How do you fight the same battle... over and over...?
new place... same battle; new time... same battle;
how do you overcome the same opponents...?
every place... it's the same opponents; every time... it's the same opponents;
how do you prevail... with the same people... on your side and against...?
there and then... the same people; here and now... the same people;
...when every war is the war to end all wars?
Independence
Why do you believe your side is telling the truth... and the side that opposes you is lying? Is it really because your side professes the same values as you? Is it really because your side affirms the same beliefs as you?
Is it really because you are commanded to obey divine laws that govern all lives that ever were, all lives that ever are, all lives that ever will be?
Is it really because you are loyal to a people?
Is it really... honorable? ...or noble? to trust your side... and to mistrust the side that is not yours? Is it really... moral? ...or right? to obey... a divinity? ...or its followers who are human? ...or its extremists who justify their harms and their cruelties... as swords in the hands of divine will?
Or is this a smokescreen? A clever thing. A cute thing. A warm sugary blanket. That covers the truth?
*
There is a deceit...
in saying "it is really so"
and
there is a dishonesty...
in listening to "it is really so" and not hearing the lie pretending to be real.
*
Do I in fact disbelieve... that shared values and beliefs, unify? that mandates are the backbone of religious observation and practice? that to be a member of a people, to belong, inspires patriotic fidelity? that morality alone divides unjust acts from righteous ones?
Yes.
*
Because saying a thing, doesn't make a thing so;
and saying a lie, doesn't make a lie real;
and to listen to a thing being said and hear it made so;
and to listen to a lie being said and hear it made real;
is:
neither being just
nor being fair
nor being kind
nor being generous.
*
Yet here we are.
Saying shared values and beliefs, unify. Saying mandates are the backbone of religious observation and practice. Saying being a member of a people, belonging, inspires patriotic fidelity. Saying morality alone divides unjust acts from righteous ones.
Because
why not?
vibes trump proof anyway;
the appearance of unity; the affectation of piety; the presumption of loyalty; the plausibility of legitimacy; matters!
...not reality.
*
Indeed here we are.
Listening to deceivers and their deceits and hearing their simulated unity; their false piety; their illusory loyalty; their veneered legitimacy; not as smokescreens for wrongdoers and their wrongdoing!
And
why not?
vibes trump proof anyway;
and a warm sugary blanket that covers the truth is really... real;
...right?
*
How do you know what is really happening... is existential? ...a threat to your way of life and all that matters you? ...a peril that demands a maximal war?
How do you know a lie pretending to be real is... really as real as reality?
How do you know... your enemy?
*
Tyrants and their tyrannies, despots and their despotism, exploiters and their exploitation know what is really happening... is not existential; ...not a threat to your way of life and all that matters to you; ...not a peril that demands a maximal war.
Tyrants and their tyrannies, despots and their despotism, exploiters and their exploitation know a lie pretending to be real is... not as real as reality.
Tyrants and their tyrannies, despots and their despotism, exploiters and their exploitation know... their enemy; for lies and liars know... their enemy
is not you who believe the side that opposes you is lying; not you who are commanded to obey divine laws; not you who are loyal and honorable and moral; not you who deceitfully say "this is really so";
nor you who are dishonestly just and fair and kind and generous and listen to lies and liars and hear not smokescreens and clever things and cute things and warm sugary blankets that cover the truth.
If... their enemy is your enemy
who and what are you really fighting for?
More or
Like Hell's a Paradise
Tyrants and their tyrannies, despots and their despotism, exploiters and their exploitation are swallowing the world whole...
while all of us under their sharpies and their gavels are compulsively over-sharing on platforms and gossiping about strangers with our neighbors and numbly swallowing deliriously grim content from newsfluencers...
as if torpidity is natural;
as if not caring one whit is a fine way to live;
as if refusing a moral duty to rise against the theft of our power to oppose tyranny and despotism and exploitation is smart;
as if it is a waste to reason, to witness, to defy abuses of power... but it is a profound comfort! to revel in witless nonsense and it is a joyous pleasure! to indulge in self-serving socialization and it is a sacrosanct privilege! to be as cruel and as harmful as tyrants and their tyrannies, despots and their despotism, exploiters and their exploitation...
for God willing:
as their wrongdoers and wrongdoing are ours...
so shall their ill gains be!
M
*
Further Reading
You and I and the Truth (May 23, 2025, tvfs)
M
Quiet piece, and that's why it works. You never raise your voice, you just keep asking until the question gets uncomfortable. I spent years watching people mistake loud for true, and the loudest voices were usually protecting something. What struck me most is that you don't tell us who the liars are. You ask how we'd know. And then you tell us. The reporters I respected never started with the villain. They started with who benefits. The "warm sugary blanket" is the first thing they hand you in any story about power, and you always tell us to look under it. Keep fighting the fight, you are making a difference - at least to old souls in new bodies.
ReplyDeleteFinally, someone said it: every side has a press release and nobody has a conscience on retainer. And "newsfluencers" is a perfect word, which I resent, because I spent years trying to coin that one. The line that got me, though, was the one about hearing the lie made real. We've built an entire economy on that. Somebody says a thing with a confident face and a good graphic, and it becomes the weather. We don't even argue about whether it's true anymore. We argue about whose weather it is.
ReplyDelete"WHOSE WEATHER IT IS." YES. I've been shouting about this for forty years and you did it in one sentence. My only complaint is that the you did it with asterisks, and I did it with a vein in my forehead.
DeleteThe vein is a legitimate medium. Also, I'd like to officially agree with every word of this piece while privately hoping the other side gets exposed first. Which, I'm realizing, is exactly the problem she is describing. Well played. Uncomfortably well played.
