Labels that become self-destructive weapons
When a group of people who have a particular belief system label themselves to indicate their beliefs, this is a signifier. This is who we are and what we believe. We do this in Syntropic World. Unless the borders are closed to be part of the group, then the choice is for people holding similar beliefs to decide to participate.
But beliefs without living them, acting on them – in all things – are empty, false gods. The global flood of this type of hypocrisy today is exhausting. Integrity has become the exception.
When that same group of people create another label for all those who attack or disagree with their beliefs, they immediately create a signifier for in-group, out-group and, in that signifier lies the Pattern Integrity of being a victim, with righteous superiority and the intrinsic design for battle woven in. The label itself becomes the weapon of everything the label seeks to prevent. In so doing, in amplification, it loses any significance.
You can have a set of beliefs and practices that do no harm to others and allow others to have their own beliefs and practices that do no harm to you. Peaceful co-existence between different cultures and tribes has happened many times for thousands of years. It is only when one side says they are the superior ones, the special ones, that we enter the field of destruction between.
This is very easy to do, by the way. I can believe that those people who care less about climate change are delusional. In my righteous superiority, I create the divide. Beware this.
It gets complicated when the actions of one group might affect the choices of another.
This is why we have regulations and boundaries. Don’t drive drunk. You might kill someone. Don’t pollute. It kills.
When a group of people have created a label that indicates a unique brand of discrimination and attack when applied only to them, they have, often inadvertently, also woven into their culture a separation and righteousness, a specialness, that by its very existence, amplifies alienation, and results in the exact opposite of what they desire. Acceptance.
Add to this unique labelling the failure to practice the beliefs they espouse, then we might not find it curious why the attack on them by others amplifies.
By their choice and actions, they wrote the invitation.
We are special. When you attack us, you are attacking our specialness. We have the right to be special, and you do not. Your attack is not permitted. However, we can attack anyone we like because we have ‘earned the right’ by the nature of our history. Our history gives us the right to do anything at all, to anyone. It justifies everything. (It never does. If it did, the beaten child who becomes a child beater would be justified to beat their child. Compassion and justice are not the same.)
I read these words, and I hear the echoes of the words that amplified during COVID. I can do whatever I like; I do not need a mask, even if I am infected and I give you COVID. That is my right.
This horrid contagion is the real precession of COVID. Rights completely untethered from responsibility.
This is not about rights. This is about self-centred people who believe they are superior and who take no responsibility for their actions in the world.
The label itself, the signifier of their specialness, is the very thing that will destroy them.
As Ta-Nihisi Coates said, my oppression will not save me.
Stop labelling as the oppressed, stop being oppressed (even if you are), and start to take responsibility for what you can do, how you got here, and why people find your actions so offensive.
Photo Taken January 14th, 2025, Article written January 14th, 2025.