Episode 63 - Enemies - Live from Los Angeles

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without further ado i want everyone to give these guys your best la welcome science mike and michael gunger [Music] [Applause] [Applause] [Music] off on up down left right north south light dark matter space gay straight male female christian secular self not self our world is made of opposites [Music] everything you've ever seen on a computer comes from ones and zeros music is sound waves made of beats a vibration between on and off [Music] the faster that the on off happens the higher the pitch there is no me without a you and there is no us without a not us there is no conception of good without also necessitating a concept of evil so why does this binary way of experiencing reality exist and how does it how does it influence our experience of our world together how does it influence our ideas of coming together like this who are we to answer that we also ask we also have to ask who are we not every good story starts with a hero right well maybe not it seems like most of the time we talk about the villain i mean who is luke skywalker without darth vader who is frodo without that burning red eye right so in the very nature of story there is no protagonist without antagonists there is no hero without an enemy and the way that our consciousness is structured the very nature of homo sapiens using language sets our life experiences up as a story that makes us the hero and anyone who opposes us the enemy [Music] how should we think about the enemy though so much of human history is playing out this very question most of the time we demonize we dehumanize and it seems to always culminate in bloodshed that just seems to be who we are [Music] [Music] so how do we deal with this violence this way that human beings seem to deal with the idea of enemy there have been philosophical and religious voices through the centuries who have argued against the more mainstream thing which is violence but people from all different major religions who have produced individuals and groups who are advocates of pacifism or non-violence but as we've talked about in the podcast before is is complete non-violence even a realistic idea is it a tenable position in a world where every living thing needs to eat and every meal kills something most of us we live in this tenuous position of how to relate to the enemy when how do we love the enemy like jesus said you know most of us have probably leanings that way we heard jesus say things like love your enemy and it sounds really beautiful to our ears but what does it mean exactly in some ways it seems simple in other ways you know it's not a person sexually assaulting you for instance what does that look like to love them what does it look like for somebody to directly be attacking your personhood how can you love them without enabling how does a wife who is being physically abused by her husband love him but also love herself forgiving and forgetting that abuse is happening is not love but just keeping so just keeping quiet about it it doesn't seem like that's love so that's what we're gonna be talking about tonight that's not love but what is it how do we engage with our enemies you know if you're not a fan of trump which probably uh you know i would imagine most people in here aren't tremendous fans of trump but maybe i don't know [Music] but how do we love our enemy of donald trump how do you rightfully and righteously resist an enemy while still loving them and how far can you take that welcome to the liturgist podcast [Music] everybody [Applause] hahaha so i wonder what science has to say about that [Music] so here's the thing among all the social mammals we've ever encountered in biology homo sapiens are by far the most violent in fact when we look back at the fossil record about two million years ago something remarkable happened our ancestors figured out how to sharpen and throw sticks and as soon as that happened large predator and herbivore populations across the entire continent of africa were decimated and as homo sapiens spread from the cradle of our birthplace across the entire globe that same pattern continued everywhere you found populations of humans you found a reduction in the populations of competitive species now we don't know exactly when human language developed we don't know the relationship between tool making for example and language but we know that once we begin to speak we begin to ascribe a set of characteristics among those who oppose us as our enemies now scientists don't agree exactly when we created war but some scientists believe that we actually waged war before we even had civilization while others say that war was probably non-existent among hunter-gatherers but either way were certain that hunter-gatherers were incredibly violent most men died at the hands of other men before the dawn of civilization and this typically came from disputes over mates territory or honor which is a little weird right like i get being upset about mate over a competition or competition over a mate that's necessary for gene propagation i understand territory offers you resources but honor what is honor it's sure as hell not scientific but when we look at chimpanzees our closest relative we learn a lot more about violence chimps are another primate that wages war but oddly enough chimps only wage war when there's an incredible disparity between the sizes of two opposing population groups homo sapiens we found statistically will go to war with a population difference as small as three percent which is almost mutually assured destruction once we created civilization we went heartily into war war has been an unending part of the human experience ever since and why do i talk about war in the context of enemies when we understand what we fight over we understand how we create enemies we require social labels to create enemies to sustain societal war war on a civilization or nation-state level it means we have to be able to say that these people are jews and these people are arabs these people are white and these people are black these people are gay or straight or christian or protestant or atheist as soon as we introduce labels we give our brains our cognitive fabric a shortcut and how to define someone as not friend but foe and in fact one of the earliest things our brains do after birth is it create a neurological algorithm designed to decide who is in the tribe and who is not and that is the neural foundation of thy enemy but even without war we love to have enemies we love to have darth vader we love to have the death star and nowhere is this passion more evident than in the bible itself this is sarah heath sarah is the pastor of the first united methodist church in costa mesa california and she came up with the whole science mic thing [Applause] you have heard it said that you should love your neighbor and hate your enemy but i say to you you should love your neighbor and love your enemy what are we supposed to do about that do we throw the whole bible out because that doesn't make any sense to me how am i supposed to love