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Toxic Love
Toxic love is a modern strand of love that equates love with not giving any offense. And it is toxic. Instead of love, it breeds avoidance and intolerance.
One organization committed to tolerance is refusing to tolerate any change or even new people. Why? Because they have had irresolvable conflicts with some members a time in the distant past!
One organization committed to tolerance is refusing to tolerate any change or even new people. Why? Because they have had irresolvable conflicts with some members a time in the distant past!
But conflict is to be expected in any organization or even any relationship. Besides, shouldn’t we even welcome conflict? Doesn’t conflict promote growth?
Why then does this organization run from conflict? As one board member explained, the members are too concerned about being nice. Therefore, instead of dealing directly and honestly with conflict and differences of opinion, their commitment to niceness and to not hurting others’ feelings has led to avoidance. As a result, avoidance and alienation grew until it became intolerable – something difficult for “tolerant” people to stomach.
The board member explained that instead of re-examining their understanding of love and radical tolerance, they remain secretly defensive and intolerant of any possible threats. While, on the surface, they remain very nice people, their membership is dwindling.
This “niceness” of toxic love can be noted in many areas of Western society. Preserving niceness has become such an overriding concern, justice has become marginalized.
In Germany, 15 were wounded when one Afghani refugee reportedly desecrated a Koran:
∑ Four police officers, two badly, and 11 refugees were wounded in the clash. Seven police vehicles were also damaged during the riot that took around four hours to come under control. According to the officials, the person who tore pages from the Holy Quran had arrived from Afghanistan. Police took him into custody for his own safety. In other words, they arrested the one who violated Sharia blasphemy law, not the rioters. http://www.jihadwatch.org/2015/08/germany-refugees-riot-stone-police-over-torn-quran-15-wounded
The one who violated the niceness code was arrested, even though he hadn’t broken a law. Contrary to the requirements of justice, the rioters were not arrested.
Examples of toxic love abound. Western leaders cannot proclaim often enough that Islam is “a religion of peace,” despite all of the evidence to the contrary, even as their own nations are endangered this form of “peace.” In fact, Western niceness has gone the extra mile labeling anyone who doesn’t practice their form of niceness as “Islamophobes.” Western nations have even criminalized warnings about those who want to take over their country and turn it into an Islamic state.
We need to see ourselves as good, tolerant and accepting people, especially of people whose ways differ from ours. For this reason, we are susceptible to revolutionary ideas for the promotion of toxic love.
David Horowitz, a former Marxist, is now appalled by Marxism and Marxist strategies. In particular, he cites Saul Alinsky’s Rules for Radicals:
∑ The Alinsky radical has a single principle – to take power from the Haves and give it to the Have-nots… a destructive assault on the established order in the name of the “people.”
Have these radical changes actually helped “the people?” Well, we can’t ask the 100,000,000 who have been slaughtered in the process, However, each one of these experiments in utopian niceness have proved to be unsustainable nightmares.
Why then are Westerners continuing to talk about the radical change of income redistribution and all other forms of entitlement programs. Horowitz continues:
∑ This is the classic revolutionary formula… [they] get to feel good about themselves in the process.
Their love is a love for “the people,” and it has proved highly toxic. Why then do we continue to opt for toxic niceness in face of its bad fruit? Horowitz ascribed it to the desire to feel good about ourselves. His assessment is born out in many other areas.
In The Significant Life, attorney George M. Weaver argues that our quest for self-importance governs our lives:
∑ Individual humans are not concerned so much about the survival of the species as they are about their personal survival or significance. In order to push ourselves beyond our confining space-time limits, we as individuals try to set ourselves apart from the rest of humanity. It is unsettling to admit that one is average or ordinary – a routine person. (7)
Weaver documents this quest in many ways:
∑ Salvador Dali once said, “The thought of not being recognized [is] unbearable”…Lady Gaga sings, “I live for the applause, applause, applause…the way that you cheer and scream for me.” She adds in another song, “yes we live for the Fame, Doin’ it for the Fame, Cuz we wanna live the life of the rich and famous.” (7)
However, “success” and significance can be achieved in other ways besides niceness. Weaver writes about the opposite attempt to establish one’s mark on the world:
∑ In 2005 Joseph Stone torched a Pittsfield, Massachusetts apartment building… After setting the blaze, Stone rescued several tenants from the fire and was hailed as a hero. Under police questioning, Stone admitted, however, that he set the fire and rescued the tenants because, as summarized at trial by an assistant district attorney, he “wanted to be noticed, he wanted to be heard, he wanted to be known.” (44)
If we cannot be nice, we can achieve our feeling of goodness in other perverse ways. On December 8, 1980, Mark David Chapman, a zealous fan of the Beatle, John Lennon, first obtained his idol’s autograph before gunning him down. He explained:
∑ “I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else’s importance, someone else’s success. I was ‘Mr. Nobody’ until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth.” At his 2006 parole hearing, he stated: “The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive… I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self-esteem.” (47)
By attaching himself to someone greater, Chapman was able to elevate himself. Was it “low self-esteem” or merely Chapman’s own way to achieve what everyone else is trying to achieve – importance? Weaver reports that:
∑ More than two hundred people confessed in 1932 to the kidnapping and murder of the infant son of famed aviator Charles Lindbergh. (50)
The need for importance – and this is often expressed in the form of toxic love - is so powerful that it seems that people are willing to pay almost any price for it. However, observing the insubstantiality of this pursuit, some have converted absurd quest into a quest for ultimate meaning. Niceness might take the form of a moral-crusader. The UN claims: “The precious dignity of the individual person is a central humanist value” (82-83). Even if true, is this mission just another expression of toxic love, disguised as a nobler quest? Is it a deceptive perversion of the real source of significance?
The Prophet Isaiah offered an alternative solution consisting of spiritual food:
∑ “Come, all you who are thirsty, come to the waters; and you who have no money, come, buy and eat! Come, buy wine and milk without money and without cost. Why spend money on what is not bread, and your labor on what does not satisfy? Listen, listen to me, and eat what is good, and you will delight in the richest of fare. Give ear and come to me; listen, that you may live… Seek the Lord while he may be found; call on him while he is near. Let the wicked forsake their ways and the unrighteous their thoughts. Let them turn to the Lord, and he will have mercy on them, and to our God, for he will freely pardon.” (Isaiah 55:1-3, 6-7)
When we attempt to find our identity through our performance, it is almost inevitable that we will succumb to toxicity. Why? If we are honest with ourselves, our performance is blighted and will fail to give us the lift from our feelings of guilt, shame, and dissatisfaction with life. Instead, we are compelled to reach out for greater and greater toxic infusions. Rather, we only find rest in the unchanging love of our Savior.
New York School of the Bible: http://www.nysb.nyc/
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