Thread by @JuliusGoat

This morning I'm thinking of the people laughing and cheering and clapping.

The Senate is contemplating turning an intemperate man, given to lies, into an armoured steamroller, for the next 30 yrs.

Yesterday the president mocked a woman who stood up to tell a tale of being assaulted at 17 by that intemperate man.

People laughed and clapped and cheered.

The president, himself an intemperate man, and given to lies, put the intemperate man forward as deserving advancement.

The Senators who seem inclined to advance him are, by and large, more temperate, but no less given to lies.

The laughing cheering clapping people, though ....

They chose the president.

And they chose the Senators.

And they chose to laugh and clap and cheer. They think it's good. They think it's all VERY good.

They think a woman choosing to put herself between a steamroller and those it would crush deserves mockery.

It is, to me, a perfect picture of the idea taken hold in dominant American culture, that some people matter and some people don't.

Which makes me think of evil spirits.

You'll think I just got mystical on you. Not so.

I'll explain.

Spirit, I'd say, is a collective belief given material expression in the world.

You don't have to believe in gods or ghosts to believe in spirit.

If your team plays with focus and passion, and their fans show up in team colors and cheer their hearts out, they have a lot of ______.

If you do precisely as the law requires, but abuse desired intent, you've followed the letter, but broken the _________.

That's spirit.

Spirit wants to do something. Spirit has goals. Spirit wants to win the game. Spirit wants to set up fair housing practices. Or make our company the best company. Or destroy the enemy.

And so on.

Spirit is bigger than any one individual. Individuals choose to enter a spirit, and doing so, lend their own energy to expanding it.

Spirit has its own unique gravity. The moreso as more join with it.

People *choose* to join spirit.

Thus spirit captures culture.

Which brings me back to the laughing cheering clapping people, and what causes such a grotesque display to occur.

I think our dominant culture has been captured by evil spirits from the beginning. Spirits: Collective beliefs given material expression in the world.

Call them our "foundational lies" if spirit is too mystical a word.

I think they are worth naming.

If I were to name our dominant culture's foundational lies, I’d say they are these:

* That we don’t belong to one another
* That life must be earned
* That prosperity is virtue
* That violence redeems

If one were to file all these under one big foundational lie, I’d say it was this:

Some people matter, and other people don’t matter, and really aren’t even people.

And spirits have goals. They’re moving toward something. I think a close examination of our dominant culture’s spirit would conclude that it has these goals: slavery and genocide.

This quite literally.

As proof, I invite you to read a well-sourced history book.

Which is how you get people laughing and clapping and cheering their chosen hero, who is a bully with the mind of a cruel child, mocking a woman for admitting she was abused, for showing a quality he can’t comprehend, which is bravery on behalf of others.

What sort of people would find such a thing good? I wonder. It’s baffling.

What are such people like? I think this question has two answers.

The first is uncomfortable. They’re a lot like the rest of us, most of the time.

The second is this: It doesn't matter.

The reason it doesn't matter is because we are not asking a question about an individual's beliefs, much as an individual's beliefs matters.

We're asking a question about spirit. And spirit is a collective thing.

Spirit can have ambitions that individuals let themselves miss.

Newspapers try to grapple with the question: what sort of people would find this good. They report with great interest and surprise that they are regular folks.

Surprise!

They're giving an individualized answer to a question of spirit, is the problem.

You can hear stories about how they’re regular folks. Hard workers. Many of them kind to their families. Love their kids. Generous. Kind.

Likely true.

Not relevant in this context.

What’s relevant, in this context, is this: They laugh and cheer and clap at shocking cruelty.

In fact, if you’re like me, their regular-ness is the scariest part. It can lead to despair. How to combat regular folks? How to defeat THAT?

Because the regular-ness, the nice-ness … it’s not working against the evil spirit. It’s working with.

They don’t manage to believe evil lies *despite* the good individual qualities. It’s *because* they can point to the good that they can convince themselves what they believe is not evil, and not lies.

No group of people ever committed atrocity until they first convinced themselves they were too good, too regular, too nice, to ever commit atrocity.

We do good (goes the thinking), so we are good

Good people don't do atrocious things

Therefore what we’re doing isn't atrocity

The point of unpacking this is simple: We need to understand the problem, so we understand how to solve it.

I’d propose that at the bottom of it all, we aren’t fighting bad people. We’re fighting bad spirit. Bad ideas, if you like. Foundational lies.

I’d propose we fight it by deliberately entering into a better spirit.

TO BE CLEAR this is *not* to exonerate those who hold evil beliefs.

Bad people DO exist.

Individual choice still matters.

You can choose to reject evil ideas and beliefs, and you should. And you are culpable for your choices, and accountable to your actions.

And TO BE CLEAR this is *not* to equivocate or call for compromise. Quite the opposite,

In fact. I think this provides us with a framework that allows us to be entirely uncompromising on the matter of justice and human dignity.

And TO BE CLEAR this doesn’t mean we don’t organize, contribute, argue, debate, volunteer, vote, vote, vote, vote.

Remember, spirit isn't passive, it's active. It's something that moves. It has goals. It wants to do something.

This will include positive forward action.

But I think we're fighting something much harder than just evil people.

We're fighting spirit. We need spirit.

We need to enter deliberately into a spirit that insists that every person is a unique and irreplaceable work of art, simply because they are human.

A spirit that wants:

A world where *everybody* is treated with dignity and *everybody* has what they need to live. Where we all belong to each other. Where life doesn’t need to be earned. Where prosperity, while good, is only prosperity. Where violence is only failure.

I arrive at spirit, because it serves as a useful compass. When I arrive at spirit, it allows me to confront people with evil beliefs directly for those beliefs, without compromise, and also without becoming a hater of human beings myself.

It’s how I can understand the disconnect between people who can be quite good and kind, yet hold evil beliefs

gives me someplace healthy to put my very appropriate reaction, which is disgust

and from being confused by individual goodness into thinking it isn’t disgusting.

It’s how I stay on a better path—when I am able.

And, it’s how I recognize the ways I’ve believed the lies—because I fail at this all the time. The gravity of our dominant cultural spirit, which insists some people don’t matter, and aren't even people, is strong

Also, I think spirit is the only thing that convinces.

Argument and debate have their uses, but changing minds isn’t one of those uses. Changing minds is a matter of spirit.

Let’s enter into a spirit that demands that every person is art. In that spirit, let’s confront any idea that would suggest they aren’t.

And then call out the evil spirit for what it is.

And name the spirit within which we choose to move.

The difference will be obvious.

Good morning, by the way. How is everybody?

I'm going to clarify, because it matters.

He was 17.

She was only 15.

https://twitter.com/JuliusGoat/status/1047409411730395136