Flattery as sloth and therefore aggression

I am reminded recently of a quote I had read as a young adult, fresh out of high school, and listening religiously to the Indigo Girls for lessons on how to approach the path before me. I’m an obsessive reader of album liner notes: in the liner notes of one Indigo Girls album is printed a quote by Marge Piercy. I have never really been able to get into her work, and at the time, at the age of 19, the quote struck me as trite. Today, I get it: “High energy doesn’t mean ‘fast’. High energy has to do with heart.”

Is it possible to vest heart into each of the numerous activities we fill our schedules with? If we’re moving so fast we can hardly think – and I mean contemplate – until we are too exhausted to enjoy the fruits of our labor, is there room for heart?

When we’re furiously busy working, or stacking our c.v.s, or simply ‘keeping busy’, we sometimes employ words to serve as surrogate for actual feelings. We take cues from society on modes of affectionate behavior, such as paying another a compliment, then crank up the volume. Flattering is often confused for complimenting; they are not the same. Flattery always superfluous: High energy, as Marge Piercy puts it, has to do with heart. What we lack in heart, we will make up with words, cheap ones and too many of them. It’s slothful. In this way, we can see that it’s actually a form of aggression. It’s not possible for one to be human and indifferent. We can only be either loving or aggressing. There is no in-between. For the flatterer, words have come to mean more that action; they have forgotten that words signify reality and that it’s the mere words that are the substance.

This doesn’t necessarily mean that the flatterer is unloving and loathing. Rather it means that the flatterer is riddled with doubt, doubts about meaning, the meaning of things, “things” such as people and deeds. And because people and deeds are contingent to Life, they have doubts of the meaning of Life, therefore. They have lost faith in meaningfulness. And Love is the only meaning.

"Ego-love" (not to be confused with love-of-self)

When someone loves their ego, they are unable to truly love anyone else. For this person self-interest will always trump the best interests of others. This is a learned tendency. The ego has learned to feed itself in times of starvation. In other words, when this person was unable to feel the love of others – particularly very significant people in her younger years – she has learned to compensate for this lack by loving herself above others. All the energy of her love had become self-directed, and she continues to move through life in this mode.

The one’s who have gone through life loving their ego most become the most difficult for others to love. The love of ego is a very durable condition. But there is a cure, an antidote to the durable ego, and it’s to shower this person with a love like they’ve never known before, one that is endless and without conditions. To love the ego-lover in this way can be an exercise in frustration, pain, and discouragement. Therefore it requires the loving one to be as ego-free as he can possibly muster. The ego-lover is the last person we should give up on – they are the reason why love and lovers exist. It is not love if we’re doing it for what we get out of it. It is meant to be given. Also, the condition of ego-love is highly contagious and must be extinguished wherever we find it.

Restore to them their naturally divine ability to love by being an example of it. Restore their faith in love and humanity.

A Conundrum

What about a person who puts the good of many over the love of his life, i.e. his own good and the good of his love? What if the works of the person inspires hope in a community – even a worldwide community – while leaving his wife husbandless and his children fatherless? Is serving the community, and possibly generations following, the greater good? Is it worth sacrificing the love of one’s soulmate or family and the confidence (i.e. faith) of his loved ones? Is it worth risking their faith in him and, more importantly, themselves? They are, let’s say, five of them. The members of the community he serves is innumerable.

At the end of a day of saving-the-world, this person comes back to a lonely life. The one’s closest to him had abandoned him. He goes to bed alone – and possibly anguished by his loneliness – knowing that going to bed means waking up again to another active day of world-saving. There, he is surrounded by people who need him and who make him feel needed. They don’t really know or care how lonely he really is; they are working on a greater good together.

The (former) loved ones of this person, meanwhile, go on with their lives with a little more doubt than there was before. Since the lover/partner/father chose ‘the cause’ over them, they have had a little less confidence in themselves, in life, in love, and in the world. I think it’s out of this lack of faith, this despondence, that we do things that are less than our best, things that are possibly our worst. The faithless – or faith-handicapped – may not wreak havoc prolifically or even ostensibly. But the kind of harm the faith-handicapped is capable of is effective and potentially epidemic. It’s the kind of injury they have experienced. And because they now know of it’s existence – as if they had bitten into the Forbidden Fruit – they can’t help but cause this kind of injury to others.

This kind of injury is the capacity to break another’s heart. And I think it’s the most insidious problem in the world. It’s the broken, faithless heart that effects evil.