Can we go from “come at me bro” to “come with me, bro”.
Marcus Aurelius is blowing my goddamn mind, and I couldn’t beat him in a fight.
My background is violence. I grew up a victim of violence. I became an instrument of violence. Now I’m striving to be a diffuser of violence.
Most of my life has been spent avoiding violence or planning violence. Every time I enter a restaurant, I find the doors. I find the kitchen. I know where the knives are.
My worldview was solidified when the military threw me into combat. It was solidified when my partner was abusing substances. If I had a problem in life, the solution was always to hurt ‘them’ faster than they could hurt me. I won almost every time. Despite this, I wasn’t happy. I was scared and angry.
My entire personality, apparently
After years of attacking the world and collecting wealth, I retired. This ripped the fight out of me. Suddenly the only enemies available to me were concepts, not people. My solution was to get angrier, but the only potential targets were my spouse and dog. Clearly they don’t deserve my wrath, so I bottled up and looked for help. Solace was found when my partner threw Meditations at me; a book written almost 2000 years ago by the emperor of Rome. This bastard, Marcus Aurelius, completely destroyed my worldview with one paragraph.
“Kindness is unconquerable, so long as it is without flattery or hypocrisy. For what can the most insolent man do to you, if you contrive to be kind to him, and if you have the chance gently advise and calmly show him what is right…and point this out tactfully and from a universal perspective. But you must not do this with sarcasm or reproach, but lovingly and without anger in your soul.”
I’m fortunate enough to have a friend who embodies this ethos. Despite almost launching myself at a neo-nazi, he had the patience to bear my rage until I understood his point. Potentially killing a single asshole would not measurably improve the world. It would just take me out of the fight until my jail sentence ended. Instead my friend wanted help creating a world where people don’t want to be nazis. Despite the fact that he doesn’t embody military masculinity, my friend defeated me with reason and compassion.
We think we’re strongest when we’re big, scary, violent. But the Emperor of one of the strongest empires figured out 2,000 years ago that we’re strongest when we’re compassionate.
The mindset I had before was “look for the threat”. Find every angle of attack, and protect against it. But by shifting to a mindset of compassion, my strategy now is “look for the fear”. Almost every dangerous bastard is afraid of something. The neo-nazi in question? He’s TERRIFIED of an abstract concept of ‘the Jews’. But that’s just an excuse, a scapegoat. What he’s probably afraid of is being vulnerable. Being alone.
Now in no way am I advocating that we “just love the nazis and they’ll go away”. If they’re currently being violent, we need to stop the nazis immediately. But violence is only a single tool, not an entire toolbox. Once the symptom of violence is dealt with, it’s time to treat the disease of fear. Compassion and patience are the correct tools for that next step.
If the forum for discussion is available, it’s time to act. Open your mind to the bastards, not their ethos of hate. Find out what they’re afraid of, and let them know they’re not alone. Tell them there are ways to fill your own plate without emptying someone else’s.
……for a happier society.
Let’s be better to each other. We still have a chance.