Our Search for Meaning and the Dangers of Possession
by Lisa Marchiano.
Eady gives his own cogent definition of a crusader mentality: “an extreme self-righteousness based on the conviction that they are doing the secular equivalent of God’s work.” He continues with a warning:
The danger of the crusader mentality is that it turns the world in a battle between good and evil. Actions that would otherwise seem extreme and crazy become natural and expected. I didn’t think twice about doing a lot of things I would never do today.
https://quillette.com/2018/02/21/search-meaning-dangers-possession/
“There is no such thing as not worshipping,” wrote novelist David Foster Wallace. “Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship.” G. Jung would have wholeheartedly agreed. He posited that psychic life is motivated by a religious instinct as fundamental as any other, and that this instinct causes us to seek meaning. “The decisive question for man is: Is he related to something infinite or not?” Jung wrote in his autobiography. “That is the telling question of his life.”1
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Ideologies and isms make for easy objects of worship, substituting handily for religions of old. “Our fearsome gods have only changed their names,” Jung wrote. “They now rhyme with -ism.”6 Political or social ideologies are appealing because they tend to confer de facto special status upon adherents, and offer a clear path to transformation. They therefore set us upon a quest toward a better life or a better society, and so provide compelling structures that dictate meaning and purpose.
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Fervent certainty such as that evidenced by [school shooter] Roof may be the surest indication that we have fallen into an archetypal inflation. This kind of certainty is seen in activism along the political spectrum. Such certainty brooks no disagreement, holds space for no nuance, and cannot tolerate any doubt.
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Eady’s world became divided into what he calls “the righteous and the wrong-teous.” There were those chosen and special – and everyone else. Ingroup status could be maintained only by strict adherence to the special truths. “When I was part of groups like this, everyone was on exactly the same page about a suspiciously large range of issues. Internal disagreement was rare. The insular community served as an incubator of extreme, irrational views.”
Eady gives his own cogent definition of a crusader mentality: “an extreme self-righteousness based on the conviction that they are doing the secular equivalent of God’s work.” He continues with a warning:
The danger of the crusader mentality is that it turns the world in a battle between good and evil. Actions that would otherwise seem extreme and crazy become natural and expected. I didn’t think twice about doing a lot of things I would never do today.
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An awareness of our dependence upon that which is larger breeds the humility without which wisdom is not possible. It reminds us that our ego is just a small part of us, and is dependent upon – and easily influenced by – irrational, unconscious forces that are beyond our full understanding. We must be humble before the destructive capacity that exists within each one of us, and like the Roman slave, we must remind ourselves occasionally, that we are merely ordinary.
Bob Dylan (from comments)
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody, yes indeed
You’re gonna have to serve somebody
Well, it may be the devil or it may be the Lord
But you’re gonna have to serve somebody
This is Water by novelist David Foster Wallace.
http://bulletin-archive.kenyon.edu/x4280.html
Time magazine has ranked This Is Water among the best commencement speeches ever delivered https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/This_Is_Water
In the day-to-day trenches of adult life, there is actually no such thing as atheism. There is no such thing as not worshipping. Everybody worships. The only choice we get is what to worship. And an outstanding reason for choosing some sort of God or spiritual-type thing to worship-be it J.C. or Allah, be it Yahweh or the Wiccan mother-goddess or the Four Noble Truths or some infrangible set of ethical principles-is that pretty much anything else you worship will eat you alive.
The really important kind of freedom involves attention, and awareness, and discipline, and effort, and being able truly to care about other people and to sacrifice for them, over and over, in myriad petty little unsexy ways, every day. That is real freedom. The alternative is unconsciousness, the default-setting, the “rat race”-the constant gnawing sense of having had and lost some infinite thing.