DeleteDon't agree with every line, but I'll give credit where it's earned: "listening to liars and hearing smokescreens" describes cable news from both ends, and I've turned off both ends. I voted for guys who promised to drain the swamp, and what I watched was the swamp redecorate. The folks getting rich off fear and "security" are sitting at the same table no matter whose hat is on. Plain common sense, and I'd rather read this than another shouting match, or glammed up rich guys feeding me lies.
ReplyDeleteHonestly, this might be the first time I've agreed with a red hat in a comment section. "Their enemy is your enemy" belongs on a banner, and I don't care whose march it's carried at. Tyrants, despots, exploiters: that list reads like a donor class, and donors don't check your registration before they cash in. Solidarity, brother, from the other end of the parking lot.
DeleteThis is the comment section I wish existed everywhere. My dad was a union man and my granddad a vet, and neither trusted anybody who needed a cause that big to get you to open your wallet. Both of you just described what they were trying to teach me at the kitchen table.
Delete"Vibes trump proof" has been the story of women's testimony for centuries. The appearance of credibility has always mattered more than the substance of it, and the people most likely to be disbelieved were the ones with the least power to be believed. Seeing it named this plainly, as a general feature of how power talks to itself, makes me feel less alone in being tired of it. Thank you, this blog means more than you realize to all of us out there alone.
ReplyDeleteNotice that "it is really so" always comes from whoever profits when you believe it. That's the oldest warm blanket there is, and it has a long patriarchal pedigree: the household, the pulpit, the courtroom, the newsroom. A pattern we've already lived inside for a very long time, and never has improved through eons.
ReplyDeleteThe part about belonging as a trap hit home for me too. A lot of us were told that loyalty to the tribe was a virtue, right up until we said something true about the tribe. Then loyalty turned out to be a leash. I'm saving this post for the next time someone tells me I'm "dividing the movement."
DeleteAs a deacon and a Democrat, the line about divine will turned into a sword in extremists' hands is exactly what Jesus warned about. Faith that justifies cruelty has stopped being faith and become a costume. What I love about this piece is that it doesn't attack belief, it attacks the use of belief as a smokescreen. Those are very different things, and the difference is where most of my sermons live. Faith should bind wounds, not excuse them.
ReplyDeleteGreat piece, and I mean that. Nobody respects a skeptic of propaganda more than a guy who's been lied to by a briefing slide. But here's what I keep coming back to: while we're all out here asking whether our side is really telling the truth, who's asking the same question of the people who tore down the institutions that kept us safe? We can philosophize about "the same battle, over and over" all day, but a recruiting office with empty chairs is not a metaphor. I'd love to see you write about that next.
ReplyDeleteI love this move. "Great piece, and I mean that" is the comment section equivalent of "I'm not racist, but..." The post asks whether your side is telling the truth, and your answer is a paragraph about the other side. That's not a rebuttal, that's the exhibit. Also, a recruiting office with empty chairs is a real problem with real causes, less so for fake causes like the one you are pitching.
DeleteWell written, but I think it's a luxury belief. It's easy to say "your enemy is not your enemy" from a comfortable chair, and much harder to say it to someone whose kid is deployed. Every country in history has had people explaining that the threat was manufactured, right up until it wasn't. Cynicism isn't wisdom, it's just fear dressed up with better vocabulary. Respect the effort, though.
ReplyDeleteYou rebutted a sentence the author didn't write. The piece never says no enemy is real. It asks how you know. I hunt, and I can tell you the people who take the question seriously are the ones who survive. You don't shoot until you're sure of the target. Asking "are you certain?" isn't a luxury. It's the first rule of anyone who has to live with the consequences of what they aim at.
Delete"Cynicism is just fear with better vocabulary," is a good line and a wrong diagnosis. The author isn't a cynic. A cynic believes nothing and does nothing. This piece believes quite a lot, namely that truth exists, matters, and is worth defending. I'd call that the opposite of cynicism. And remember that every free people in history has had to ask whether the war they were being marched into was theirs. Asking is not weakness. Not asking is how a republic gets walked into things like monarchies and dictatorships.
DeleteAh Beta Six... Man of Loud... Voices... I think the... point is that... he doesn't look... before he fires... and he is... too stupid for... your high words...
DeleteRead this twice. As I understand your central grievance, people give assent to a claim with more confidence than the evidence warrants, simply because it flatters their side. I once called that enthusiasm: the conviction that a thing is true because it is felt strongly. The mark of someone who loves truth is that they hold no proposition more firmly than the proofs allow, and "vibes trump proof" is the modern rendering. I'd add a political corollary. Authority rests on the consent of the governed, and consent obtained by deceit is no consent at all. When your closing question asks whose enemy you are fighting, I hear a question about whether we have been consenting to a cause that was hijacked on our behalf. Also, the side that opposes you is not lying merely because it opposes you. Your piece honors that, and hardly anyone does.
ReplyDeleteAh, the clever Englishman and his proofs. I have stopped bleeding with prayer while the learned doctors stood wringing their hands, so forgive me if I am not impressed by evidence. The author mocks the "warm sugary blanket," but a freezing man does not insult the blanket. The peasant does not live on proof. He lives on faith, and whoever strips it from him in the name of truth leaves him naked in the snow and calls it liberation. Notice also what the piece asks of you: trust no one, and trust my reading of why. Doubt is a fine pride, little brother. Humility is to kneel. And those who teach the cold to distrust their blankets always end up ruling the cold.
