Moral superiority is a drug that is entirely legal, readily available, and is often even cast as virtuous. I doubt anyone has not partaken, and wow, does it feel amazing. In the short term, anyway. It does leave a long shadow, though, and can itself become difficult to untangle from who we think of as our own selves. Trying to get free from its grip can look like cognitive gymnastics worthy of Cirque du Soleil, wherein we attempt to pretend others’ behaviour is not morally outrageous, or their beliefs patently untrue, or their perceptions (as expressed) not dangerously one-sided or oversimplified.
There’s a middle ground I’ve landed on, accidentally, but with increasing gratefulness for its ability to create both clarity, and compassion, while not clouding any of what I myself believe, or perceive. It’s the concept of “othering” what is harming another human.
I love the imagery of the “uncanny valley,” and this is where I now almost physically push the "monsters” of distortions, assumptions, problems, and abstract, ethereal enemies to life which I (in this story) see as everywhere and nowhere, impossible to grasp, but very much affecting the situations I walk into, or through, or even that I carry with me into the situations I’m walking into, or through.
If you love someone who is acting or speaking in ways you find disturbing, dismaying, or dangerous, and you don’t know how to direct your anger and grief and sense of wrongness, maybe this podcast will give you a way to navigate in love, in truth, and in congruence with obvious reality, while not latching on to moral superiority as your only possible weapon. Ugh. That one is in itself quite liable to become monstrous.
We all fight them, and yet many of them remain in the shadows, unnamed, unnoticed, even defended as friends. They’re not friends. They are monsters.
Fridays are for fence-sitting; this one is the divide between what is useful, helpful, friendly, and what is most definitely not. I hope this affirms, or maybe suggests, a story to tell yourself when you badly need a villain you can fight with all the strength you have. Not other humans. Not yourself. One hard thing: name the enemy. Fighting it is much easier when it’s categorized as apart from what is human, worthy, and good. (You!)