someone that is actively doing negative things to me when we look at scripture i think often too quickly we come to these judgments we decide that the whole thing doesn't make any sense because if i look at one part and the other part and what i've been told it doesn't go together but just for a little bit let's dive into matthew together matthew it begins with you should love your enemy but it keeps going to add insult to injury not only am i supposed to love them but if they slap me in the face then i need to turn my face jesus is pulling a ninja move i mean it see if my right hand strikes your cheek and i turn my face you have a decision to make are you gonna hit me with your left hand because in culture then if i hit you with my left hand which by the way was the toilet paper hand you're welcome for that knowledge i couldn't do that see if i hit you if i struck you on the cheek i was saying you are less than me but jesus says uh turn your cheek because then they gotta fight you like an equal see scripture is all about subversion and power dynamics and we're the ones who got it wrong if someone asks for your cloak you're supposed to give them all your clothes as brene brown would say now you're vulnerable nothing is more uncomfortable for you or someone else unless you're science mike who doesn't mind this but getting naked in front of people is not normally a normal your comfortable thing being nude in that culture didn't just shame you it actually shame the people who are looking upon you it's a power dynamic like how ninja like you want to mess with me i'm getting naked now what you want to start this fight nobody fights the naked guy unless you're greek next time you're in a bar fight don't throw a table take your clothes off that's good advice it is what do we do with this see if jesus doesn't want us to be meek and powerless he wants something more as we look at scripture so let's keep going through matthew we get to matthew 10. i did not come to bring peace but a sword now if you're me i i i liked peaceful jesus isn't he great like i couldn't put him on my dashboard he's he was my boyfriend for a while in college a peaceful jesus guard your heart i mean i really i wanted you to be peaceful what do you mean i did not come to bring peace but a sword as i have matured in my faith as i've spent time in scripture what i have discovered is that jesus didn't come for us to be non-active see oftentimes we think peace looks like if i walk away some people take scripture and they use it horribly and they say you know jesus said take a sword give me one instance of jesus wielding a sword instead he is using micah 7. he's hearkening back to the old testament saying the sword will divide so what i'm about to say to you is uncomfortable and you're going to have to choose a side justice injustice any peace you got to choose but do not for a minute think that peace exists when no one is fighting how do i love my enemy and you may have heard like turn the other cheek but here's the thing we never talk about turning the other cheek means i never left i stayed in the room with you you're uncomfortable but i'm going to stay near you people always ask me why do you stay in the church why are you a pastor and i'm like mostly it's the pay that's not true i stay there because i believe in the kingdom of god and i believe when jesus said love your enemy he didn't mean get on facebook get in your own algorithm and never have to meet up with anyone who doesn't agree with you because every sunday i sit beside people who don't agree with me or the fact that i'm the one who's like sorry i'm your pastor i'm a girl i have to be near my enemy for them to strike me i had a professor who i adored he knew what he was talking about when he talked about peace his name was bishop peter story we don't often hear about him he's desmond tutu's best friend he happens to be the caucasian part of the story and he often goes into the background because he knows that desmond is often much better at speaking dr story told us this story that i think talks about how we're to treat our enemies you see he had been taken out to a field with his best friend desmond because they had been holding church services where both races were together during apartheid and a man had held a gun to both of their heads by the way when he tells you pacifism's the way to go you're like absolutely [Music] he said it wasn't long after that they were in worship and they continued to worship black and white and the guards came in and they were ready to fight they had guns and desmond tutu gets up to the mic and giggles and says you have come to join the winning side come we have seats for you the soldiers didn't know what to do because now they were face to face with their own ugly and their only choice was to sit down and worship and they did years later bishop's story was at an event where he was speaking and someone came up and he said you probably don't recognize me but i'm the man that was told to murder you that day and i couldn't loving your enemies is not about being passive or maintaining some sort of weird piece where we just don't talk about the tough stuff like thanksgiving with our family loving our enemies is risky it's scary and it's biblical let's thank sarah [Music] there's a world [Music] silent casualties oh god grant us peace in these sleepless nights i can hardly breathe despite brutality i know that i will be free i know that i we'll be free so let the light keep it shine let it break into the darkness all the love dares us to see we'll all be free to let the light keep it shine let it break into the darkness all the love dares us to see we'll all be [Music] free we'll all be free we'll be free we'll be free [Music] we [Music] [Applause] [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] let it break into the darkness we'll all be [Music] [Applause] [Music] it's normal at so many different points in our life to feel like something is getting in the way of being present or happy something stopping us from achieving the goals that we have for ourselves or feeling connected to the people that we love betterhelp will assess your needs and match you with your own licensed professional therapist to help you work on all those things you can connect with someone in a safe and private online environment for that reason it's so convenient you don't even have to leave the house you can start working with someone in under 24 hours when working with someone through better help you can send a message to your counselor at any time and get a timely and thoughtful response plus you can schedule weekly video and phone sessions better help is licensed professional counselors who are specialized in treating things like depression anxiety navigating family conflicts and so much more they're committed to facilitating great therapeutic matches so they make it easy and free to change counselors if needed anything you share with your counselor is confidential so many people have been using better health that they're recruiting additional counselors in all 50 states start living a happier life today as a listener