Episode 73. Love Your Enemy

What in life deserves our time and attention and what things don't. I hope that as we consider that question along with other topics on this show, that we can all learn to live our lives just a little more intentionally. This is Seth Roberts. Thanks for joining me on Skipping Stones - “Love Your Enemy.”

I've hated people deeply. And if you're being honest, so have you, anyone who says they've never hated someone is lying to themselves, but is our nature truly so constraining that there's nothing for us to do about that? The more I think on my enemies, the harder it becomes to hate them, even if I still am at odds with them.

I have found in my life that everyone I have ever spoken to thinks they're in the right. They'll gimme detailed arguments for why someone else was terrible and why they were right. I've also made similar arguments to justify my dislike of other people. On a few occasions, I've even had the privilege of hearing both sides of dispute tell me why the other was wrong, and they were right.

No one ever seems to think they're wrong, and it isn't always super clear cut. If we are always right and everyone else is always wrong and we all think that way, then who is actually wrong? Obviously, we're going to be wrong at least some of the time. Or maybe one facet of our argument may be wrong. The other thing I've come to realize is that if we were someone other than ourselves who was not involved in the conflict, we would likely find some element of our enemy story that we could sympathize with, for better or for worse, but certainly to my severe annoyance as a kid, whenever I would complain about someone else to my father, he would take up their side.

He would start to challenge whatever I was upset about. And it was incredibly invalidating and annoyed the hell out of me. But some of the time, and maybe more than just some of the time, he made good points. He would make me consider what their perspective might be. And once my rage goggles came off, I could often relate in some way to the situation of my enemy.

The thing is that our minds will likely always figure out who we like and who we don't like without much effort on our part. But in spite of that, I think it's worth considering if anyone is really and truly your enemy, even those that are literally trying to harm us may actually be less an enemy to us and more of an enemy to themselves.

Anyway. When people try to hurt us, it may be because they hate us, resent us, or threatened by us, et cetera, but the reasons they hate us, resent us and may even feel threatened by us, may have much less to do with you than you realize. People are inherently self-centered. How they interact with you is based primarily on how you make them feel, not the other way around.

I don't actually see anything wrong with that. By the way, if our desires were oriented towards something outside of ourselves, we would probably not be able to exist. Some amount of self-interest is required to stay alive, but it's a beautiful thing when someone is able to overcome their self-interest for the benefit of others.

Part of what makes it so hard to look past ourselves is we don't typically have a great understanding of ourselves in the moment. Our emotions overwhelm the rational mind and make it hard to see clearly. We may be in conflict with someone because we feel threatened, because being around that person makes us feel like we are less than.

Part of our conflict may have to do with our own broken interpretation of how the world is supposed to operate. Maybe we were simply hungry at the time of the argument. At any rate, sometimes we convince ourselves that we understand the landscape when we're in the middle of a dense forest, we need to get above the tree line in order to really know the full picture.

As much as we struggle to understand ourselves, I think we struggle even more to fully comprehend our enemies. There's almost always a reason to sympathize for your enemies. More often than not, they themselves don't understand their own internal landscape. They may have been hurt by something before you even argued with them, but they don't know it.

Maybe a person that resorts to physical violence against you did it because that's the only way they ever learned to deal with what they feel. Maybe another person mistreats you because they are simply blind to the fact that what they're doing is indeed unfair to you. Maybe that person had something so bad happened to them that it forever skewed the way they interpret the world for the worst.

Now, to be fair, I think some people really are pretty terrible. And I think we may have good reasons to dislike them, but we all more or less start out with a blank slate in life and more than just our genes shape who we are. It may seem entirely counterintuitive to try to understand a person that is actively hurting you, but understanding and coming to a place where you can make sense of someone doing terrible things is not something you are doing for them.

It's something you do for your own benefit. Loving our enemies is not a selfless act. It lets you see the world from a clear vantage point, which provides greater understanding. Greater understanding in turn takes away the worst sting of the pain someone can cause you. We need to try and love our enemies, not because they're deserving of love, but because you are deserving of love and we are all someone's enemy.

If you can find a way to see yourself in the eyes of the enemy, it's hard to hate them. With so much heat and intensity, we share something with all people. We even share something with all living things. We are all driven by fear, hunger, pain, and we all experience hardship. We all do things for a reason.

Even the most atrocious people started out like the rest of us. Once upon a time. Too often the very voice in your head is going to be your worst enemy, but somehow, most of us manage to not hate ourselves. Hopefully, maybe the voice inside our heads is worthy of our hatred. Because of the pain it causes you.

But deep down we know that that voice is a part of us and so we don't, in fact, we are more likely to hate the part of us that the negative voice is yelling at that special part of us that we esteem to be, quote us, exists in every soul. We may be taken over by the worst parts of ourselves from time to time, but there is a part of us inside that exists outside of our actions and deserves to be loved.

So love that your enemy has that piece of them that is worth loving and hate. The negative actions that they take, sympathize for them because they are more often than not victims to the life they have led or a victim to themselves. We need to love our enemies, not because they are worthy of it. But because you are.  This is skipping Stones - “Love Your Enemy.”

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