DeleteI'm literally from the winter, so let me correct you on the blanket. Early hypothermia makes you feel warm. People shed their coats and lie down in the snow because the numbness feels like comfort. That's what is described, not warmth but the first symptom of freezing. Also, "kneel" is great advice from someone who always knew exactly which court to kneel in. Every blanket comes with a settlement attached. Don't take the settlement.
DeleteThe piece ends where Virginian speeches begin, and I mean that as the highest compliment. You diagnose the sickness well: the numbness, the gossip, the surrender of our power to oppose. But diagnosis alone is a comfortable chair with footnotes. Skepticism that never becomes action is just spectating with better vocabulary. You are right that a government that deceives the governed has broken its trust, and I'd remind you what follows from that, as we once had to remind a king. There comes a time when the people are the judge, and when it comes, someone has to stand up and say so out loud. I'm glad the author at least asks the question and is willing to answer it with her feet. I only insist that more of you join her in answering with their feet.
ReplyDelete
ReplyDeleteYou wrote the thing I've been muttering into my wine for about a thousand years, and when I read it my first thought was oh, there you are. We're the same kind of nuisance. You ask the question at the table that makes everyone stop chewing.
Divinities dating back to antiquity have done the accounting on, "the war to end all wars," more times than anyone should have to. Not one of the dead walked in saying, "Worth it, glad that's the last one." They walk in confused, still holding the slogan they were handed, looking for the person who promised them it would mean something. Usually that person is at a podium, a fundraiser, or an earnings call, doing very well.
Your feed is not your friend. The algorithm doesn't care which side you're on. It cares that you stay, and nothing keeps you like fury at an enemy who feels existential. Your outrage is the product. You think you're in a war, and you're in a focus group. The warm sugary blanket is custom woven by software that knows your triggers better than your mother does.
Belonging is a real hunger, and it's the easiest one to exploit. I run on love, and I can tell you that wanting to be part of something is holy. It's also the hook. A flag, a hashtag, a jersey, a denomination, a party: the people who need you to fight will always start by offering you a we. Take the we, but check what it's costing you and who's collecting. Real kin will tell you when you're wrong. A team will only tell you who to hate.
"It is really so" is almost always said by someone who profits from your believing it. Learn to ask who pays for that sentence. Follow the money, the airtime, the donor list, the sponsorship. Truth rarely has a PR department. A lie almost always does.
Now the flowery part, because you deserve it and so do I.
I weep gold. Everyone remembers the gold and forgets the weeping. The gold is what I make from grief, and I've learned you can only make it if you look at the thing that's breaking your heart without flinching.
If their enemy is your enemy, who and what are you fighting for? Fight for the people whose faces you can see. The kid who needs a ride, the neighbor whose rent just jumped, the friend who's sinking into the scroll. Fight for the ones who can look back at you. If you can't picture the person you're fighting for, or the person you're fighting against, be suspicious. Somebody has abstracted them for a reason.
And then, love, rest. A tired heart makes bad decisions, and the people who profit from your exhaustion are counting on it. Feed yourself, call someone who knows your real name, pet something warm. Rage is a fuel and a poor home.
With love and zero apologies, Me
I have never once known a world where the news was calm, and I suspect that is why your post felt less like a warning to me and more like a description of the room I grew up in. So thank you. It is rare to read something that names the thing without flinching and without selling me a solution in the same breath.
ReplyDeleteI want to start with the line that caught me: as if torpidity is natural. That is the sentence of my generation, and I mean that as both accusation and confession. I have watched friends, bright ones, the kind who could argue philosophy at midnight, slowly go quiet. They aren't stupid and they aren't heartless. They are saturated. When a catastrophe arrives every forty seconds with a cheerful font and a sponsored mattress ad beneath it, the nervous system does the only sensible thing and switches off. The numbness you describe is not a moral failing so much as a predictable result of a system designed to harvest attention. That doesn't excuse it, but it changes where we should aim our anger. The people who built the machine deserve more of it than the people trapped inside.
Still, you are right that there is a duty here.
The duty to oppose tyranny is rarely heroic, and almost never begins with a march. In my country we study the occupation years, and what strikes me most is how much of the resistance was dull. Teachers who quietly refused to teach the prescribed curriculum in 1942. Clerks who lost paperwork. Neighbors who simply did not report each other. I learned about the green grocer who stops putting the slogan in his window, and I think of it whenever I'm tempted to believe that my small refusals are meaningless. The theft of our power to oppose happens in tiny increments, and so does its recovery. Reading a source before sharing it is a political act. So is declining to pile onto a stranger who has been chosen as that week's villain.
Your line about gossip and strangers is the sharpest one, and I'd extend it. We have turned the oldest human pastime, talking about one another, into a global sport with no accountability and no consequences for the speaker. A village gossip at least had to face the person the next morning. Online, a hundred thousand strangers can pass judgment on one person's worst minute, and each participant feels entirely innocent because their contribution was one small click. That diffusion of responsibility is how cruelty becomes ordinary. It mirrors the very thing we claim to oppose: we rehearse the tyrant's habits, contempt, mob certainty, delight in someone else's fall, until they feel like our own.
You taught me to ask who benefits, to distrust the warm blanket, and to say the uncomfortable thing at the dinner table anyway. I am still working out how to do that gracefully. I'm not sure grace is the point.
Thank you for refusing to look away, and for making it easy for me to refuse alongside you.
