Sins and Sinners

Yesterday, I wrote:

The hard right, which spent decades screaming and hollering about pedophilia, is largely cool with pardoning arguably the biggest monster of the biggest child sex trafficking ring in modern history.

The hard left, which spent decades screaming and hollering about rape, is largely cool with Hamas raping Jewish Israeli women.

Everyone's just posing. Signifying. Waving flags and feeling righteous in their mouthy stand. Peel back the skin, and it's brute tribalism. Hatred for the Other is the only real thing. The sole motivator.

Performative virtue, as the fruit of a poisoned tree, cannot help but be hypocritical and spotty.

So what's the answer? How do we fix this?

As ever, it will happen by each person individually reframing. Here's the recipe, and it will seem both radical and profoundly familiar:

If you have a conviction that seems so incontrovertible that it appears to justify full-on seething emotion, and your white-hot fury feels right because it serves Righteousness so you feel elevated in your screechy, mouthy scorn as you smite the wicked without observing the normal considerations....maybe pull back a little. Maybe don't do that.

We can fight perceived wickedness with an emotional pitch of "8", rather than "10" or "11", and do so with ordinary civilized restraints fully in place. The answer, my friends, is blowing in the wind, and has been for thousands of years. 2.5 billion of us profess to practice it already. Here it is:

While fighting what you're certain is Wickedness from a position you're certain is Rightness (I won't ask you to moderate your certainty; that would be a step too far), you can hate the sin while loving the sinner.

Of course, we're only two millennia into that proposition, so it's still way too early for the full version. Let's do baby steps. Don't *hate* the sinner. Don't *dehumanize* the sinner. Even if it makes you feel real good to do so.

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"The surest way to work up a crusade in favor of some good cause is to promise people they will have a chance of maltreating someone. To be able to destroy with good conscience, to be able to behave badly and call your bad behavior 'righteous indignation' — this is the height of psychological luxury, the most delicious of moral treats."

- Aldous Huxley (in "Crome Yellow")

"Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle: Social justice activism is widely regarded as driven by noble intentions, but it attracts large numbers of psychopaths, narcissists, and other dark tetrad personalities who use it to feed their sense of self-importance and to dominate others."

- Gurwinder

See also: "The Evil Glee of Sanctimonious Scorn"