--- Nick Arnett <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> wrote:
Oy. Could this be ANY more polarizing?
I cannot equate "contributed to" to "blame?"
Why not?
Because they mean two different things. The blame game drives us apart from one another -- how else do terrorists justify their actions but with a self-righeous conviction that we are to blame for their troubles?
Decide that the other guys are to blame and that I have the right, if not the obligation, to straighten them out by wiping them off the earth, if necessary -- that's the path to hell, paved with hubris.
Well, when people are crashing airplanes into buildings or, say, shooting a couple of hundred kids in the back, I'd say that the unhealthy thing is telling yourself that there _isn't_ someone to blame.
That sounds to me like another way to obsess about blame. I'm not willing to rent out space in my head to terrorists, which is how I see giving in to the blame game. When I fail and yield to that thinking, I'm surrendering my nothing less than my freedom, yielding to the fantasy their behavior is forcing a certain response from me. Ultimately, it's like I'm a little kid, justifying hitting Tommy because he "made me angry." I know that I can choose more freedom than to just react.
No, I don't think so. If you are so committed to refusing to blame people that you think the _wrong_ actions of the United States "contributed to" 9/11, you aren't being morally mature, you're just abdicating your position as a moral being. If you can't make a judgment _then_, then you're not rejecting narcissism, you're rejecting _morality_.
In my experience, self-righteousness is the very worst sort of immorality because when I practice it, I kid myself into thinking I'm being good. In contrast, virtually every other kind of misbehavior lacks such ingrained hypocrisy, despite rationalization.
You see it as refusing to blame people, I see it as disengaging from the kind of thinking that turns me into a slave to self-righteousness and an addict to personal power. None of which is to suggest that disengaging from such selfishness is easy; it is not, as it requires something that seems to go completely against my nature -- a spirit of self-surrender, which I suspect you see as surrender to terrorists, in this case, eh?
Nick
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