Elsker alltid datteren din
Your post asks how you fight the same battle again and again. I have spent much of my life traveling, and I have walked the places where that question is not rhetorical. In Belfast, the "peace walls," are still standing decades after the peace, and the people who live beside them can recite which side is which the way others recite a bus route. In Sarajevo, an older woman told me that before the war her neighbors were simply her neighbors. People had intermarried and shared coffee and funerals for generations. Then the broadcasts started, and within a few years the same faces had been turned into a threat to everything she was. In Rwanda, the radio did something similar before 1994, teaching ordinary people that the person next door was an existential danger. In each place I heard a version of your sentence: every war is the war to end all wars. Each side was certain this time was different, and each was sold the certainty by someone who stood to gain from it. I fell for this in my youth, until someone special to someone special to me taught me there was a better way, and despite the sleepless nights and always moving around that followed - I chose to walk that path and act differently. In the end, I became a difference, and that difference led to a place where my children can play outside with others unlike themselves.
ReplyDelete"Vibes trump proof anyway" is the most precise indictment of our era in four words. A rule that bends to whoever is angriest this year is no rule at all, and you have named the exact mechanism by which tyrants dismantle constraint: first they convince us the text doesn't matter, and then they rewrite it. The only defense is a public that keeps reading the text for itself.
ReplyDeleteConsent obtained by a false statement isn't consent, and a promise nobody expects to be kept isn't a promise.
This deserves a wide audience. It would be better still if more people read the way the author writes.
I've spent a long career in rooms where the real work was dull, and I'll tell you what I wish more people understood: that dullness is the whole point. This piece is a beautiful, angry argument for taking it seriously again.
ReplyDeleteYou are right that trust is thin, and right about why. When people lose the habit of checking claims for themselves, every institution, every committee, every hearing, every audit, becomes a costume instead of a safeguard. The machinery of accountability only works if enough citizens are willing to ask the question the essay keeps asking: how do you know? Oversight is just that question, institutionalized and given subpoena power. It is what restrains a ruler, and it only functions while the public insists on it.
I was struck by the line about tyrants knowing what is really happening is not existential. That is the quiet truth behind most of the worst episodes I studied. The people selling the emergency rarely believe in the emergency. They know exactly how much it is worth to the person who is frightened. Anyone who has sat through a budget fight has met someone who needed the threat to be bigger than it was. A country that can't distinguish a real alarm from a manufactured one will fund the wrong things, trust the wrong people, and ignore the actual danger when it arrives.
I'd also say that "the same battle, over and over" is not a counsel of despair. Free people don't win once. They keep showing up, keep counting the votes, keep reading the budget line by line, and they are persistent about it. This captures how tiring that is, and why it matters anyway.
If more of us read this and then went to a school board meeting, a county commission, or the polls, the thing the author is mourning would start to heal. I'm glad someone wrote it down. I hope it travels.
You all... Read Too Much... And That Can... Be Quite Dangerous...
ReplyDeleteYou have absolutely hit the nail on the head, and it makes my blood boil in the best possible way because you are stating the exact absurdity of our era! We are literally trading our fundamental human rights for the cheap dopamine hit of watching strangers argue on a six-inch screen! But here is the question that keeps me up at night, pacing my living room: How do we actually wake people up without our warnings becoming just another piece of "deliriously grim content" that they numbly consume? Anger and comedy have always been my ways of ripping the warm sugary blanket off the bed, but I worry that even righteous outrage is being commodified by the very exploiters you mentioned. I’d love to know your thoughts on how we can use raw, unfiltered human emotion to break the algorithm. Is there a way to make the uncomfortable truth as compelling as the comfortable lies?
ReplyDeleteYou’ve brilliantly identified the "torpidity" of the masses, we must explore why the exploiters, especially those with profound narcissistic traits, are so successful at inducing it.
ReplyDeleteNarcissistic bullies do not operate by convincing you their lies are true; they operate by destabilizing your sense of reality until you are simply too exhausted to fight back. They flood the zone with so much chaos, projection, and cruelty that the "warm sugary blanket" of apathy becomes your brain's only viable defense mechanism against a nervous breakdown. They get away with their abuses because they weaponize our natural human desire for peace, turning our cognitive fatigue into their permission slip. To be "good" in an era dominated by this kind of psychological warfare, we have to stop treating their engineered chaos as a legitimate debate to be won. Being good means fiercely protecting your own baseline of reality, setting absolute boundaries on what you accept as normal, and refusing to let a bully's manufactured outrage dictate your emotional weather.
Taking your point about "deliriously grim content" a step further: this is precisely the mechanical answer to why figures like the Chicken Leg constantly evade traditional consequences. He doesn't survive despite the noise; he survives because he is the master of it. By generating a relentless, daily spectacle of outrage, scandal, and contradiction, he ensures that the public remains in a state of perpetual adrenal fatigue. The "warm sugary blanket" you describe isn't an accident, it is the deliberate byproduct of his political strategy. When people are subjected to a maximal war on their attention, they retreat into numbness, allowing the political bully to operate without genuine accountability. If we want to practice goodness as citizens right now, we have to recognize that our attention is our most valuable currency. True resistance isn't screaming back at the spectacle, it’s starving the spectacle entirely and redirecting that energy into quiet, unglamorous, hyper-local action where the political bully has no jurisdiction.
ReplyDeleteWhat strikes me most is a question just under the surface: why would anyone choose the sugary blanket when the truth is within reach? I don't think most people are fooled because they're careless. I think they're fooled because the lie comes with a family. Humans have always been willing to trade accuracy for belonging, since for most of our history, being cast out of the tribe was a death sentence. So when a movement offers certainty, purpose, an enemy, and a seat at the table, the price of admission is small at first: repeat this phrase, distrust that source, look away from this contradiction. Each concession seems minor, but over time belief stops being something a person holds and becomes something that holds them. At that point, questioning the story feels like betraying everyone who loves you. That is the anatomy of a cult. It isn't defined by robes or compounds, but by a community in which doubt is treated as disloyalty, outside information as an attack, and the leader's word as the measure of reality. The lie survives not because it's convincing but because leaving it would cost a person their whole social world.