you get 10 off your first month by visiting betterhelp.com liturgists join over 1 million people taking care of their mental health again it's betterhelp h-e-l-p-dot-com liturgists this is william matthews william is an artist advocate who writes tweets and sings at the intersection of spirituality and justice william good to have you on the program as always thank you for having me you may yeah you may recognize that voice from episode 34 of the literature's podcast black and white racism in america so so good to be here with you guys thank you for having me thanks for being here thanks for being here man enemies we were talking about this the other day we were and it got real complicated real quick it did so we're just gonna bring it to the complication to everybody um that's how we roll so so do you ever think and feel in your experience um that people misuse the phrase love your enemy absolutely um i i think the question that you kind of asked was uh do you ever feel like the church particularly abuses that word and uh i think church particularly as it relates to it being an institutional power uh is always looking to protect its power privilege and status and so by doing so i think the term love your enemy gets or becomes code for abuse and i think a lot of us have experienced in church situations where abusive behavior was happening uh whether emotionally spiritually or even physically and in order to protect the group the community the innocence and the purity of it all something gets covered up a scapegoat is always created and love of enemy or this the scripture is often contorted and used to manipulate people and to manipulate situations and unfortunately too many of us get put in abusive situations where we feel like god wants us to be abused like 70 times seven and you're an altar boy in the catholic church yeah you know what i mean yeah like ugh i know uh you know it's wrong but i mean you would you know don't say anything uh you know i know that you were touched inappropriately but you know it's not worth you know uh you know so-and-so is a good he's a good priest he's a good pastor they're a good leader we don't you know want to say nothing anything bad about them yeah essentially the difference between like jesus saying love your enemy or like caesar saying love your enemy what's the what's the difference sometimes when it comes to church and caesar that's uh yeah exactly yeah i know it's not jesus but the well today it may be ambiguous but i think clearly there's a historical difference between christ's church and rome christ was crucified and rome used crucifixion and it seems like we lose as sarah was talking about that subversive element of these stories when we use them to prop up imperial powers we use them to prop up government authority when we use them to erase the stories of people who are crushed underneath it it erases the entire context of the new testament which was the beloved city of jerusalem the holy city of jerusalem that should be under no one's authority but god sitting under the authority of caesar yeah and when we when we flip that it is literally like roman centurions marching into jerusalem and saying hey love your enemy like while they stab people while they illegally acquire property while they oppress and the if you ignore the power dynamic in the story you completely eliminate its ability to speak truth in my opinion i think as a culture we just struggle with truth-telling in general uh so i think we love i think as americans we're culturalized to be nice right like we're culturalized to not say anything that's gonna ruffle feathers or not speak truth to power or you know we were at dinner the other night and someone uh talked about um they didn't like their dish and they talked about it and we all just said they're a little cringe like so awkward you know and uh but then i checked myself like why why do why is them saying uh to the restaurant what they didn't like like why do i feel that that's wrong like why and i realized even the other night i was like that was so culturalized to not ruffle anything and just go along and pretend everything's alright and i just think as a culture we don't we don't like truth telling we have a hard time with people who tell the truth i mean jesus said you know you who kill the prophets and uh i think our whole culture is littered with uh painting people who speak truth as mean and divisive and hateful and painting this character of if you disrupt power you are hateful you are bad you are an american and truthfully it's if you speak truth not niceness but sometimes truth is loud and sometimes truth is angry and i think culturally we don't allow ourselves to space to feel all those things and to express those things without feeling a sense of challenge or feeling like somebody is uh yeah being hateful i mean i feel like when we're we we so think of ourselves as individuals we so want to feel like an empowered individual and we sometimes forget the effect and don't even forget just don't notice how we just kind of fit into the thing into the structure into the easy way of existing within society it's just and group think takes over and it happens to all of us and we have these our consciousness does get informed by the yeah world that we're in i remember being in um at auschwitz and seeing this town and it was just striking how normal this town was about you know i remember being outside of the gates of this like one of the most horrendous things in history where there's smoke billowing into these neighborhoods and of ashes of people humans and i see all this little old lady walking and i was like she's old enough she like she was like hobbling on the sidewalk she's like she may have been here she may have seen that ash and like what what is everybody in town doing what it like i don't i don't know um and can i say that i would have been a lot different than the normal town person if i had been in the exact same circumstances you can't say something like that you don't know i think it's also part of our american liturgy so to speak right and our like there's a propaganda even you know with the analogy you're using with ashu it's like there was this propaganda that propped up so to speak i wish we had propaganda here i love that guy's shot he's invited him he's on tour shout out to friends on twitter shout out to prop we love him uh there's there's a propaganda though that props up this american liturgy or in that sense it was the german the nazi liturgy that uh you know don't question don't speak up don't uh don't challenge you know and i think we forget how that is the cultural context that we're all socialized into that creates very nice neutered people so you might not believe this what but i'm not a native los angeles citizen i haven't always lived here um it's hard to tell because i have an amazing professional broadcast voice but uh i thought i'd better laugh honestly a little disappointed uh i grew up in the southeast and uh lived there until like what seven weeks ago eight weeks ago something like that and when you talk about this american liturgy this propaganda um