This problem calls for strategy. What I tell my daughter is, you care about your bodyweight, or the spots on your face, as long as caring is helping to clear out your mind. Once this caring is no longer helping to ease the mind, you stop. Further, we should care about every little detail *inside our own minds* “How can I improve my intentions, attitude towards this present person, situation, life?” “When I act (because you have to do something about your intentions and attitude) what is the quality of my intention and attitude in the act?” “What tiny fault is there in my own goodness, my own understanding?” These are things you can handle. It is still a very hard and ambitious thing to train yourself to care about, but you can not handle all the deaths in the world.

I think sex, coming from any side is about domination and power. Yes, that makes it related to freedom, but that is about as uninsightful and pessimistic as the phrase “knowledge is power.” Knowledge is almost entirely not power, and sex is almost entirely not about freedom. That makes the relationship sex has to freedom special, but not very helpful for gaining freedom.

Why is sex not so much about freedom? You can gain power with sex, power over your children, power over your partner, power over the opposite sex in general, or the same sex. Sex is often sold in many ways, but there are forces of domination at play in the intellectual circles talking about sex-as-power (often disguised as sex-as-freedom, which is double-talk), and derivative circles, that will probably rob you of any power you might gain from thinking about sex (including gender) or enacting sex.

In the same way that focusing on the individual instead of corporations is a way of controlling people financially, politically, and psychologically, focusing on sexual identity is no different. The main effect of focusing on sex is it limits people’s ability to understand everything else. Just like if you only focus on yourself your ability for compassion and understanding others decreases (though not entirely). People forget more important things like happiness, peace, and an entire spectrum of wonderful human things that, yes are related to sex, but not determined or defined by sex. The secondary effect is groups like male and female and so many others jostle for power and in that setting power-players can play people against each other and keep control. Because sex is primarily concerned with power, powerful people (editors, etc) are able to control the dialogue. Other topics like happiness are not like this.

So if you decide to allow yourself to be pushed into thinking this is the central issue, you are feeding yourself into a patriotic power structure. Shifting to a matriotic power structure is hardly revolutionary to powers that push sex, it is like voting democran or republicrat to fight capitalism.