Try not to be a bigger dick or bitch than you need to be.
Try to be a little nicer than you need to be.
I thought about calling this post “Boundaries”. My reason was that sometimes you DO need to be a dick. I’ve said this on many occasions. Not many “spiritual” writers would say it that bluntly.
And most of the time, none of us need to be MUCH kinder than needed. Most of the time, the excess says more about stories we are telling ourselves–about our vanity, or about our public virtue signaling, which we may not do ourselves, but hope someone does for us–than about how loving and genuinely considerate we are.
This headline is a joke on me. It just came out, and I left it. What I am realizing is that Grand Schemes are almost always the outcome of large–grand–unresolved conflicts.
Most saints are probably secretly more than a little psychotic, and their secrets were hidden well.
I was reading up on Rajneesh the other day, who was remarketed as Osho after high level followers tried to kill people, and plotted to kill more.
It was a sex cult. Did you know this? Everyone was having sex with multiple partners nearly all the time. His cult members were working 12 hours a day, 7 days a week, while he owned NINETY THREE Rolls Royces. He apparently was very fond of valium and nitrous oxide too.
Here is the thing: he was a great talker. People from the time remember fondly how charismatic he was. But that was the background, and can you not infer major emotional problems from all that?
The passion to “change the world” often comes from a bad place.
We read MLK, Jr. was certainly a philanderer, and most likely at least an accessory to rape: https://news.yahoo.com/martin-luther-king-laughed-rape-friend-fbi-documents-145714868.html.
Does that detract from who he was? Yes. Does it mean there was not still much that was very admirable? No, of course not.
I think, perhaps, we all need to lower our expectations of each other, on the right and the left.
On the Left, of course, they are more or less training one another to be devious, corrupt pricks. Since you cannot be forgiven, once called out, you have to both be systematically and carefully disingenuous, and–like Harvey Weinstein for many years–you have to play ball with the System. If they are lying, you have to praise and support the lies. Everyone lies, and all their allies support their lies.
If you do that, they will protect you. They only pushed Harvey down the stairs to get at Trump. They will sacrifice their own in a heartbeat if it serves some major, if transient, purpose. There is no loyalty, which is why the need for caution, where it is possible.
But maybe Saint Francis was molested. Can you imagine the plight of someone subjected to sexual assault and pedophilia in the 12th Century? Maybe Mother Teresa also.
Crazy people change the world. Sometimes the PR folks for those people, with time and general ignorance, can make all the craziness disappear, and create a picture which works for all who come after.
Now, Mother Teresa–or Albert Schweitzer, who I really do have a lot of admiration for–really did get a lot of concrete, physical things done. That is all to the good. It would not have been done without her, so she deserves the credit.
But I think all of us lose something interesting, contact with possibilities within ourselves, when we naively submit to simplistic notions of sainthood, goodness, virtue, and morality.
If everyone did 5% better tomorrow, the world would be changed in a week. As I think Elie Wiesel said, about 10% of the world is mostly good, and 10% mostly bad, and 80% is just following the winds. In such a world, being a leader is a good thing. But I think the less we ask of our leaders in terms of sainthood, the more capable leaders we are likely to find. The reason we got Donald Trump is that 1) he IS capable, even if often also abrasive; and 2) many people who might have done as well or better refused to deal with the sliming. And EVERYONE is hurt when solid people won’t step forward. The Left can’t see that–they are trained parrots, for all intents and purposes–but it is the truth.
My two cents for today.