Facebook asked what’s on my mind yesterday — no one else was asking — and I said . . .

. . . This “preferential option for the poor” that came out of liberation theology, a S. American philosophy, you might call it, means what for me as non-poor? Besides feeling guilty about it, that is. Ideas?

To which I should add “guilty about things I can do nothing about!”

Quite an important nub here, as beautifully explained by Hayek in Road to Serfdom, which I recommend to people feeling guilty about things they can do nothing about.

An excess of empathy, as the man wrote a book about, published a month or so ago, Against Empathy; The Case for Rational Compassion, is what I speak of.

I am also reminded of a movie scene many decades ago, a black-and-whiter in the ’40s, in which a lone protester standing outside the state prison where an execution is scheduled is asked if he thought his protest would change anything.

The man thought not but said he was there not to change the law but to protect himself from being changed.

Or as the Soc. of Pius X preacher said in Oak Park, also some decades back, when touched by a panhandler we give money out of charity not to change the panhandler but not to be changed: Do it seeing Christ in the beggar and you gain, whether he does or not.