the soup parable: the neighbor outside the equation — Reconfiguration in miniature
let’s just make the example that it is a hapless Canadian, foreign, “un autre,” separated from me by a chasm of history and language and value and deep respect for individual freedom—then in this wholly random instance there would be no community-minded constraints on my natural impulse to bonk your head and commandeer the desired soup
Context
The parable's payload, and the pickup's core: the American's utilitarian calculus extends mutual respect only within "the community," so a "hapless Canadian, foreign, 'un autre'" falls outside it — free to be bonked and robbed, then handed "my greed's waste... under some sham-arrangement of quote Interdependence." Steeply says it himself: Interdependence is "a crude nationalist scheme to indulge my own U.S. individual pleasure-lust" while offloading the waste onto the neighbor. The soup parable is the Reconfiguration in miniature — the whole Concavity gift compressed into a dirty bowl passed to the man outside the equation.