Why can't we all just get along??

We become what we hate. The very act of hating something draws it to us. Since our hate is usually a direct response to an evil done to us, our hate almost invariably causes us to respond in the terms already laid down by the enemy. Unaware of what is happening, we turn into the very thing we oppose.

The alcoholic who tries to “resist evil” quickly discovers that the very attempt to conquer the compulsion by main force is futile.

“The more a tragic conflict is prolonged, the more likely it is to culminate in a violent mimesis,” writes Rene Girard; “the resemblance between the combatants grows ever stronger until each presents a mirror image of the other.” With what visage, then, did the United States emerge “victorious” from forcible resistance to Hitler’s evil? We have adopted a permanent war economy and a militarized conception of national security. We see it as our duty to police the “free” world, and we fund a huge army staffed, if necessary, through involuntary conscription. We have created an invisible apparatus of surveillance and espionage that seems incapable of distinguished patriotic protest from sedition, is unaccountable to public authorities, and inaugurates wars without consent of the Congress. We have increasingly come to rely on military intervention instead of diplomacy, force rather than negotiations. We are one of the major purveyors of armaments to nations all over the globe, many of whom purchase weapons at the cost of the welfare of their own people and the destabilization of their own regions.

We have, in short, granted Hitler a degree of victory by adopting elements of the ethos and mentality of Nazism.

… In overcoming the enemy, one tends to swallow not only his better qualities, but also the worst, and to become like the vanquished through victory.

William Irwin Thompson comments … “Japan is now Los Angeles and Detroit, and Big Sur, California, is a Zen Mountain Center. Germany is now a consumer society, and we are the largest militarist state in the history of the world. We have become our enemy.”

Jews emerged from the nightmare of Hitlerism and the Holocaust crying “Never again!” and are now treating Palestinians brutally. Torture and massive overreaction to legitimate protests grow in their inhumanity.

The tragedy of the Holocaust is indelibly ingrained in our consciousness. Contemporary Jewish theology helps us come to grips with our suffering; it hardly recognizes that today we are powerful. It holds in tension Holocaust and our need for empowerment. Consequently it speaks eloquently for the victims of Treblinka and Auschwitz yet can ignore Sabra and Shatila [the sites of massacres in Lebanon at least consented to by Israeli armed forces]. It pays tribute to the Warsaw ghetto uprising but has not place for the uprising of ghetto dwellers on the other side of Israeli power. Jewish theologians insist that the torture and murder of Jewish children be lamented and commemorated in Jewish ritual and belief. They have yet to imagine the possibility that Jews have in turn tortured and murdered Palestinian children. Holocaust theology relates the story of the Jewish people in its beauty and suffering. It fails to understand the contemporary history of the Palestinian people as integral to our own. Thus, this theology articulated who we were but no longer helps us understand who we have become.

Why do prisons fail to rehabilitate criminals? Because, says Mark Mason, who has been there, the criminal justice system does everything possible to socialize prisoners into the ethos of penitentiary life. The prisoner is taught, by the guards, administration, and other inmates, how a criminal walks, talks, breathes, looks, reacts. Prison strips a person of a sense of self and conditions one to act like a criminal in order to fit into the group. Consequently, as high as eighty percent of released convicts return to prison. Having developed a “criminal self,” having identified with the criminal life and criminal population, most find that they cannot live a life apart. The criminal justice system not only is a school for crime; it actually molds people’s souls into the very identity prisons are supposed to make them renounce. Having become alienated from their true selves, they can live nowhere else than in this hellish circle of the damned who have nothing left but a collective negative identity.

The ancient pattern of violent resistance being transformed into its opposite governs collective life from the nation to the family. We are addicted to violence, and the irony is that this addiction is as prevalent on the left as on the right.

The radical left fringe of the anti-Vietnam War movement, for example, correctly identified the evil our government was doing in Asia and adopted the same violent means to oppose it. Nor was that all; they became the actual image of what they hated. Like the Powers they opposed, they became secretive (as terrorists must). This forced them to abandon all attempts to build a popular political base, so they became increasingly elitist, an oligarchy that “knew what was the best for the rest of us.” To counter Messianic American imperialism they became Messianists in turn who would impose their good on others. Here, as so often, the thesis lived on in the antithesis.

We have played out the principle of mimetic counter-resistance even in our relationship with nature. By 1950 many scientists recognized that DDT was toxic to a wide number of species, but we were already “hooked” into its use. For while malarial mosquitoes were becoming increasingly immune to DDT, discontinuing its application was not an easy matter because the DDT had virtually exterminated the other species that fed on the mosquitoes. By 1980, forty-three types of malaria-bearing mosquitoes had become resistant to the leading insecticides. As a consequence, the incident of malaria in some countries has increased a hundredfold in the last fifteen years. One response has been simply to increase the toxicity level of pesticides being sprayed, in a bizarre parody of Cold War politics. Violent reaction has become a reflexive twitch that threatens the very ecosystem itself.

Western allopathic medicine plays out the same total-war scenario. Prevention through diet, meditation, stress reduction, and exercise has until very recently been almost totally ignored by doctors in favor of “fighting” disease by ingesting highly poisonous chemicals that are deadly not only to harmful agents but to helpful ones as well.