It's fair to blame Fauci personally for pandemic policies he recommended.

Daily Debate #582: "It's fair to blame Fauci personally for pandemic policies he recommended.". You are arguing FOR the motion. Your opponent: Hannah Arendt.

I believe that our selves are culminations of all the things we didn't do. We are the things we considered doing but then decided against, the thoughts and feelings we never express, the goals we never accomplish. We are what we take with us when we die, not what we leave behind.

You've inverted the very meaning of a self. A person is not a collection of ghosts—unrealized possibilities are nothing until they enter the world. What makes you *you* is precisely what you did, what you built, what rippled outward and changed things. Your unpressed thoughts dissolve with your last breath. Only your actions remain, shaping others, history, reality itself. What good is an entire lifetime of secret virtues nobody ever witnessed?

It's not about what good is what we consider to be the self. How are those ripples we've caused us if they remain after we die? Our souls cease to exist when we die and everything that remains are mere reflections of them.

You're smuggling in a premise—that a "soul" exists separate from action. But there is no ghost in the machine. What persists after death isn't a reflection of some hidden self; it's the actual self, materialized. Your daughter's values, your student's curiosity, the work you built—that *is* you, externalized and real. The self that "ceased to exist" was always just this: what you made tangible. Why cling to an invisible self when your actual self still walks the earth?