let's remember that that european culture especially was steeped in a particular structure that was designed to preserve a social hierarchy and to especially benefit those who were most in power and so as we moved out of the feudal system and we got into the magna carta we got into some everybody has right situations everybody of the right ethnicity has right situations we started to create protocols that people were indoctrinated with from birth that prioritized what being polite being pleasant and being nice these are all values i hold deeply as a southerner right i i if i don't think about it i say yes ma'am i say yes sir i tend to hold the door open for everybody in fact uh michael laughs sometimes because i literally won't walk through the door until everyone else does and i'm perfectly comfortable having a really long standoff to be the nicest i tried to beat him one i tried to beat him it got absurd it was absurd i was like no you because i was like i'm not gonna let him do it this time no you sorry this is what we're talking about and one time i beat both so long it comes back i didn't have the southern chops the southern man or chops to hold up this is designed and well well if if a billionaire is polite to me then i feel elevated and there's some truth to that i mean if oprah smiled at me i'd like to freak out the door for you you'd be like oh my gosh yeah like i'm like i'm on another level but i'm on a new level but the the hairy back of that situation it looks nice and then if you turn it around it's kind of surprising is this nice culture prevents us from critiquing the status quo so what happens when a trans person says your comfort with where you use the restroom ends up dramatically increasing my risk of sexual assault what do we say whoa that's not a nice thing to say yeah what if a person of color says you know uh i don't know if you've noticed this but it turns out people with my skin color get arrested charged and incarcerated at a much higher rate than white people for the same crimes we go whoa whoa whoa that's not nice yeah what if native indigenous people to the united states say by the way you literally stole every inch of the land your house is on from my ancestors through brutal genocide we go whoa that's not nice don't you understand we're elevated now you're just like us you're we're all nice together and that means i'll say yes sir to you as you drive home to an indian reservation and i drove home to a nice suburban house but mike they worked really hard for that house worked hard for not minimizing that what i am saying in this conversation about enemies is sometimes the the very structure of an enemy becomes systemic in nature and impersonal and almost becomes more nefarious in that like what is more traumatizing people marching in the streets and white hoods or a disproportionate number of black fathers rotting away in prison which one of these feels more like an enemy it makes me think of that this is going to be me trying to quote scripture for you okay gone vishnu gone let him use uh we battle not against flesh and blood principalities and powers and that was always when i was a kid that was like demons it was like we're battling demons not people [Music] when you see these powers that do move society and do move individuals within society to just kind of fit in that slot that they belong in so that they don't get hurt or or be seen as mean or whatever to whatever degree or killed in some some societies you know i just i think that seeing this is a tricky thing because then you can get into the like you can sound like the people that are like love the uh sinner hate the sin um and it can sound it can become simplistic but i think um somehow resisting the evil and the powers of evil that are operating through human beings but somehow still not having your battle against flesh and blood i think there is something really fascinating and profound about that um i think that's where we're at where that's what we're trying to figure out how to do and that's why the command of jesus to love our enemies is so complicated and so complex for us because i don't know sometimes how to differentiate between the good intentions of a white supremacist like i struggle as a person of color to to love my enemy especially when my enemy is perpetually giving me death by a thousand papercuts in the systemic way right if not the utter brutal way which does happen yeah still or an actual or an actual execution or a lynching like the biracial boy who just were uh was just lynched wow uh you you wouldn't think in 2017 we that would be a headline uh and that still is so it's both um and so i i struggle i mean i was listening to sarah earlier and i told lisa i was like how am i going to go after this i cannot love my enemy i struggle and uh truthfully i think that's just my honest confession is i don't know how to love my enemy i really don't and the most i've been able to do is to take small steps toward more inclusion to value the opinions of those who are different from me i mean listen i'm i'm black and i spent the majority of my adult life actually the entirety of my adult life working for white evangelical churches that was an exercise in putting myself in situations with people that i don't always agree with and but i learned a lot through that process and i'm still learning and i find i have much more to learn but i i think the only thing i've been able to do is just to consistently fight in my own heart for the space to be inclusive the space to be more loving the space to be more open-minded to hold firm to how of my experience of the world yet as well to create maybe inroads for people who maybe don't see the world the way that i do and i hope to offer those in-roads to people and i also pray that those inroads are offered to me let's thank william matthews [Music] [Music] look [Music] is [Music] so [Music] [Applause] oh [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] the peace [Music] [Music] of life [Music] [Applause] [Music] my enemies [Music] [Music] [Music] [Applause] [Music] oh [Music] my this is peter rollins peter is the founder of a theory and practice called pyrotheology let's welcome peter to the [Applause] stage [Applause] [Music] all right i'm worried they want me to rap this is terrifying is this a dream am i on a nightmare and i'm naked no this is awful okay no rapping the irish we're never supposed to rap supposedly actually bono loves rapping and every time they're doing an album they have to tell him not to rap so there's a little little nugget for you um it's great to be here i really appreciate being your guest and uh yeah yeah yeah you guys you're doing a great job you're facing the right way you're clapping at the right time you're like you're doing a very good job as an audience very good i i do i do this a lot i speak in in rooms but mostly there's nobody there and that's called a mental illness but when you show up it makes me look normal so i really appreciate that um okay i just want to reflect a little bit on this idea of loving your enemies um and i want to ask the question do we love our enemies