Me v. Me &
You v. You

by Douglas Milburn

The problem is us. If you don’t instantly understand "us" to mean all humans together, that failure is itself the number one symptom of the cause of the problem.

Certainly, because of its wealth and power, America has a special responsibility for dealing creatively and justly with the problem.

And certainly, America has, as a wealthy part of the six billion of us, added significantly to the problem.

The case can be made and made well that America has no mote in its eye but a very large beam. Bafflement and confusion are compounded when those outside America speak so harshly without realizing that they too have beams, though smaller to be sure, in their criticizing eyes.

There is no excusing America’s massive misbehaviors. But there is also no excusing the almost-as-massive misbehaviors of others.

The problem is not America. The problem is us.

Once, fair judgments were easy. The omnivorous rift between the oppressed and the oppressor was just so. Now, with spreading affluence quickly coming in the reach of so many, such judgments, though out of habit still easy, are neither fair nor helpful.

Granted, America still has too much, and is still hot on the trail of getting too much more. And that’s an aberrant behavior that must be faced and dealt with.

At the same time, unprecedented numbers of humans have now within their grasp enough to eat, at least modestly worthwhile work to do, and all the rest.

No paradise this. Far, far from it. But the three terms of the old argument are shifting.

1.
First, long ago and for a long time, there has been the tyranny of nature over humans. Famine, disease, disaster.

2.
Then came the tyranny of humans over humans in its countless forms, some capricious, some cleverly contrived, but all brutally and bloodily exploitative.

3.
Now, as comfort and stability distantly approach, we come finally to face the third, and by far the most difficult and insidious tyranny: that internal one of each human over himself: tyrant ego, which knows no nationality, no ethnicity, no religion, no ideology, no philosophy, no science, no art.

The old battle lines, outside—us vs. nature, some of us vs. others of us—are still there and in many ways still relevant and dangerous.

The oldest, invisible battle line, the one rarely considered—me vs. my self. you vs. your self—now comes faintly, faintly into view, storm clouds obscuring a distant troubled rainbow.

Go back a few centuries and you run into Pascal’s sighting of the enemy in his remark about how all the trouble in the world comes from the fact that a person cannot sit alone for an hour in a room.

Go back a lot more centuries and there’s Buddha going on and on about, well, desire as the root of all evil.

To move toward fixing the problems of the first two tyrannies—nature over man, man over man—we contrived imposing solutions from without: technology and reductive science with their brutal man(!)-handling of nature; systems of government based on forced compromise and ill-temperedly shared power.

The third tyranny, me v. me and you v. you, admits of no such external solution.

To be sure, solutions exist, age-old, time-tested solutions. But now, as always, we are constantly distracted from them by the glitter of new toys, the shallow delight of acquisition, the savage joy of winning.

Tyranny is its own reward.

What tyrant overthrows herself?

Why bother, we think, fondling our toys, our money, or enviously eying the toys and money of others and plotting ways to get stuff for ourselves.

Tyranny is its own prison, from whose tiny windows only fragments of rainbows are seen, or at night a clutch of stars. Birdsong is distant, trees but a memory, and childhood a dream with touches of nightmare.

The good walk among us, invisible, perfectly invisible to the greedy, violent crowd. They do, and they live in miracles. That they, or one of them, might somehow touch and "cure" us is the most childish, primitive of wishful thinking.

Yes, we are a worry, a tragedy to them. A stain on all rainbows. They have done, still do, what is possible: erect signposts, arrows, pointing, labeled "This Way Out."