Four years ago, I was watching a David Attenborough documentary with my girlfriend. David, for us, was a source of comfortable contemplation. His voice is calming, but with just enough inquisitive showmanship to keep your brain from completely switching off—a perfect pre-bed ritual for us on lazy Sundays. In the documentary, he lectured on the changing climate around the southern Andes mountains and how the stretching warm seasons have caused unexpected changes for local wildlife. Among the burgeoning population of the lower Andes steppe is a mountain cat, the specifics escape me at the moment, but what I remember is that they were once thought to be like most cats, completely solitary hunters; however, they had been recently observed hunting in regular pairs. Cara and I found that interesting and spent the rest of our pre-bed ritual with the documentary paused, sitting cross-legged on our mattress and discussing it, but even after she had moved on the next day, I had it worming around in my head for weeks.

I’m an economics student, and I got into the subject before college through reading old political and economic theory. I had read the classic materialist writings, but while Hegel and  Marx had colored my impression of the world, nothing quite struck me so vibrant the way that tidbit from the Attenborough documentary had. I mean, here was a concrete example of something perceived as immutable, like the nature of a creature, changing like the way a river reroutes itself over time. Revealing that the only true nature of the river is that water runs where it can. This wasn’t some Darwinian gradual, generational change; there was no nurture to grind it out with the nature of these cats. They changed with the seasons within a lifetime. There was a flaw in how we understood the nature of creatures with lives far simpler than ours. Perhaps the same was true about human nature.

I was once asked to think on the question: “What do we owe each other?”, and it occurred to me to tell this story because I, on a moral level, always believed that human beings have an inexhaustible and globalizing duty to one another, but in my meditations on these animals, I realized some time ago that this was equally true on a literal and metaphysical level. 

When people are held in solitary confinement in prison, they often follow a similar pattern of psychological degeneration. Victims begin with panic and depression and progress into states of measurable mental decline. Their mind recoils at the thought of being alone with itself. If solitary treatment persists long term, psychosis can set in, physical maladies form, and the will to live wanes. Liberally interpreted, when people are removed from a social context, the self loses its shape, perhaps even fails to materialize. 

People require other people to define themselves and their actions. Even under the auspices of Randian hyper-individualism, the ideology of competition and the individual is sold through the assurance that it produces the best outcomes broadly.  Opposites like selfishness and altruism require a partner. We are both subject and environment. We have every bit of duty to one another as we do to ourselves because we are every bit a part of one another.

As my favorite public speaker of the 20th century, Eugene Debbs, once said, “While there is a lower class, I am in it, while there is a criminal element, I am of it, and while there is a soul in prison, I am not free.” The self contains within it a myth of separation that we call subjectivity, but each reaction produced in the subject is forged by the environment built and maintained by the collective, and as such, we are as obligated to feed others what we hunger for, give dignity when we are asking for it, and pay in kind what we feel we are owed. Solidarity. Free Palestine.