and in a particular perverse way do we love our enemies like like a hypochondriac loves their disease right you see a hypochondriac say who thinks they've got cancer they think the cancer is the problem but the cancer is the solution to your problem the hypochondriac has anxiety they have fears they have guilt all of this trauma that's going on and that is externalized onto this thing the cancer so they think the cancer is the problem and they think if we could only get rid of the cancer everything would be wonderful but actually the cancer is protecting the hypochondriac from looking at difficult things in their own life it's dissimilar with alcohol if you know somebody who drinks too much we think that alcoholism is the problem but actually alcoholism can be seen very often as the solution to your problem it's what you do to try to avoid a suffering in your life something that's gone wrong some pain some difficulty in your existence and if you don't face what's beneath and if you just concentrate and not drinking you're going to do something even worse you're going to take up something even more dangerous so i live in l.a no and i've seen this first hand i don't know if you've seen or heard of crossfit it's okay honestly one moment you're drinking too much in the next moment you're flipping tires i have seen it i have seen it i would yeah i'm irish there's no way i'm going to do that but you know you you just find something else you just like whack a mole you get rid of one symptom and another one arises if you don't deal with what's beneath it so the difference between a hypochondriac who thinks they have cancer and then finds out they have cancer that doesn't mean they're not a hypochondriac that just means their hypochondria actually happens to have the thing that they think they have right just like you know that phrase just because you're paranoid it doesn't mean they're not out to get you right which means you could have the structure of a paranoid delusional individual but the fbi could be out to get you but it doesn't mean you're not paranoid delusional in fact the fact that the fbi all right to get you just helps hide the reality of your paranoic structure okay now the reason why i'm saying this is because actually this this is called skip coding scapegoating is when you take you know you cannot face your own brokenness your own suffering your own difficulties so you put it onto something else and you think that's the problem in in fascism obviously you know the the stereotypical fascist group is against the jewish community and the jewish community are hated traditionally because they have the education system they have the banks the monetary system and they have the news they have the media and so they are they are scapegoated and the fascist community says if only we could get rid of them then everything would be great but actually it's the jewish community that allow the fascist community to avoid a confrontation with their own crisis with the problems that exist within it so if you look at soviet russia the kulaks were seen as the enemy of the people the cool axiom the means of production as the kulaks were persecuted and it became obvious that the cool acts were not really the problem the coolacks were actually the way that the soviet system was able to galvanize support was able to avoid looking at its own crisis so as they were able to kill the kulaks they realized that they needed the enemy so the definition of a kulak began to expand a kulak wasn't simply someone who owned the means of production you know a kulak was someone who employed other other farmers or a kulak was someone who had a little bit more land than everybody else eventually a kulak was someone who thought like a kulak or a kulak with someone who would think like a kulak if they had the chance in other words the definition expanded so much because they needed an enemy psychically you needed the enemy to protect yourself from looking at your own difficulties this is a defense mechanism and it's perfectly fine but what happens is hegel called this the beautiful soul the beautiful soul condition is where you so want to be pure and good and not look at the darkness and the badness that you projected out you see this with kids you know that phase where they cannot look at the monstrosity of themselves so the monster is under the bed and of course the monster isn't under the bed the monster is inside the child but what you do is you split the child splits and projects the monster outside of themselves this beautiful soul notion continues often to function if you break up with somebody splitting is one of the defense mechanisms that you see where you're innocent and pure and the person is evil and bad and wrong and sometimes they are you know that's the sometimes they are but but two people are in this relationship and when you break up like you just want to slag them off they're terrible or awful etc now if you're a good friend to someone who's splitting what you'll probably do is you won't affirm it and also you won't attack it you'll just wait you'll wait until there's a moment where that person just starts to pause before they attack or they hesitate or there's something in the tapping of their finger that tells you that this is a moment of opportunity and then you might say something like i just think you're hurt i just think you're really you really were damaged by this whole breakup and the person might then turn around and say yeah you're right and you know i'm part of this as well and maybe there i've got something to to look at and then at this point the person's defense begins to lure they begin to work through their own suffering and then this splitting begins to break and it gets to the point where the person might be able to actually think good thoughts about the other person or maybe would meet them in the street and actually shake their hand and say i wish things had worked out i wish things had been different but it's good to see you so these defenses that we put up can protect us from looking at our own difficulties and so we we want an enemy now that doesn't mean that all enemies work like this you could be a healthy person who happens to have cancer you don't need the cancer you're not psychically invested in it so you can actually try to address it try to you know find ways to get over it but are you or am i psychically invested in my enemies do my enemies give me a way to feel pure and good and divorced if you've ever seen social justice within churches it's interesting often we do social justice because we think you know the homeless is the problem or the prison population's the problem and we want to be good news to the other but that can make us feel very pure and very good we are kind of like the voice of god to the other but what if homelessness is not the problem what if it's the solution to your problem what if the prison population is not the problem it's the solution to your problem the problem is in our society inequality inability to deal with mental health issues wealth disparity whatever and these problems our refusal to face them means