Change conservative to liberal and the statement is every bit as accurate.
No matter how you cut it, no matter how you layout the information, the argument is always us against them. The others are wrong, misguided, stupid. The battle is never one of inclusion, it's always exclusion, it's always blame, it's always the belief that everything is screwed up because of those others.
That thought process allows us to take action that we know to be fundamentally wrong. We convince ourselves that the ends justify the means, that we're doing it for the greater good, that we're fighting fire with fire.
It's all the same shit moonie, just a different wrapper.
I appreciate you taking the time to make your point of view known to me. Over the years I have tried to describe the disease I believe infects the human race, the problem of dualistic thinking, the appearance in our thought of a capacity to compare and contrast things, thing that are only concepts and have no existence in reality. This all arises our of thought, thinking abstractly, a capacity we have because we name things with language. The human psyche is is split, divided against itself because we invented the notion of good and evil and applied it to ourselves. Before language there was only the timeless oneness of being, every moment lived in the present, no fantastical thought of some evil haunting the world we had to work against to save ourselves. We could not tell yourselves stories, identify our selves by external concepts. We could feel pain and loss but we could not blame ourselves or others. This is the world to which the enlightened return, to the joy of natural being, where one is the Alpha and Omega, the source and creator of all things the endless outpouring of love for all things, our original state and the inheritance we were due at birth.
Once the notion of good and evil exist and the belief that goes with them that they exist, words can be used to destroy this natural inborn self respect that should have blossomed. Instead of an integrated sense of self and the joy of being, we learn shame and self abnegation, we learn we are evil and full of guilt, a state of mind no child can consciously bear. So it all gets repressed and replaced by an ego, an identification with whatever it is we are taught is sacred. Openness to love is shut down and replaced by rage at its theft, endless smoldering or violently expressed hate.
As I see it, two things can happen at that point. In order to survive the pain we create an ego, a false self or front that we tell ourselves our story by. I am good because I conform to the rules of those who destroyed me, or I am good because I fight for the victims of hideous oppression. And now we have both sides. We can call them conservatives and liberals.
We have the monsters and the monster fighters and which is which is based solely on the opinions created by personal ego identification.
So you are right:
"The battle is never one of inclusion, it's always exclusion, it's always blame, it's always the belief that everything is screwed up because of those others.
That thought process allows us to take action that we know to be fundamentally wrong. We convince ourselves that the ends justify the means, that we're doing it for the greater good, that we're fighting fire with fire."
But when you say we know it is wrong, that is not a conscious awareness. We know it is wrong only at a deeply buried level where our true selves faintly remember the unity we were once heirs to. And this is not a truth that can condemn. We are asleep and can't be held accountable for doing what is fundamentally wrong. You can't blame programmed machines.
What I try to do is to show the programming for what it is where I see it for those who I feel suffer from it in the hope that something may click as it once did for me.
When you see that all your sacred cows are a joke, when the emotional loss is suffered, the laughter starts.
There is only one side. The perp and the victim are one and the same. Opposites resolve at a higher level of understanding. There is only love. The war isn't out there it's within. We are the source of division because we are divided within. Not both sides, inside, that's where the war is to be fought. It's what Jihad is really about if I am not mistaken.
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