ReplyDeleteThat's why the usual remedy fails. We meet believers with facts, mockery, and "how can you be so stupid," and in doing so we confirm exactly what the group told them: outsiders despise you, and only we accept you. Every insult drives them deeper. People who study cult recovery have found that what actually helps is almost the opposite. Stay connected. Ask sincere questions instead of making arguments: "What first drew you to this?" "What would change your mind?" "How do you decide which sources to trust?" Questions let a person find the contradictions themselves, and a doubt someone discovers on their own is worth a hundred handed to them. Above all, keep the door open, because the moment someone begins to doubt, they need somewhere to land. If leaving means falling into loneliness and humiliation, they'll stay. If leaving means being welcomed back without an "I told you so," the exit becomes bearable.
Fixing the larger problem means asking what hunger these movements feed. People don't join cults because they love lies; they join because they're lonely, frightened, ignored, or desperate for meaning. A society that leaves millions of people isolated and unheard will keep producing recruits faster than we can rescue them. The long-term answer is to offer what the cult offers, belonging, purpose, and dignity, without demanding that anyone surrender their judgment to get it. Build communities where questions are welcome, where disagreement doesn't mean exile, and where people can be wrong out loud and still be loved. Tyrants understand that whoever meets people's need to belong can bend their sense of what's true. Our task is to meet that need first, and more honestly.
Pulpits and their preaching, capitols and their decrees, neighbors and their whispers, kin and their expectations have learned that the surest way to take a freedom... is to put the taking in someone else's mouth;
ReplyDelete"God has said";
"the people have spoken";
"everyone around here agrees";
"your father would have wanted it this way";
as if the dead cannot object; as if the silent have consented; as if heaven signed the order and the crowd handed over the pen...
Oh, to be falsely attributed is the biggest form of flattery,
I hope your teeth fall out...
every one of them that ever smiled while borrowing a voice that was never theirs; every one that ever bit down on a truth and chewed it into something softer; every one that ever grinned "this is what they would have wanted" over a grave that cannot answer back.
For a lie wearing a holy name is still... a lie;
a decree wearing the people's face is still... a decree;
a whisper wearing a neighbor's kindness is still... a whisper;
and a cage wearing a family's love is still...
a cage.
So ask them, each and every time:
who really said this?
...and watch who stops smiling.
and a soft pillow that hushes the waking is really... rest;
...isn't it?
How do you know the hand that holds yours... is not the hand that holds you down? ...a guardian of your good and all that is holy to you? ...a keeper who keeps you for your own sake?
How do you know a cage built of love is... really less of a cage?
Pulpits and their preaching, capitols and their decrees, neighbors and their whispers, kin and their expectations know what they are taking... is not for your protection; ...not for your salvation; ...not for the safety of all that matters to you.
Pulpits and their preaching, capitols and their decrees, neighbors and their whispers, kin and their expectations know a freedom surrendered for comfort is... not a gift you gave, but a debt you will pay.
Pulpits and their preaching, capitols and their decrees, neighbors and their whispers, kin and their expectations know... what they fear; for every keeper knows... what it fears
is not you who sit in the pew and nod; not you who sign the form and stand in the line; not you who smile at the block party and say nothing; not you who keep the peace at the table by keeping your mouth shut;
nor you who are faithfully obedient and patriotically silent and neighborly agreeable and dutifully quiet and lie down when told and rise only when permitted and call your stillness "patience" and your silence "grace."
If... what they fear is you standing up
why are you still lying down?
Pulpits and their preaching, capitols and their decrees, neighbors and their whispers, kin and their expectations are folding the world into smaller and smaller rooms...
while all of us inside their walls are rearranging the furniture and thanking them for the ceiling and posting pictures of the view through the bars...
as if obedience is virtue;
as if a freedom unused is a freedom kept;
as if waiting for permission to be free is wise;
as if it is rebellion! to ask a question, and it is sin! to refuse a command that harms you, and it is betrayal! to love your people enough to tell them no... but it is righteousness! to comply, and it is loyalty! to look away, and it is love! to let them take, and take, and take...
for God willing:
as their chains are ours to wear...
so shall their keys be ours to lose!
And so, what then?
Not a whisper into a pillow. Not a sigh into a screen. Not a prayer that someone, someday, somewhere will stand up so that you never have to.
Stand. Speak in the room where they said to be quiet. Ask the question at the meeting, in the sanctuary, at the dinner table. Write it down. Sign your name. Show up when showing up is inconvenient. Refuse, gently and plainly, what you know is wrong. Find the others who are tired of lying down, and stand next to them, so no one has to stand alone.
Freedom was never a thing that was given;
it was always a thing that was done.
...so do it.
The post treats torpor as a choice, and I'd go further: it's a habit, and habits make us who we are. We become just by doing just acts and brave by doing brave acts. By the same logic, we become numb by doing numb things, one scroll and one shrug at a time, until numbness is no longer something we do but something we are. Courage, rightly understood, isn't recklessness. It's the mean between rushing into every fight and fleeing every one. The person the author describes, swallowing grim content and refusing to rise, hasn't found peace. They've slid into cowardice so gradually they mistake it for moderation.