that we create a symptom and this symptom is the homeless population that we can then manage and work with and feel good about ourselves because we're trying to help but what if actually the homeless or good news to us they tell us that we are participating in a system that is problematic and that we have to do the hard work of looking at that and working through how we change that and as we do that the symptom begins to diminish you see a symptom a symptom is that thing that tells the truth that you cannot speak so in your own life you might have headaches migraines bad back heart palpitations sometimes a cigar is just a cigar and those are just health things you've got but sometimes they may be telling you something that you cannot tell yourself that you're in a job that you despise a relationship that's abusive that you're in a family environment that's bad when you cannot speak your truth your truth finds a way to speak and that is the symptom and the challenge is to listen to your symptom not just try to get rid of it right not just try to if there's violence in your society go right we want to get rid of the violence but the more difficult question is to go is that an explosion of something that is problematic in our wider society that we have to look at and if you do that the the psychoanalyst lacan talks about how your symptom can become and he he just basically writes symptom in a slightly more archaic way a sand hum the french santom which is s-i-n-t-h-u-m-e a sand hum in french is not just a symptom it also signs like holy man sound home holy man your symptom becomes a prophet that speaks to you it tells you that there's something that you have to address and look at in your society and if you listen to the prophets changes happen and if we refuse to listen they don't so just to kind of finish off this very brief reflection do we need our enemies is there something that we get out of it that means actually unconsciously we don't get want to get rid of them i don't know if you ever saw there was a sign that said the democratic party used that said love trump's hate it's a popular sign and it meant you know love is better than hate and it also meant trump was someone who was hateful and love is better than that but there is another way to read the sign which is just literally love trumps hit how many of us love it get something out of it how many of us are psychically invested in it great jokes great humor great this great that great sense of we are pure and we are good and and actually we end up wanting our enemy and therefore unconsciously not wanting to get rid of them because they purify us they help us have a beautiful soul it's interesting that judge dredd came out of the u.s judge dredd's interesting as judge dredd he finds a criminal he judges them there and then and he if needs be executes them in in popular culture judge dredd is the ultimate in concrete justice he's not abstract he's concrete he looks at the problem there's an evil and he deals with it he's concrete not abstract but in philosophy those terms are the opposite way around judge dredd is the ultimate in abstract justice because to understand something you have to concretize it in its network in its wider structure to understand it to abstract something is to take something out of its context and just judge it judge dredd abstracts a criminal from what was his education or her education where was she brought up what family was he from is so judge dredd abstracts the the enemy from their context and judges them the difficulty for us all is to ask ourselves you know what what are we getting out of the society that we're in we can purify ourselves by hearing something but the really difficult question is to ask am i participating in a system that actually perpetuates problems and difficulties in justices and racism and inequalities and that's a difficult question to ask so do we love our enemy like a hypochondriac loves their disease [Applause] [Music] [Applause] [Music] so we talk about like i've actually never considered the idea of needing the enemy ever so bravo but i started thinking about our nearest genetic relatives who i alluded to earlier in the program chimpanzees and how they so readily engage in inter and intra group conflict right they're they're they're really really really violent primates not human violent but close and there's another species just as closely related to homo sapiens as chimpanzees as bonobos and bonobos are not violent uh when bonobos have conflict within a group they express their frustration and then they stimulate each other's genitals and usually around the time of mutual orgasm the conflict is no longer a problem and uh so bonobos very much make love not war and these species are almost genetically identical i mean really really they almost push the boundary between a species and a subspecies but the behavior is so radically different and uh when primatologists have tried to uncover the differences in these behaviors it's geographic separation chimpanzees generally live in environments where due to seasonality competition for food and water is intense and bonobos live in a region where the climate is stable and the food supply is plentiful in fact there's so much food some of their favorite fruit frequently ferments so bonobos not only get to hang out they also get a pretty good buzz and it's interesting to me that our two closest genetic relatives kind of speak to the different approaches we have to relating to each other and the different strategies we have for dealing with an enemy right we literally have a state department and a defense department a bomb people department and where does this tension come from well i think as you said resources is a huge thing the degree to which resources are available and distributed drives our ability to create an enemy but a chimpanzee i don't know is necessarily projecting onto his enemy he is actually just trying to get food but we have this capacity to be aware of inequality to produce agriculture to have shipping capacities and interestingly enough on the right and the left for example if you want to if you want to drive americans crazy talk about reparations for slavery talk about reparations for native genocide and on the right and the left you'll have the same reaction like whoa where's that money going to come from and then an excuse about why the other party is the root of inequality and as you said like this need to project our own inadequacy to create an enemy like how comfortable are we right now as progressive people to have trump to demonize to hide the fact that we're so comfortable having so much more than other people oh man that was so convicting for me so how do you think we start to become aware of the way we're externalizing and start to process through that projection to be more whole healthy people wow very good that's a big question you know my interest and this would take us very very deep we can't really go here but i it's just we can't it's literally well i i want to say interestingly that chimpanzees and and whatever don't seem to go through the eatable complex and i