Being bitter is like drinking poison and expecting the other person to die.
These days, my essays are focused on this cancerous spread of spiritual illness that’s infecting society.
We’ve lost the ability to see our fellow human beings as human beings. We spiritually disown people who don’t agree with our politics, who see the world differently, and who may have said the ‘wrong thing’ a few times.
What’s worse, all of this hate is manufactured.
You, most people, aren’t really filled with hate but when they engage with these forces that manufacture hate, they become hateful.
I can spot hoaxes and manufactured outrage immediately. It’s such a remedial playbook that so many people fall for over and over again.
I want you guys to all stop falling for this shit.
It’s an uphill losing battle, but I have this masochistic need to engage in it, so here we go.
You Guys Aren’t as Different As You Think
I have hardcore MAGA folks who love my writing. I have LGBTQ followers. My readers cross every political spectrum, gender, sexual orientation, religion, ethnicity, nationality, whatever.
How could this be?
I talk about the things that unify us.
Human beings are simple:
- We want respect, admiration, praise, and status
- We want to find someone who loves us and who we can spend our lives with
- While we all don’t want to be mega-rich, we want financial flexibility and to avoid stress over money
- We want to move away from pain and toward pleasure
- We want acceptance, which is one of the main reasons we’re having so many problems today with tribalism
The only difference is a handful of hot-button emotionally charged issues.
Instead of focusing on the things we have in common, the media amplifies these issues, forces us to focus on them, and drives a wedge between us by making the ‘other side’ seem like evil human beings.
Cancel me if you want, there’s nothing wrong with voting for Trump. I know a lot of Trump supporters and they’re not closet klan members.
There’s nothing wrong with being a Democrat. I disagree with a lot of wokeness, but I don’t hate woke people. I think some of them are misguided in their thinking, but I understand that demonizing someone doesn’t change their minds.
Who am I to throw stones from a glass house?
I can see both sides of the abortion debate, gun control, immigration, whatever it may be. I understand how people can come to different conclusions about those issues without thinking they’re bad people.
If me saying that makes you feel angry, maybe you’re the problem, not me.
The Outrage Manufacturing Playbook at Work
So there’s a new hot-button debate about Ariel being black.
Or, is there?
If you go online, it seems like there’s this huge raucous about a black actress being cast as a mermaid. Just another example of white supremacy!
In reality, nobody actually gives a fuck about a black mermaid. We got bills and shit.
This is a rhetorical trick people fall for over and over again. There are 365 million people in America. The law of large numbers leads to the conclusion that there’s going to be a handful of racist people who don’t like black Ariel. All you have to do is compile a handful of examples and make it seem like it’s a huge problem when it’s not.
They run this play over and over again. They take the fringes of each side and use them to judge the entire side. For a society that says we want to move past stereotyping, we seem to have no problem doing it to our political enemies.
I used to get riled up about looking at Libs of Tiktok — this Twitter account that posts TikToks the most insane and mentally deranged examples of leftists. I realized most of the leftists I knew in real life weren’t like that at all.
Divide and conquer. That’s the strategy.
If you want to get political about it, I’ll tell you why they’re doing it. We don’t have a race issue in society. We have a class issue in society. The gap between the rich and poor is wider than it’s ever been, and a lot of the gap comes from the fact that rich people are rigging the game,
Most people agree, but they only point to the other side. Trust me, both sides are picking your pockets.
If you want to be mad, don’t look left or right, look up.
Hate is Turning Us Ugly And Separating Us From People We Need
It makes me sad to see now how so many human beings are making massive sweeping generalizations about other human beings.
Take men and women.
These days, it feels like a crime just to be a male who breathes air. I go online to read articles and it’s just a constant barrage of posts reminding me how I’m not shit just because I’m a man. Or how I’m responsible for the actions of other men and it’s my job to police all of them. Or how having anything resembling something close to a traditional view of the world makes me a misogynist, sexist, toxic, dangerous person.
On the flip side, a lot of guys have deeply negative views about women. They think that every woman is a slut, gold-digger, hypergamous, untrustworthy, emotionally unstable bitch. They want to sleep with women, but they don’t actually like them. Dudes who would do fine with dating if they just acted normal can’t get a date because their mind is warped by red pill bullshit.
Now there’s a large group of men and women who are fed up with dating and totally opting out of it. People are lonelier than ever and their heels are dug in. Men and women need each other. Cancel me if you want, but they are different. We compliment each other.
That’s one of the more obvious examples but just think about all the others.
Take racism. I just want society to be equal, but now it seems like the pendulum has switched to the point you now have a green light to say anything you want about white people. I see phrases like “mediocre white man” tossed around as if that’s not a hateful thing to say. Imagine if someone talked about “mediocre black women.” There would be a shit storm.
My rule of thumb is don’t say anything about anyone you couldn’t say about everyone.
It’s time for all of us to stop finger-pointing at others and look within.
Take responsibility for yourself. Hold yourself accountable. If you want your romantic life to improve, become the type of person someone would want to date. If you want people to treat you well, treat others well. Instead of making your fellow humans out to be your enemies, understand that you are your worst enemy and fix your self-sabotage.
We ALL Need to Work on This
I’m working on this myself, too.
I have biases.
I have a large disdain for woke ideology. I’ve picked on them because they seem to hate people who disagree with them, so it perplexes me when they claim to be tolerant.
But I don’t want my disagreements with them to make me hateful in turn. I used to hate-read articles from people I disagreed with. How stupid. I used to get into these long debates with people trying to convince them to join my way of thinking — no more.
I have a firm set of beliefs. There are ideologies I disagree with. But that doesn’t mean I have to be a dick.
When I’m out and about in public, I smile, look people in the eye, chat with them, and try to make their days a little brighter regardless of who they are, what they look like, or who I suspect they voted for.
I’m constantly trying to reanalyze my views and change them when new evidence comes in. It’s hard. It’s hard because I want to believe I’m right about everything. That’s how we all are.
That’s how you are.
Here’s my challenge for you.
Work on trying to understand where people are coming from even if you disagree with them. You won’t want to but try. Consider what your hatred for others has done to you. Ask yourself if you want to spend your life holding onto deeply negative feelings about anyone, especially people you’ve never even met.
Maybe, you know, actually, try having a conversation with someone who doesn’t align perfectly with your views. Do it without trying to one-up them or catch them in a gotcha moment. The key to becoming open-minded is to understand that, by default, you are close-minded.
It doesn’t have to be this way. You don’t have to be this way.
Aren’t you tired, my friend?
I know you want to stop, so just stop.