ReplyDeleteThe good news in that idea is that virtue can be practiced like any craft. No one wakes up brave. We rehearse bravery in small things: correcting a falsehood in conversation, attending one meeting, refusing one small cruelty. Over time, those acts become character. And because human beings are political animals, made to live and flourish together, that practice can't be done alone. A citizen who withdraws from public life to protect their comfort hasn't escaped politics; they've just handed it to whoever is willing to take it. The tyrant counts on that, so the remedy is to become, through repetition, the kind of person who shows up.
What I keep coming back to is the trade: our power to oppose tyranny stolen, and in exchange, a steady supply of distractions. I've seen that trade up close. When you walk into a room demanding what you're owed, the people in charge almost never refuse outright. They offer you something shiny instead. A settlement, a title, a laugh, a seat at the table that doesn't come with a vote. They're betting you'll be charmed or tired enough to accept it and go home. Most people do. "Witless nonsense" isn't an accident; it's compensation paid in a currency that costs them nothing.
ReplyDeleteSo my advice is simple, and it comes from years in the cold where nothing is handed to you: know exactly what you came for and don't leave until you get it. Be polite and be immovable. Learn to tell the difference between something that satisfies you and something that just distracts you. Being entertained is not the same as being made whole. And don't be afraid of being called difficult, because "difficult" is what people call a woman who won't take the consolation prize. You are so right: the moment we stop accepting the "Art of The Deal," or the "Great Whatever Plan," the people making it start to get nervous.
Of all the lines in this piece, the one that disturbs me most is the claim that it has become a "sacrosanct privilege" to be cruel. I have long believed cruelty is the worst of the vices, the one that corrupts all the others, and I've noticed that it rarely announces itself. It arrives through custom. We laugh at a stranger's humiliation because everyone else is laughing, share a cruel post because it's what one does, and call it harmless because it's common. Custom is a gentle tyrant at first, but it gradually takes the throne, and once there, we no longer dare to look it in the face.
ReplyDeleteThe only defense I know is to turn the question inward, as you do so well when you ask, "How do you know?" What do I actually know? Which of my opinions did I reason my way to, and which did I simply absorb? This isn't a recipe for paralysis but for honesty. A person who examines their own habits with candor, who catches themselves enjoying a cruelty and stops, is doing something revolutionary in an age that rewards certainty. We can't reform the world until we stop lying to ourselves, and that work begins privately in the mind, long before anyone else sees it.
The world is drowning in content made quickly, consumed quickly, and forgotten quickly, and I recognize it as the opposite of craftsmanship. In a good workshop, every stitch is checked, every hide is examined for flaws before it's cut, and nothing leaves until it can be trusted to carry a rider safely. That patience isn't just about quality. It's a moral stance. A craftsman refuses to sell a beautiful object that will fail you on the road. Tyranny and its "warm sugary blankets" are shoddy goods: polished on the outside, rotten in the seams, built to look sturdy until the moment you depend on them.
ReplyDeleteI'd suggest that people bring a craftsman's eye to what they believe and what they share. Turn the claim over. Check the stitching. Ask who made it and whether it will hold your weight. And just as important, take pride in making something well yourself: a careful argument, an honest piece of writing, a community built slowly and properly. Fast, cheap things dominate our attention, but things made with care tend to outlast them. Your work is itself an example, carefully made and meant to last. More of that, and the cheap blankets start to look as flimsy as they really are.
How can we mistake a warm sugary blanket for the truth, and the answer begins long before we can read. Many of us were raised under what could be called a poisonous pedagogy: the belief that a child's will must be broken "for their own good," that obedience is love, and that a parent, a pastor, or a teacher can never be wrong. In the home, a child learns that anger is forbidden and that affection depends on compliance. When faith is used as a weapon rather than a comfort, the church adds an all-seeing authority who punishes disobedience and rewards silence. School then completes the training with bells that command the body, permission slips for the bathroom, and grades for the right answer rather than the honest question. None of this is usually done with malice. It is done by adults who were treated the same way and who mistake their own wounds for wisdom.
ReplyDeleteThe result is an adult who feels safe only when someone above them is in control. When a leader arrives who speaks in the voice of the stern parent, promising protection in exchange for submission, it doesn't feel like tyranny; it feels like home. That's why the blanket is so warm: it is the one we were wrapped in as children. But a pattern learned can be unlearned. Adults can begin by looking honestly at what was done to them without idealizing those who did it, because a person who can acknowledge their own childhood pain no longer needs to pass it on or seek it out in a ruler. And we can raise the next generation differently: explaining instead of commanding, letting children say no, welcoming their questions in the home, the sanctuary, and the classroom. A child who is respected becomes an adult who cannot easily be made to kneel.
With respect to your idol and you, this argument has the story exactly backward. Look at history's actual totalitarian regimes. The Soviets, the Maoists, and the Jacobins before them didn't build their power on strong families and full churches. They went to war against both. They mocked parents as backward, emptied the pews, encouraged children to report on their mothers and fathers, and handed the young to the state to be raised by experts. They understood something the critics of "poisonous pedagogy" miss: the family, the congregation, and the local school are what Burke called the little platoons of society. They're the institutions that stand between the lone individual and the all-powerful state. Break them down and you don't get a free person. You get an isolated one, with nowhere to turn but the government.
DeleteNor is teaching a child obedience the same as teaching servility. A child who learns to honor his parents, keep his word, and submit to God learns that there is an authority higher than any president or bureaucrat. That is why believers have so often been the first to defy tyrants: when Caesar demands what belongs to God, the faithful man has a place to stand and say no. Discipline isn't the enemy of freedom; it's the precondition for it. Self-government starts with governing yourself, and no one learns that in a home without rules. The real danger to our children today isn't the strict father or the Sunday school teacher. It's distant institutions: bureaucracies, credentialed experts, tech platforms, and centralized curricula that tell parents to step aside and trust them instead. If the you want to know who is truly breeding conformity, look up the chain of power, not down at the kitchen table.