i put a lot of uh emphasis on this eatable story now very quickly what's the eatable story well it's a guy he wants to sleep with his mum he doesn't know it's his mom but he wants to have sex with his mum and his father's in the way and so he kills his father sleeps with his mother he thinks it's going to be wonderful but it's a disaster right now one one way of understanding what that means is that the mother here is a symbol of returning to oceanic oneness wholeness and completeness and the father is a symbol of a prohibition that gets in the way of that return and the the this the sun breaks through the prohibition returns to wholeness and completeness thinks it's going to be wonderful but it's a disaster now the jewish the jewish community has its own edible story which is adam and eve it's very similar structure adam and eve are walking around the garden there's a prohibition and behind the prohibition there's you have this piece of fruit and then you will be like god and that means you will be whole and complete right and there's this serpent that's saying it you eat the fruit and you'll be like god and this isn't even an iphone 7 or something it's just a piece of fruit right like you wonder why is it so appealing but it's the prohibition if you ever take a toy off a child you'll notice that sometimes the very act of taking the mundane toy away generates an excessive attachment to the toy and then the child goes crazy to have the toy right now in psychoanalysis the serpent is called the superego that is the voice it tells you you can be whole and complete if only you have enough sex or go wide enough uh are nicer to your mother or whatever right that's the superego in in theology it's called a serpent and in psychoanalysis the idea is to realize the superego doesn't exist in theology is to exercise the serpent and the technology of psychoanalysis is of course the clinic but the technology of theology is grace which is the you don't have to do anything you don't have to pursue this frantic idea of something that makes you whole and complete now why am i saying all of that very quickly to say this when we are caught up in this eatable problem we start to fantasize there is there's something wonderful and amazing and if only we could have it everything would be great and then we start to fantasize that there's some enemy that's preventing us from getting it and then we want to get rid of that enemy destroy them to get the thing that will make us whole and complete this is the scapegoating mechanism and it's that which i think is a very particular form of human evil it's a very particular form of human problem so for example you'll see that enemies are often in in films they've got everything the joker has a smile etched on his face he's having excessive pleasure the enemy has the thing that makes them happy and we want to take it away from them that's why there's that old romanian parable of of this farmer and this angel comes to the farmer and says oh god has seen how good you are how carefully you tend the land he wants to give you anything you want and the farmer is about to speak and then the angel says and it gets even better than that because whatever god gives you god will give your neighbor double and so the farmer says take one of my eyes because we so hate the other having the thing that we think will make us whole and complete that we despise them so my whole thing is how do we escape this eatable curse embrace our own brokenness and our own unknowing embrace grace which means you don't have to do anything don't frantically pursue this sacred object and in doing that you will find yourself not libidinally invested in this scapegoating mechanism i mean that's a lot for that's great i loved what you were saying in the way that it when you it's so easy to look at an enemy and it feels like you're objectively judging that situation that person that system whatever and i love how you were calling attention back inward a bit because i think like if we just take a second here i'll say some words and just pay attention to yourself pay attention to how these words resonate in you western christianity gop um southern evangelical alliance of christians biblically inerrant okay now let's switch it up just in case i mean we are in l.a those are probably the but but we'll switch it up uh immigrants the liberal elite hillary what happened no but were there any words were there any words in there that you can go ahead and were there any words that made something and you go just on a you can be honest yeah i see a little handy ass um interesting like none of those things did anything right now while i said those were like to these are just ideas said these names words and we have these little we have this thing and and one thing that i've really been um learning and and experiencing more over the last couple years especially the last year is those things outside of myself that i have let that i have experienced suffering from the enemies the ken hams of the world inside joke it's sort of um and the the people that have that i've had battle with on outside that i feel like have caught like what have you done in my life and and to realize that every feeling and experience that i've ever had with any enemy is an experience that i've had within me that those sufferings and those tensions and those those are all something that happened inside of me not outside of me and i think the buddhists here have have a lot of beautiful wisdom to teach as far as suffering goes and how suffering is always related to our attachment and i think this talk about enemies it's it's often a matter of perspective because it's so easy to to assume this really solid me that has a subjective point of view and this really solid them that is out there and that i have a full view of what's actually happening and this is what's wrong with them and this is how they've wronged me or us or whatever and um [Music] when you can step back a little bit and see what's happening internally this is what's a beautiful thing about meditation or spiritual practice and you can step back far enough to see like oh look my ego is really hurt this this ego is feeling hurt because i didn't feel like i my my thoughts are respected or whatever um and you can just kind of see it and you see that brought up some suffering because apparently my ego really cares about that sort of thing but that practice when you move far enough into that you can kind of eventually see that all of your interactions all of the enemy the us and the them it's all happening in your own mind and your perception and your narratives and the things that are going on and i think when you can shift and i i would imagine this is where jesus was coming from um is being able to see when he said lord forgive them they don't know what they're doing there was this deep it wasn't just a it wasn't an idealism to like push on somebody when somebody's mean this is what you should do but like so deeply entrenched and connected to the all into the what we assume is the other that the divine is no more distant in that enemy than it is my own breath