Splinters and Beams

When I was young I worked a bit as a carpenter, building among other things playhouses for kids. Having gotten accustomed to the task, I felt I could do without the blueprint, and small errors began to sneak in through the cracks I left open with neglect.

It ended up as a disaster. I tried to fix it by applying pressure to the elements, forcing them together.

As anyone with any experience in construction or politics will know, it is easier to tear things apart than put things together.

It's the only time in my life I have stood quietly, accepting a steady stream of verbal abuse. Really, I had this one coming.

Blind spots and reality check

Jesus was a carpenter too. He knew you had to prep for any job you do. He used blueprints. He had a set of rules, a code, and he was following a plan for whatever it is he intended to achieve.

The parable about the splinter and the beam - or more accurately; the metaphor - is not one he picked up as a carpenter, but a classic saying at the time, encouraging students of the Torah to mind their own spiritual development, before they tried to install integrity and the fear of God in their fellow man.

Today we speak of the same principle in different terms. We call it "blind spot" and "reality check", meaning:

Find out what it is you are not facing about yourself, which prevents others from taking your words seriously.

Identify the element of delusion or denial in your own mind, before you beging to criticize others. It will be more effective, simply because it will be done with improved accuracy and decreased risk of damage.

Perhaps even with TLC and involvement, as a good doctor should.

The lack of empathy crisis of the right wing

In America the Republican Party is struggling to gain some leverage with the new Obama administration, but they are pitifully short of actual plans or even overarching strategies.

The one thing that has sidetracked the right wing for a long time is the lack of empathy. By labelling the left wing "touchy-feely" and "bleeding heart liberals" they have allowed their opponents to basically monopolize the better aspects of human nature.

Attempts to recover from this position by launching phrases like "compassionate conservatism" have failed. It was simply too difficult to prove a reasonable level of realism to the concept.

In many cases a good spin, a word design, has saved the right wing.

In this case there's nothing to do, because the derogatives they designed to alienate their opponents, to make them appear unrealistic, unmanly and impractical, were much more powerful, much more cactchy.

It's what people remembered, for some time about the liberals, and later on with reverse effect, about the conservatives. Instead of thinking "compassionate conservative", too many on the middle thought "callous conservative".

Disregard for lives had become ingrained in the backbone of the GOP.

The danger of leadership through fear

In politics you can survive being evil, if you have a great sense of humor. What you can't survive is to be evil and impractical.

It was only when the gross extent of the failure of the Bush administration was realized by the general public, the latent crisis exploded.

Evil, people feel, has some place in politics. You got to be able to defend your interests, deal a certain amount of pain and accept a considerable amount of collateral damage.

It's ingrained in us through evolution, because culture and science was developed through armed conflicts.

It can be difficult to tell if you are being evil or just pragmatic, cynical or simply rational. But if you are evil - corrupted and alienated from the charitable aspects of human nature - and you are later exposed as a failure, you quickly lose ground. If you have exercised leadership through fear, there are lots of enemies - even in the ranks of people who feign blind devotion to authority.

With no real trust from anyone around you and lots on your conscience, it's like sharks smelling blood. People remember an insult, and no insult is greater to a man than forcing him to lie about his true opinions out of fear of reprisal.

The downwards spiral of negative spin

If USA wants to be a world leader, and the West wants to continue the course of steady progress towards global democracy, Washington must first let itself become democratized.

The blind spot to all the geostrategic calculations of every bureau and secret agency working to further American interests is that of a humanized perspective. The level of collateral damage accepted is too high, too dysproportional between American citizens and the lives of foreigners.

Even Europe, after a sudden rush of support for the neoconservative geostrategic ambition, was forced to bail out.

"Imperial hubris" became a buzz-word, one difficult to eradicate or counter by spin.

It's true that diplomacy works better, if you are holding the bigger stick, but the moment you apply the stick, you lose an option. You got to have something worse to threaten with to uphold your authority by terror, and it places you in grave risk of resembling terrorists.

At this point of a shifting equilibrium spin doctors become obsolete, because you are actively branding yourself as evil. Even the weight of relatively larger evil does not count much in the balance of things.

This is the point, where politicians and corporations and other entities of power begin to whine and complain. They blame the media, they blame intellectuals and the blame the naivity of the people. They kill every messenger, because the message is to their disliking.

Which all goes to prove that the blind spot has grown to the size of a beam, sticking out of the eye to grotesque effect.

The eroding effect of callousness

Having effectively lost the battle for the hearts and minds, a new dangerous option becomes tempting: Not to care at all. So what, my image is already blemished. I might as well go full circle, since I seem to be the only one who understands the gravity of the situation. I might as well not care.

A leader who has developed this level of vision impairment is beyond redemption, whether an individual, a political party or a nation.

All advise is perceived as subtle attacks undermining to undermine authority and credibility of the person or party in question.

Paranoia sets in.

Still, there may be a very clearly defined and outspoken agenda of good intentions. A person may believe he is out to rid the world of evil.

The British Empire, for a long time, did not realize they were merely plundering the world of wealth. They thought they were raising civilizations.

The Communist Empire of the Soviet Union believed it was called upon to civilize Earth, to instruct mankind in a more egalitarian way of living, but instead it created an authoritarian nightmare, which locked the world in a deadly conflict for decades.

The Germans of the Third Reich did not think the harsh measures against perceived enemies of the state would be employed against themselves, good citizens as they were, and when they did it was too late to react against it.

Germany was utterly destroyed, which is a point many forget, because the US Marshall Aid helped Europe gain its footing after the fatal flirt with fascism.

Total destruction of nations await

Desolation is the consequence of the kind of ideological blindness besetting men and women all over the world, including the West, with gross nationalism being the fiercest symptom.

People do not understand this scope, even if they may somewhere in the back of their mind fear it or intellectually accept it.

That's the basic problem of reality: It can always get worse. There is no end to the amount of pain and degradation human beings can employ against each other.

In that sense it is true: Hell does exist. We invented it aeons ago.

The metaphor of the beam and the splinter speaks of being rationally entitled, legally justifed, principally to the point, but lacking emotional involvement.

It is this condition that backfires through ingrained social mechanisms: The self-righteous not only accepts too high a price in human lives measured against common ethos, but also denies the emotional reality of human beings - underestimating the virulent responses of masses to mass oppression.

It's not a wild card, an element which may overturn the best laid plans. It is a given, a dynamic ingrained in society.

It's only people who do not really care about people, but perceive them as instruments - as tools or cogs in a machinery, who can be plaid out against each other for a desired effect - who fails to understand this:

The faculty of human emotion

Humans are sentient beings. If you try to remove a splinter from their eye - a flawed ideological or religious perspective - with your own vision impaired, you will remove both their eye and the splinter.

And knowing this, they will resist you. They will pluck out your eye, before you realize what is happening, and it may not even be out of hatred. It's just instinctive self-defense.

It is natural to man to resist a vision that offers no view to your own advantage.

This is how the metaphor applies to ideological reprogramming of societies, to fighting battles for hearts and minds, abroad and at home.

It's not enough to have the equipment to do it or even the right intentions. You have to have the competencies, and above all competencies is the faculty of emotion. It will teach you what to do, when people are upset, and it will lend you a proper response where calculations and strategic planning will fail.