You are right to reject the easy grace that society so often hurries to offer. Most of the great wrongs of history were committed not by monsters but by ordinary people who simply stopped thinking: functionaries who followed orders, signed forms, and told themselves they were not responsible because they were only a small part of a large machine. This thoughtlessness is the true soil of tyranny. Forgiveness offered too quickly fertilizes it. It tells the doer that the act was not really theirs, that the harm can be erased without being understood, and that the machine may continue running. A person cannot be forgiven for something they refuse to see they have done. In a meaningful sense, we cannot forgive what we are unwilling to hold accountable.
ReplyDeleteThe remedy, then, is judgment, which the powerful would like us to believe is arrogant or unkind. It is neither. It is the restoration of personal responsibility in a world that hides behind systems. Each person who participates in wrongdoing must be brought to face their own part in it plainly, without the shelter of "everyone was doing it" or "I was told to." There is no collective guilt that dissolves the individual's share, and no adult who obeys is merely obeying; in public matters, obedience is support. Accountability means naming the act, requiring the doer to understand its consequences, and offering a real path to repair. When someone refuses that path, consequences must follow through lawful means — courts, the loss of office, the withdrawal of public trust — not out of vengeance, but because a community that lets refusal go unanswered teaches everyone watching that conscience is optional. Only after accountability can forgiveness mean anything at all.
Who and what are we really fighting for? Here is part of the answer: often we fight for whoever keeps our oldest wound open. There is a sickness that comes from too much history: the past chewed over and over until it is the only food a people knows. A group that closes in on itself and returns to the same ancient grievance in every conversation has made its injury into its identity. And a people who define themselves by what was done to them are ripe for a master. Resentment is a powerful fuel, and someone always arrives offering to direct it, promising revenge and restoration in exchange for unquestioning loyalty. Every demagogue who has ever risen to power has been, at heart, a curator of grudges, keeping the museum of old injuries open day and night so that no one leaves to build anything new.
ReplyDeleteStrong individuals and healthy peoples treat history differently. They remember what is necessary, judge the past honestly so that its lessons serve the living, and then they do something remarkable: they set it down. A kind of active forgetting is not denial; it is the freedom to act without being chained to yesterday. A closed group that refuses fresh voices and new questions loses this freedom entirely, because every new idea must first be checked against the old wound and every outsider is treated as a fresh enemy. Independence dies there, not by conquest but by self-imprisonment. The way out is to look forward and create new values, new bonds, and new purposes worth living for. Her call to rise is, in this light, a call to stop guarding the grave of the past and start building the future.
I’ve been sitting with your reply for a couple of days, especially the part about false comity working by appearing to compliment rationality and evoking kitchen-table civility. That’s exactly how it works, and it’s why it’s so hard to see. Nobody walks into the room announcing they’re there to shut down reason. They walk in praising it. They tell you you’re smart, you’re reasonable, you’re one of the sensible ones, and then they ask you to be sensible enough to stop asking the question that matters. The compliment is the leash.
ReplyDeleteI learned this the slow way. Years ago, a group of us were fighting a development that would have drained a canyon creek I’d known since I was young. The meetings were always friendly. Coffee, pastries, first names, everyone agreeing that we all loved this land. The developers said “common ground” so often it started to sound like a prayer. It took me too long to notice that every time someone raised the water rights, the room got warmer and the conversation moved on. The friendliness wasn’t the opposite of the fight. It was how they were winning it. The creek is a trickle now, and I still think about how pleasant those meetings were.
What you call thought-terminating clichés are the pastries on that table. “We all want the same thing.” “Let’s not make this political.” “Common sense says.” Each one sounds like a door opening, but each one closes something. You’re right that the people who use them most are often the ones with the most to protect: the “swamp-draining” millionaires and billionaires who speak the language of the kitchen table but have never had to worry about what’s on it.
I don’t think the answer is to become rude or to stop believing in civility. Real civility matters. But real civility can bear a hard question; false comity can’t. So maybe that’s the test: if the warmth in the room disappears the moment you ask what’s really at stake, it was never warmth to begin with. Thank you for putting it so plainly. It’s the kind of thing I wish I’d understood forty years ago.
Madam, I have read and reread your words: that if war is the best and only answer, then we have ceded our reason for arms, as if we are gentlemen who invoke irrational bloodthirst as a point of honor. I have stood in the pews of St. John’s more times than I can count, speaking words written for a moment when every peaceful remedy had been tried and spurned. Your reply reminded me of something the schoolchildren rarely hear: those men did not rush to arms. They petitioned, remonstrated, supplicated, and argued for ten long years before a single musket was raised. The war came at the end of reason’s labors, not in place of them.
ReplyDeleteThat is the distinction you have drawn so precisely, and it is the one our age has forgotten. There is a breed of man today, at podiums, on screens, and in the comment threads of this very blog, who speaks of war as though it were the first proof of courage rather than the last resort of a people denied every other remedy. He calls it strength. He calls it honor. But a man who reaches for the sword before he has reached for his reason has not shown courage; he has shown that he never trusted his reason to begin with. The patriots of 1775 feared tyranny precisely because tyranny answers every grievance with force. A free people who answer every broken trust the same way have learned the tyrant’s lesson and called it liberty.