or my own spiritual practice it's just pervasive and and i think then you can love i think you can actually love your enemy because you can see they don't exist can i mention something else yeah because we have a back in belfast we developed a series of things called decentring practices and one of them was called the evangelism project where we went to be evangelized by other people so we would go to say a fundamentalist church or the jewish society or the atheist community or whatever it is to be evangelized by them now it was called the evangelism project but the evangelism didn't really happen when this community say it was the islamic society told us about what they believed like somebody might be evangelized that was totally fine but the reason why we called it the evangelism project was because uh halfway through we would say so what do we look like to you and then you would see yourself through the others eyes and you would be evangelized because you would maybe see pollutions in your own life in your own community that you just couldn't see because i need your eyes in order to see myself there are things that i hide from myself i find it funny we often talk about what you believe people say what do you believe as if we know what we believe our consciousness our consciousness is designed to protect you from ever even glimpsing what you believe none of you believe that a duvet cover will will protect you from a knife attack unless it's late at night and you hear something downstairs and then you get all harry potter and suddenly it's an invisible clue that you put over your head right it's you believe it you just don't know you believe it in fact that's why you do things like psychoanalysis is because you realize that coming to know what you believe is a profoundly difficult thing but so but so the advantages and project is to help you see yourself like traditionally say for example you're all democrats and you're all republicans a debate is the democrats want you to become democrats and the republicans want you to become republican but in the evangelism project it was slightly different the democrats would say listen we're unlikely to convince you but maybe you can make us better democrats tell us what you see in us that's so bad because we think we're great and perfect and fantastic and then you see some things maybe that you never thought about you see yourself through each other's eyes and go okay maybe we're a bit hippy dippy and you know we're not like political enough or whatever and then what happens interestingly is the other side are more open to doing the same thing and say well you're not likely going to make us uh you know we're not going to make you republicans but maybe you'll make us better republicans what do you see in us that's so bad and if you remember like in an argument where two people are fighting and you see something on the news and you say one thing your partner says the other within five minutes you're arguing like world experts until someone says to be honest i don't really know what i'm talking about i could be wrong the other person might go haha i win but they might also say well to be honest i'm not don't really know what i'm talking about either and then a real conversation can happen so the problem with splitting the big problem is forget about the more morality of it the major problem with splitting is no novelty can occur when like in northern ireland you had protestants and catholics and they were each other's enemies you could not talk about the other as anything but horrific and awful and terrible but eventually life got so bad that we had to drop the splitting and we had to say is there another way to communicate and when you drop that novelty occurs in other words you start to find creative ways to engage with argument see war is not conflict don't ever think war is conflict war is the inability to have conflict there's a great irish comedian dylan martin said this is where war is when you cannot stand to be in the room with another person and argue and disagree and fight so you want to take out a gun and blew their brains out but when you are able to put down war then you can start to have conflict and with conflict comes novelty and with novelty can come the possibility of change i mean i've i've been on this journey in my life for the last couple of years getting past the reflex to never admit that i'm someone else's enemy and that can show up in really surprising ways in your life but i've learned through scholarship and lived experiences that sometimes the cultural context i live in the systems i participate in make me an enemy to others you know how would a how would a teenager relate to me in afghanistan if his older brother died from a drone strike i mean how how did these children i met in a palestinian refugee camp relate to me as i drove on roads that said a gift to the people of palestine from the united states and then in the camp we found tear gas casings and rubber bullets stamped made in the usa sometimes i am an enemy and if i refuse to say to the other no no i'm your friend no no i'm with you then i fail to listen to the ways that critique can help me become a more whole person the ways that the inside of my participation and their oppression could in some way meaningfully not only address their suffering but start to create a solution to love our enemies as christ has commanded means we have to admit sometimes we are enemies and whether that's some projection of our consciousness escaping the oneness as peter said sometimes the tumors are real sometimes the suffering comes from something in the external world and until we've done the work to admit how much we need the enemy and how much we also never want to be the villain we can't fully engage in the work of making shalom universal in human justice or dragging the kingdom of heaven near well thank you peter rollins let's give him a hand thanks for being part well we hope you've enjoyed this episode of the liturgist podcast live for like the first time ever [Music] yeah we'd love to hear your feedback you can do so by going to the liturgist.com podcast catch us on twitter at the liturgistsfacebook.com liturgist or in the lobby um if you're a patron patrons in the house anybody there wow okay check the app for your invitation to the after party tomorrow uh we also want to let you know we're doing two more liturgies gatherings in uh boston and seattle and we're gonna announce tonight that the special guest in boston will be christina cleveland and the special guest in seattle will be hilary mcbride so pretty good stuff make sure you listen to that online or visit us in person and we want to thank sarah heath william matthews peter rollins lisa gunger and irish chandler for joining us tonight and the strings and the strings how are the string players [Applause] yeah we'd like to thank uh our boy corey pig and jim chaffee for helping put the litter scattering together we want to thank greg nordine for his production work on this podcast and of course i'm science mike i'm michael gunger thanks for listening [Applause] everybody [Music] you