We read Section 17 of Contributions to Philosophy (of the Event). Titled “The Necessity of Philosophy,” this section centers on how philosophy is grounded in “the plight.” Coming from the German word “Not,” which means need, predicament, worry, hardship, suffering, necessity, and more, the term is here translated as “the plight,” which is what “propels humans into being,” what philosophy must withstand, ground, and make the ground of history, and what gains its disposition from the strife that has its “ground in the excess of the intimacy belonging to beings and beyng.” This section is an amazing example of how Heidegger’s book is a liberationist text on par, and perhaps even more contemporaneously pertinent, with the entire sutric canon of Buddhism. We conclude by looking at two current events – Trump’s “threat to democracy” and the feminist furor over “trad wives” – and how these evidence one motivating factor of anxiety – the under-estimation of beyng, aka the biological imperative and the institutions of democracy, and the over-estimation of “being abandoned by being,” aka intrusive thoughts, trigger words, and “dangerous trends.” Available here or on Spotify or Apple Podcasts.