Codependency

If there's one thing that the whole debt-ceiling kabuki-theater row has driven home for me, it's how much American public politics has become nothing more than an unrewarding and codependent civic religion. I won't indulge the popular and patently false mass-media fiction that both sides are guilty of the exact same things, but both sides do an awful lot of kidding themselves and "straw manning" in order to prop up the respective fantasy-worlds in which they live. And year after year, they fail to see that the fantasy they continue to support brings no tangible benefit whatsoever to their own or anybody else's lives. It's as though the more intelligent homo sapiens becomes, the more tools we acquire for ruining things and removing ourselves from the truth of matters.

So why do they continue to support what they support if it's so ultimately unrewarding? The answer is exactly the same as why people stay in romantic relationships that only drain their emotional energies and undermine their sense of self-worth: Their sense of who they are has become so completely bound up in the relationship or situation that something known as the psychology of previous investment takes over. If all your mental eggs are in one particular basket, of course you are going to be utterly loathe to recognize the fact that those eggs might be better protected in other baskets.

The whole thing makes me terribly sad because there truly appears to be no antidote. If people are going to cling with a white-knuckle death-grip to what isn't so and will only cling to it ever more tightly in the face of evidence that it isn't so, what is there to do? You certainly can't tell people what to think, and behaving as if you can is the most deranged, childish, and absurd control-freak-ism humanly possible (and of course those who choose that option cling to that with an insane codependent death-grip that only ends up kicking what they think they want further and further and further away from them, as though they were utterly infatuated with ignorance and failure).

So I guess the only thing left to do is, once again, just sweep your own front door-step, try to be as clear-headed as you can manage, and put those who cling to what doesn't work out of your mind. Life is too short to aspire towards and worship what only undermines one's ultimate purposes. I believe it is a much better idea to use our time here to make ourselves as spiritually evolved as we might manage, and that by the way by definition means rejecting fundamentalism and absolutism of every variety. And remember that God (the Divine, Spirit, etc.) loves everybody equally no matter how badly screwed up they are.

And my pithy closing sentiment is thus: "Convictions all too often make convicts."