This is not an easy subject, but a necessary one. Please accept my apologies for being unable to present it more comfortably. And I’ll be brief.
We in the West, and Americans in particular, have fallen into a very serious trap: a trap we’ve known so long and so well that we accept it as a fact of life.
To make this as clear as I can, I’ll state this problem in several ways. I’m quite sure you’ll recognize at least one of them:
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- We require continual doses of bad news.
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- We require outrages to react to.
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- Too long without some new evil to oppose and we become deeply uncomfortable.
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- Condemning bad things makes us feel righteous.
The bottom line is that we’ve become unable to feel righteous, except in contrast to evil. That is simply the model nearly all of us have matured within.
This is not a Biblical model, by the way, even if we mix it with Biblical terminology. According to St. Paul, our righteousness is from God, which we have by virtue of being “in Christ.” Jesus wanted us to “do the things I say,” like loving one another, practicing the golden rule and bearing fruit. Moses gave Israel ten commandments to keep personally, and stopped there.
The golden rule, of course, is the best model of morality in practice anywhere, among religious people or otherwise, and it has absolutely no slot for an enemy. Rather, it rests entirely upon self-reference.
The enemy addiction, on the other hand, exists only in relation to external points of reference.
So, a fixation upon enemies isn’t essential or optimal; it’s simply a trick that generates good feelings, fast and cheap. And however used to it we may be, it is not helping us.
For one thing, this addiction breaks our long-term relationships with better things. When good things come along (as they do in even the worst conditions), we welcome them at first, but rather quickly become bored with them. Soon enough we crave more bad news and let the good news be pushed aside.
In other words, our bad news addiction won’t let us hold good news; we’re unable to maintain our focus upon it.
Perhaps even worse, the bad news addiction won’t allow us to build and hold visions of a better future, which we require to move forward with any consistency. “The good place we’re going” can’t maintain a prominent position in our minds, since our model of righteousness requires an enemy to condemn.
I have no intention of continuing on this subject, by the way, but I think it’s worth keeping in mind rather than tossing away. So, here’s a final restatement:
Without an enemy firmly in view, our righteousness deflates. Thus unmoored, we are compelled to find yet more bad news.
And so we are addicted to our enemies. We need to get out of this cycle, and we are quite able to do so.
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Paul Rosenberg
freemansperspective.com