SPIRITUAL SOAP: Don't Make More Enemies Than You Need To

Friendship is subversive.

Before we were The Black Sheep, we were a newsletter named Spiritual Soap. Please enjoy this article from our history!

Update: This is the last newsletter you’ll receive in this style!

From here on, my newsletter will be changing to focus on a subject that’s been crucial to my personal growth and work. It’s a subject that encapsulates the alienating experience a lot of us have gone through over the last few years as we’ve watched our society and the people in it change in ways we’ve refused to go along with.

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I’m sorry for the slowdown on my newsletter, but you’ll love what’s coming. Thank you for supporting me and giving me the time to work on a meaningful project that I can’t wait to finally share.

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I find myself compelled to reiterate basic truths nowadays. Partly because our culture seems hellbent on relearning old lessons, partly because I’m learning them myself. These lessons make the difference between a fulfilling life and a life of needless suffering.

But needless suffering is popular today; we’re encouraged to take the most antagonistic approach to even minor conflicts.

It’s called “empowering” when you righteously refuse to tolerate mistreatment, even if that mistreatment was invented by recasting inevitable errors as unacceptable attacks, like mispronounced names.

Today’s cultural regression encourages us to reassess the simple truths we thought we knew. I thought I knew why you should avoid making enemies needlessly, but then I watched the president deem a vast portion of the population as the enemy for not getting a vaccine they may or may not have needed. I’ve watched the media recast average people using a merry-go-round strategy of enemy-labeling: last week they were white supremacists, this week they’re paranoid conspiracy theorists, next week they’re domestic terrorists. With every new attempt to use the old strategy of character assassination, the same outcome is reached: division and bitterness are increased, cooperation and trust are decreased. The last few years have shown me exactly what makes old truths true and given me the zeal for my beliefs that only life in their absence can.

Whether it’s politicians, the media, or the everyday people around us, there’s a reason why cutting people off and demonizing anyone who disagrees with you has become more common: it’s easier. It’s harder to humanize people you disagree with. It’s harder to open yourself up and be authentic when you’re likely to be met with malicious criticism and rejection. It’s easier to do the malicious criticizing and rejecting instead.

We’re less charitable in our interpretations of what people do and say now because we’re in a race to the bottom. People have less faith in their ability to reason with others and less respect for the right of others to go their own way, wrong though it may be. People who are afraid of a specific outcome tend to bring about that outcome themselves. The anticipation of pain is often worse than the pain itself. If I attack you as a racist first, I’ve beat you to the possible punch—we’re already having the conflict I’ve been painfully anticipating. It’s the same pathology that leads some people to pick fights with their partner when everything’s going well. If you think you know what’s coming, why not land the first punch?

A culture embattled by the constant exchange of increasingly intense accusations of immorality is just a culture of people so accustomed to conflict and rejection that they rush to beat each other to the painful punch.

We’re using the emotional equivalent of auto-text to fill in the blanks with the worst outcome we can imagine and this pattern is doing exactly what it’s designed to do: isolate us.

I used to be the kind of person who would opt for the least charitable interpretation. An older man looking at me for too long in public? He’s a pervert with a misogynistic entitlement to make me feel uncomfortable for the benefit of his male gaze. A person with different political views than mine? They’re stupid, selfish, evil, or all three. Both of these perspectives offer no other logical response than to create distance between me and these terrible people. My unwillingness to humanize and look for good in the people I didn’t immediately recognize as on my side made them my enemies.

We can know almost nothing about a person, and yet feel confident in naming them our enemy.

With only a thought, I created the world I lived in. With another thought, I could’ve created a different world, one where an old man’s lingering gaze isn’t perverse, but mournful: do I remind him of his estranged daughter or dead wife? Is the person with different politics just a stupid, hateful human or are they trying to make sense of a confusing world in their own flawed way? Do they have some reason for their views that I’ve never encountered, but could learn from?

Humanizing the people we don’t like or understand is enjoyable in its own right. I can feel the expansion of my capacity to understand this world when I push myself to see things as more than just me vs you. But we’re capable of going further than simply refusing to see the people we disagree with as our enemies and granting them their complex humanity. This isn’t just praise for giving people the benefit of the doubt. I’m not only talking about overcoming the cognitive distortion that makes us assume everyone who isn’t overwhelmingly similar to us is against us. We’ve done more than that before. There are people we deeply disagree with who we’ve befriended.

By Katrien De Blauwer

I have friends I’m ideologically out of sync with. They’re not acquaintances or family, they’re genuine friends who I’ve relied on in tough moments and who celebrate my wins with me. I dislike their politics and I’ll openly disagree with them in conversation, but I treat them like a friend even in our disagreements. I don’t recast them as stupid or evil or selfish to dismiss their disagreements. In the best case, disagreement is a game we play together, going back and forth to share our side of the issue while always staying on the same side in our relationship.

When you recognize how useless it is to try controlling people, you can enjoy the reality of who they are. They’re not your enemy, they’re a window into another experience of life that you aren’t having.

I’m not naive or new age about this. I probably spend more time than most people sounding the alarm on how our material freedom in this world is being eroded. You might have no desire to control others, but when others are acting on their desire to control you, it’s a lot harder to see them as a window into another side of life instead of a threat. This is the part where many people miss a crucial element in what makes loving, authenticity, and understanding not just beautiful values, but weapons against their opposites.

No one looks less trustworthy than the person who responds to authenticity with deception.

No one looks weaker than the person who responds to love with fear.

No one looks more evil than the person who returns your kindness with malice.

If you truly believe in the autonomy of individuals and rejecting force as a tool to get your way, you will see the power in letting your enemies be the ones to admit they are your enemies. The best way to sway a crowd organically isn’t by telling them where to go, but by showing them where they’re going. Nothing is more convincing than watching the truth play out. When you approach the world with friendship, it has this subtle ability to lower the veil on everyone around you. It’s like the embodiment of the open-palm gesture.

A genuine invitation to mutual positive regard makes it clear that you aren’t hiding malice. It also makes it clear when other people are.

Treating the world as a potential friend doesn’t make you naive and it doesn’t make you vulnerable in the foolish way naivety does. Being willing to befriend everyone is just a willingness to be completely genuine and extend the first offer of mutualism. It’s vulnerable in the way that makes you stronger, which is to override the usual guarded and fearful programming that makes us wary of people unlike us. It’s vulnerable in the way that overcoming your ego and admitting you’re a flawed, fearful human is vulnerable. It’s vulnerable in the way that being the first one to try befriending a classmate at the start of the new school year was vulnerable.

There’s nothing lost in being genuinely open toward other people. If we want the opposite outcome of stoking bitterness, division, and mistrust, we should try the opposite approach of designating everyone that doesn’t immediately side with us as our enemies.

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