See Your Opponents as Captives

Instead of stupid or evil

Photo by Harry Shelton on Unsplash

This is a time of remarkable division. Accusations and counter-accusations dominate the news cycle, or fly across the Internet in hopes of changing someone’s mind and perhaps changing an election.

When it’s all over, about half of our number will exhale a sigh of relief and half will be wracked with anger, crushed by disappointment and exhausted from anxiety. Some (hopefully) smaller few may bring their rage to the streets. Social media will certainly be a dumpster fire; but when is it not? In a few weeks there will be unpleasant arguments around the table at holiday gatherings that may echo through families for years, or generations.

I have thought about this for a while. I have tried to make very few declarative statements about the presidential race. There was a time, when I was first exploring social media, that I thought the clever exchanges on assorted forums were useful, or impactful. I have moved past that.

Information can change minds. Experience can change minds. Love certainly does.

But seldom dispute.

The more I think about all of this, the more I realize that we are making enemies where we shouldn’t. We are a nation of people passionate about politics, for better or worse. Our political excitation is native to the rebellious American psyche. It is made more intense by our incredible freedom to be wildly different. It is amplified by the blessings and curses of the internet in general and social media in particular. It is inflamed by assorted over-valued experts and by the ease with which we embrace and transmit truths, half-truths and untruths when they comport with our desired outcomes. I’m sure that barely scratches the surface of etiologies...

It is also inflamed by people who publish click-bait. Our internal conflict is coveted by corporations who need advertising dollars. (Consider the old adage from the journalism world, “if it bleeds it leads.”) And the fire of our division is hourly made more of a conflagration by fuel tossed on by foreign and domestic groups who help manufacture outrage in our population in order to increase division. We’re all victims of this, no matter our political leanings, and make no mistake.

Equally relevant is the hard reality that none of us are as smart as we think we are. There’s a tendency on every side of our political (and cultural) arguments to go straight to the assumption that one’s enemy is simply ignorant. “How can you be so stupid?” I often hear this among highly educated professionals. They endlessly invoke the “Dunning-Kruger Effect”, which put simply means that people often think they know more than they do about a particular topic. I heard this a lot during the pandemic. And it’s not wrong.

It’s not wrong because we’re all wrong, a lot more than any of us care to admit.

Perhaps worse than the “you’re stupid” argument is the “you’re evil” argument. This one is pretty big these days. And yes, as a Christian I believe in evil and I believe that some human beings are particularly, intentionally evil. I have to love them; I am commanded to do so. But I needn’t agree with them.

Of course, most of the people we disagree with are not evil. They aren’t enemies. They aren’t even stupid. They just see the world differently. They love their parents, love their spouses, love their kids, love their dog. They like a good cheeseburger. They’re about to start watching holiday Hallmark movies. Or they’re excited about deer season, a new series to stream or the Taylor Swift concert coming to their local arena.

They may live their lives by a passionately held faith. Or they may live their lives by a cultural and political ideology, separate from religion, that frames the way they see everything. They just want to live as they see fit. They are allowed to have a voice about it, “because America.”

When it comes to objective reality, some of them are very right. And some are also very wrong. But they aren’t generally stupid or evil. They simply know things and have experienced things that others can’t fully grasp.

Some of them have embraced bad ideas. Frequently it wasn’t intentional. It was their upbringing, their friends, things they read, suffering they endured. It’s likely that some of their attitudes have to do with genetic tendencies or very old cultural influences beyond their conscious control.

So as we go into this wild election week, and more importantly as we face living through the aftermath, it occurs to me that maybe we should try an experiment.

Maybe instead of thinking of our political opponents as stupid, or evil, we should think of them as captives of the bad ideas they embraced. This works for all of us. I’m not trying to tell anyone whose ideas are good or bad. I certainly have my own, strong, hopefully informed and sometimes incorrect opinions.

I just wish we could be less hateful in our division.

I thought about this a few days ago as I cared for a gentleman seeking help for opioid addiction. As the saying goes, “nobody ever sets out to be an addict.” He was kind and trying hard to do the right thing because his addiction had already nearly killed him. He wasn’t stupid and he wasn’t evil. He was in the throes of something bigger than himself.

Ideas can be like that. Politics can certainly be like that.

We don’t think of captives as stupid or evil. We think of them as people who need our help. We feel badly that they were taken. We want Liam Neeson to rescue them with extreme prejudice.

Now, all analogies are imperfect. I’m not suggesting everyone with whom you disagree is an innocent. And I’m certainly not suggesting that we shouldn’t stand for what we believe or express our views. But maybe we can those things with more compassion and less vitriol. With more light than heat, as they say.

This being Sunday, it occurs to me that this idea of captivity, this idea of sympathy and rescue is a deeply theological one. The Bible is full of references to human sin and the need for ransom, for redemption. Jesus refers to giving himself as a ‘ransom’ for all; the Greek is apolutrosis/ἀπολύτρωσις. It means a price for redemption and ransom from bondage. It is sometimes seen as payment of the human debt for sin, and sometimes as the price of freedom from the captivity, the slavery of sin. Again, this is from Jesus, the guy that (ironically) both sides keep telling us we should act more like; when it’s politically convenient, that is.

I know this might sound like some dewey-eyed sentimental exercise, some milquetoast, nice-guy Kumbaya around the fire thing. I don’t mean it that way. I just want to find ways to stop the crazy train. If we don’t do something, if we don’t stop escalating our arguments and dehumanizing and name-calling those across the aisle, we’ll eventually worry less about counting ballots and be faced with counting bodies. We don’t need to go there again.

So just maybe if we could see others as captives we could see them more clearly as humans in need. We could see them as humans struggling with their own issues, their own needs and wounds, their own internal dialogues.

Maybe we could rescue one another for a while and stop depending on any politician to do it for us.

Evil people? Stupid people? There are probably fewer than we think. At least I comfort myself with that belief.

But people who are captives? They’re simply everywhere. And the more we yell at them, the more we call them names, the more likely they are to stay safe behind the bars and walls that hold them.

Edwin