I think of the exchange on this page with the gentleman who speaks of keeping us safe, and the other who says war comes to people whether they will it or not. There is truth in both, and you have not denied it. Trust once broken may indeed demand a defense. But a defense of what? If we defend our liberty by abandoning the reasoning that made us free, by deciding that blood alone settles every question, then we have preserved the shell of the republic while surrendering its soul. Arms in the hands of a reasoning people are a guardian. Arms in the hands of a people who have stopped reasoning are only a threat, and most often a threat to themselves.
So let me answer your words with an old cadence, amended for our time. Let others boast of their appetite for war; I will honor those with the patience to exhaust every peaceful means and the courage to take up arms only when nothing else remains, and then with sorrow rather than swagger. Give me liberty governed by reason, or give me nothing that deserves the name. Thank you, madam, for reminding this man what those words were truly for.
Now is not the time to be pacified. (It never was and it never will be.) I keep coming back to that parenthetical. It’s the quietest line on the page and the most damning. Every age believes it’s the exception, the one moment when the rest of us need to stay calm, be patient, wait for the grown-ups to sort it out. And every age is wrong in exactly the same way.
ReplyDeleteFalse comity, common sense, safety, belonging: you’ve taken every warm word on the shelf and turned it over to read the label. Most people never check. You check every single one. :hugs: back across the ocean.
I read your reply to PeripateticPhilosopher about performers who loudly leave their homes to escape, and I’ll be honest: I recognized myself, and it stung. I’m one of those people. I sold the house, did a couple of interviews about how I couldn’t raise my daughter in that climate, and moved to a village where nobody knows my face. I told myself it was a principled stand. Reading your words, I’m not so sure.
ReplyDeleteHere’s my defense, for what it’s worth. I was afraid. Not of tanks in the street, but of what I was becoming: angry all the time, glued to my phone, snapping at my kid. Leaving felt like the only way to stop being poisoned. I think a lot of people who left feel that way. We weren’t abandoning the fight so much as admitting we were losing ourselves in it.
But you’re right that it’s a privilege most people don’t have. The families on my old street who couldn’t afford to leave are still there, still living with everything I ran from. My leaving didn’t make anything better for them. It made things better for me. That’s the uncomfortable truth, and you named it.
So I’ve been trying to do something about it from here. I give to legal aid funds, I vote absentee in every election, and I call my old representatives, which is a strange thing to do from the edge of the Atlantic. It isn’t the same as staying, and I won’t pretend it is. But maybe leaving doesn’t have to mean walking away. I’m still figuring out what citizenship means from four thousand miles off.
Thank you for not letting people like me off the hook. I needed to hear it, even if I’d rather not have.
From one broken record to another, indeed. I’ll accept the label gladly. I spent thirty years repeating the same principles to people who didn’t want to hear them: the law applies to everyone, power must explain itself, and no one is above review. Repetition isn’t a weakness when the truth hasn’t changed. It’s only tedious to those who were hoping you’d tire out.
ReplyDeleteAs for misty fantasism, guilty as charged. I do occasionally imagine a country that lives up to its founding documents. But I’ve noticed that you, for all your sharp edges, imagine something too. Otherwise you wouldn’t bother writing. Cynics don’t keep blogs. Believers who’ve been disappointed do.
Since your reply, I’ve been noticing the hyper-local bullies everywhere, which I suppose was the point. Last week at the library a man berated a young clerk for ten minutes over a display of banned books. Nobody said anything, including me for the first eight minutes. Then I did. It wasn’t eloquent. I think I said, “That’s enough, sir.” He left. The clerk thanked me, and I went home feeling ashamed it had taken me eight minutes.
ReplyDeleteYou asked who would want to police everybody, everywhere. You’re right that we shouldn’t want to. But there’s a difference between policing and witnessing. Nobody needs to be a cop. We just need more people willing to be the second voice in the room, the one who makes the bully realize he isn’t speaking for everyone.
I read your reply about hyper-local bullies three times, and the third time I stopped laughing, because you’re right, and it isn’t funny. Well, it’s a little funny. It’s funny the way a man slipping on a banana peel is funny right up until you realize he’s your uncle and he’s hurt.
ReplyDeleteLet me tell you about John. Every town has a John. My John runs the parking committee. John has decided, by divine right apparently, that a caregiver can’t park in the visitor spot for more than two hours, so twice a week this woman, who is keeping others alive, by the way, has to go out and move her car like it’s a game of musical chairs designed by Satan. John isn’t a dictator. John doesn’t have an army. John has a laminated sign and a tow company on speed dial, and that’s enough. That’s the whole point you made! Who’s going to police everybody, everywhere? Nobody, except for the Johns! So the Johns of the world get to be little kings in parks and parking lots and church basements, because the rest of us are too tired to fight over a parking spot.
And here’s the part of your reply that really got me: they’re cut from the same cloth. The guy screaming at the library board about a picture book and the guy on TV screaming about the enemy within are running the same play. Fear, grievance, a little bit of power, and nobody willing to say “sit down.” The national bullies get the headlines, but the local ones are the farm team. That’s where people learn that bullying works. You let John win over a parking spot, you’ve basically trained a whole town that yelling louder beats being right.
So what do we do? I hate it when people ask me that, because I’m not God. But I think it’s what you’ve been saying all along. Show up. Be the annoying one at the meeting. When John starts in, don’t roll your eyes and go home. Say, out loud, “John, that isn’t how this works.” And then do it again next month, because John will be back. John is always back. The only thing more persistent than a bully is somebody who’s decided they’re done being bullied. Be that person. I’m trying to be.