Mindset
Who Have We Become?
“Good moral character is the first essential in a man.”
– George Washington
To be accurate to the original quote, I chose not to change “men” to “human beings.” However, this truth should include everyone.
Far too many people are eroding this foundational property of the human spirit daily. It’s become fashionable to defame, deride, blame, accuse, and insult others.
It’s become too easy, maybe even too rewarding, to be negative, accusatory, or shout profanity.
Character defamation is a sport now.
This is not exclusive to one side or another side of society, as some would wish us to believe. The fabric of vulgarity and dishonesty flows like a golden thread through far too many—especially those in leadership of any sort.
We are far too quick to forget the lessons learned in times when humanity has reached a precipice of character.
Often, during a time like the Second World War, when evil reached a zenith, our history books portray the evil of the losers and the goodness of those who prevailed.
However, that is not the real truth.
There was evil everywhere. There was no perfect side. Most certainly, those who perpetrated such destruction, torture, and atrocity upon so many innocent souls have become figures in the representation of the worst of human nature, as they should.
But thread throughout this betrayal of human character were sub-stories of rape, torture, malfeasance, and abject evil that those who would one day be painted as the victor perpetrated upon those who would one day be declared the loser.
But the outcome, the sense of it, was that those who fought on the good side did so under the pretense that what they stood for was freedom and some fabric of moral character.
Being somehow better than those who represented the worst in us. By winning, this belief was seemingly codified in our sociological fabric.
After the war, an almost perfect image of our mind’s belief of what would/should be good and right was painted into the cultural mosaic of the homes, furniture, cars, and lifestyles of the time.
Television became the sociological representation of our perfect lives, creating perfect families and people. “Leave it to Beaver”, “The Andy Griffith Show”, “My Three Sons”……..everything was good, or so it seemed.
But so much perfection led to backlash and the sociological upheaval of the 60s. We aren’t really that good, it’s just not possible to be that good. But we like to believe we are better than the worst version of ourselves.
In the ’60s and ’70s, the tug of war between good and bad characters became more evident, Watergate shone a light on the temple of righteousness that had been politics to that point. There is before Nixon and after Nixon, and these times are not the same.
Our attention was focused on the evil that would be communism and mother Russia (The Soviet Union at the time), there always has to be an enemy. Someone or something who’s character is worse than ourselves otherwise we have to look within, and that’s not what we do.
The other side is worse; they do bad better than us. We do bad for a reason; they do it for something else. Our bad is a necessary evil; theirs is questionable at best. This keeps us focused on what matters: our sense that we are better than, or more than.
Funny how as we ascend through Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, it is the rare character who reaches back and pulls others up. More often than not, we reorient and distance ourselves. We look down upon them as though they are not once us. They are to be restrained or constrained. They should not be in our environment. We are better than them.
Television and movies portray us but also make us believe there is always a happy ending, or at least the fantasy of good and bad could be played out in stories rather than in our day to day.
Housed within our television diet was the media messaging, ever-shifting under our feet. Slowly, insidiously these media networks became finger pointers, judgers, and drivers of our preferred narrative. If we had a bias, and we all have bias, then these networks and their ever-growing list of influencing figures began to support our beliefs.
Those who didn’t, well they became the left of the right, or the far right and the far left. Anything they said was not worth listening to. It was all a lie. No truth to be found here.
Even then, we had no way to respond. We were forced to listen and talk amongst ourselves. We weren’t the problem, those in the television box were the problem.
And then came social media and the smartphone and everything has changed.
Now, those who have more can be shown to be less. Those who have less can influence their own. The power balance has shifted. In so doing, we’ve once again lost our way.
Now we see the character within all of us, the thing we try to suppress, but unfortunately exists in everyone.
People can say, without real retribution, what they are actually thinking.
I was talking to a friend the other day about a politician I thought was being maligned unfairly. He had made mistakes, he did things I didn’t think made sense, but I believed that his heart was in the right place. I questioned why people were so easily prone to vitriol and disdain for him on social media.
My friend said to me, “I think it…..I just don’t say it. I agree with what those people say about him in my mind, I just don’t say it out loud.”
Wow……and there it was. What we see today is a vehicle for expressing what is being said inside the minds of so many of us.
Perhaps this is why organized religion exists because we need a deity to tell us how to behave. Something better than us to extol the virtues of what we should be instead of what we are.
And yet, once we organize our religious beliefs, there we go again: us versus them. One is better than another; one viewpoint is so much more good than the others.
Oh, and then, as though our minds can’t handle the necessity to be good, those who lead our religious faith perpetrate upon the weakness of those who stand in community with them. We don’t have to look too far to see what ungodliness has been imposed upon so many souls unwittingly disguised by those in the purest of white linen cloth.
So it’s not about the right or the left, or the in-between. These are belief systems that free people have the right to explore and express, for that in and of itself is real freedom.
But the character part of the equation is our ability to hear each other’s views without judgment, to dance the delicate dance of compromise, and to find something that can work for all. Idyllic as it may be, this is the essence of character.
Stand for what you believe, but recognize this comes with the restraint of consideration of one’s fellow human being, not with their submission.
It’s a tough slog to create a civilized society, but the other option is anarchy and chaos as an outcome.
The central tenant of a civilized society, as the first president of the United States once said, is a human’s character.
This is what we need to find once again in a time where so much seems out of line.
