Destructive Gentleness

 

DESTRUCTIVE GENTLENESS

So practical and understandable, the building of armies, the toughening of the children.

How inept, weak, and incompetent I feel in comparison to the guys who are tough, the professionals who are accomplished, the heroes who have survived.

Is their path superior?  Is it the better path to study martial arts, to prioritize toughness and combat skills?

Does gentleness have a place anywhere?

Is gentleness counterproductive? 

Is gentleness destructive?

Is gentleness so impractical, so irrelevant, so pointless that we would be better off relegating it to a wish-list but not wasting precious life on trying to practice it, unless with our own children in the safety of our well defended home?

We live in a world of walls.

We  surround ourselves with walls out of necessity.

How appealing it is, that image of security and privacy!

How imprisoning that is, that image of security and privacy.

What place gentleness and vulnerability in this world?

Gentleness and vulnerability appear only in brief flashes in scriptures and texts, and are for the most part carefully avoided in creeds and dogma.

We, of whatever religion, recite our beliefs, claiming we believe in this or that and such or the other, delightful intellectual constructs for our minds.  But seldom do our recitals of beliefs about theology and eschatology or our mantras of methods for enlightenment and transcendence invoke the word “gentleness”.

Our media, our sports, and our heroes hardly hammer home admonitions to practice gentleness.

For a politician “gentleness” might be misinterpreted as weakness.

Gentleness is far too impractical, and mainly, far too dangerous, to ever survive as a political position or religious dictate, much less as a way of life.

So, the world continues as it always has, practical and pragmatic, violent and tragic.

Those we would follow, cheer, and vote for must have big muscles or expansive egos, not big hearts and expansive souls.

Gentleness remains unencouraged and unnoticed. 

Yet we are always grateful when we are the recipient of it.  Its salt in the cauldron of humanity keeps the world from devolving into even worse violence and brutality.  With no rewards for it, no hall-of-fame for it, no high titles for it, and no job openings for it, gentleness avoids spotlights and awards - quietly laying its foundations for lives and growth and healing in even the midst of the clash and combat of this world, gentleness quietly revealing the real meaning of strength and courage.

 Copyright 2025 Don Ray.  Please share.

Digitally Fractured Beliefs

 

DIGITALLY FRACTURED BELIEFS

Only belief unites people, for going to war or for civic projects.  It is only belief, ungrounded - arbitrary - unsubstantiated shared belief.

Belief, and only belief, gets an army to march, the members to pledge, a populace to serve. 

Belief driven societies underlie all of human history. 

Shattering of shared belief underlies today’s fractured political landscape. 

In hindsight the unravelling of nations and civilization by the internet was quite predictable because the internet and fractured media facilitated the shattering of shared belief.

The collapse of a unified belief system, neighbors holding different beliefs, family members holding conflicting faiths, this is exponentially amplified by today’s diverse digital media environment.

I no longer need to behave like you.  Unseen influencers in Moscow or Austin can shape my behavior, and your behavior.  Even your family need not worship as you do.  A media multitude will tell them they need not worship at all.

The great clashes of civilizations are simply clashes of beliefs, beliefs that conveniently justified the raping and pillaging that reside in our dark souls.  The belief could be in a king or prophet or political system, as long as it was a shared belief.  .  

For millennia, family and society defined our beliefs.  Now we can believe whatever we want, with affirmation from people all over the world.  It is a heady feeling, a disorienting feeling, inducing a spiritual vertigo.  It is liberating, one would think.  Yet instead, it is more fearful than liberating, because we are exposed to so many people, people near and far, who do not share our beliefs and even threaten our beliefs.

This is new for humanity.  Our beliefs are ultimately our identity.  Contradictory beliefs in such close proximity are a threat to the core essence of our being.  

Historically humanity accommodates a sudden exposure to conflicting beliefs by invoking violence, cataclysm, and terror on the infidels, heathens, and gentiles.  But this time the differing beliefs are not across a border, not conveniently wearing a uniform, not even demonstrating the courtesy of self-identifying with a different skin color or facial structure.  

This is existential conflict of beliefs, beliefs identified only by channels watched and newsfeeds subscribed.  

Differing beliefs can coexist if there is some shared overarching belief subsuming the divergent beliefs, or if the differing belief is entertained by such a small cross section of population as to not pose a threat.  On Sunday mornings it was OK to drive past those other churches that were not really that different from ours.  It was OK to tolerate some minority opinions and ethnic groups when all were under an umbrella of shared patriotism and faith in a political system.  But remove the umbrella of overarching belief, partition a subcontinent or dissolve an authoritarian Balkan country, and the next lower level of beliefs  come to the fore, beliefs now in conflict.  The people that have always been in that other house of worship now seem threatening.  

In the United States and western Europe, the overarching blanket of beliefs is being stripped away, not by imposition of new borders or eradication of central governments, but by profitable exploitation of fears and ignorance.  Nothing has changed, but you and I now believe completely contradictory claims.

Shatter beliefs and shatter a nation, fragment beliefs and destroy a civilization.

When my neighbor shares almost none of my beliefs, it takes little provocation,  a provocation based on fervently held belief, for my neighbor to become a threat.

That is the world (dis)order of the internet, repeating the lessons of history but now worldwide, a history driven in its triumphs and tragedies by beliefs, beliefs now dispersed and mixed and scattered and stirred, terrifying diversity right next door,  even in our own living room, history waiting, waiting, to see if humanity will find any belief in common, anything overarching, some belief to share and unite, before the digital media incited conflicting beliefs turn our own neighborhood into the 1861 U.S., 1919 Russia, 1935 China, 1947 India, 1965 Indonesia, 1992 Balkans, 2024 Ukraine, 2025 Palestine…….

Copyright 2025 Don Ray.  Please share.