Between the Lines VIII: Mesmerism and forgiveness
“We now seem to be in another period of turmoil. Pax Americana, which lasted from the end of [World War II] to, I would say, 9/11…seems to be over. Every time a dominant power loses its grip, there is turmoil and chaos. And we are seeing really the return of that, and it feels to me like the [19]30s.” Margaret Atwood, author of The Handmaid’s Tale
As readers can probably tell by now, Holy War is a novel of twenty-first-century events and people, set in the 1990s. The challenges and lessons David Darke and Tamar Tsmindashvili are facing and learning from, parallel those we face and, hopefully, are learning from today.
In this morning’s Between the Lines, I’d like to focus on a couple of points raised in Holy War that are applicable to our present-day world.
Evil works through mesmerism
Americans are mesmerized by Donald Trump, just as they are, in Holy War, by Jonah Meek. It doesn’t matter if people see him as a positive force or a negative one, if they’re obsessed with him, they’re mesmerized. David is trying to help people break free from the mesmerism of his era, and the Davids of today – the truth-tellers in the media and elsewhere – are trying to do the same. We are also faced with two big wars, in Ukraine and Palestine, that have mesmerized people.
Merriam-Webster’s online dictionary defines mesmerism as “Hypnotic induction held to involve animal magnetism; hypnotic appeal.” No one wants to be hypnotized against their will, but when a public figure or event grips mass thought and makes people think or do things they wouldn’t normally think or do, they are being mesmerized, and that’s how we need to see the situation if we’re going to combat evil successfully. [Please note that, for the purpose of this column, I am not making a judgment on Trump, or taking sides in any of the conflicts. I am making a judgment on the state of mass thought coalescing around the person and the wars. The spell needs to be broken for us all to move on.]
The future of humanity has less to do with politics, armies, or groups of any kind than with where humanity’s thought is going and how successful we are at defending our thinking from manipulation. It’s a mental world that drives the physical, not the other way around. Harmful thoughts make a home with those who see advantage in doing harm and then quietly scatter and plant themselves in cruel or naïve minds, where they are nurtured by the selfishness, greed, hate and fear into which the human mind all too easily falls, until they are ready to bloom in lies, corruption or full-on mayhem. Are we content to let ourselves be used like that?
Weed the garden. Even the tiniest sprout of hate or whatever is pulling us down needs to be ripped out. The enemy is not a person or a government or a group. The enemy is the malicious thoughts that come to all of us, often prompted by malicious actors. Don’t give these thoughts a place to sprout. No one is naturally hateful or dishonest. No one is naturally hazy in their thinking. Being mentally drunk is not a normal state. When we can detect and master mental attacks and find peace, the world will be closer to peace, too.
This process of mental gardening helps defend the world from evil because it strips evil from agency on a practical level, and it does so more effectively than all the fulminations about evil people and groups that are flooding social media, college campuses and the streets of the world right now.
This is not to say there are not people out there who are determined to do evil for the sake of power or money or some other misguided goal. Indeed there are. The worst of them are the people who try to mesmerize you and tell you they are actually doing good, or that you have no choice and just need to accept reality and let evil run its course. These people love to divide and conquer. Don’t let them. The hate and fear we may feel are not ours. Focus on practicing the moral law. There’s much beyond moral law – there’s a whole world of spiritual law to understand and practice – but morality is a good place to start. The progress we make is then made for the entire world, and a little more confidence, a little more grace, is entered into the human condition.
Forgiveness can start the ball rolling
David Darke’s latest column in Holy War about the need for forgiveness toward Russia and the Soviet Union (chapter 40) is actually very timely – it’s prophetic journalism, after all! In his world and ours, there are people who are doing immense harm. In fomenting hatred, promoting lies, sponsoring murder, they have their own large constituencies. But these people and their actions are not causes. They are reactions against goodness planting itself in human consciousness, and they are symptoms of something larger, too, namely, a society fallen asleep. What we need in response is not outrage or revenge. We need forgiveness.
It’s one thing to forgive your neighbor who lets his dog run loose and trample your flowers, or your spouse who never, ever, cleans up their messes. (My wife has a lot of patience.) It’s another thing, and harder, to forgive in the context of world affairs. How do you forgive the head of a country whose army is killing thousands of innocent people? How do you forgive those who kill for the sole purpose of instilling terror and provoking revenge? How do you forgive someone whose life is built on dishonesty and who now wants to make his confusion the policy of an entire nation?
You do it by proving a different law in your own life. Bring more integrity, generosity, peace into the world where you can, even just in increments. Defend the most valuable thing in the world by defending your mind from evil. It will enable you to see where your talents can be put to best use in helping bring the world out of hell. Then let God handle what’s left. Jesus didn’t try to forgive those who were attempting to kill him. He let God do that (“Father, forgive them, for they know not what they do.”). He was too busy proving that life isn’t at the mercy of evil.
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