ENEMIES: From War to Wisdom Episode 28: Self-Righteousness and Moral Superiority

More than three centuries ago in 1793, the great poet and artist William Blake said, “Without Contraries is no progression. Attraction and Repulsion, Reason and Energy, Love and Hate, are necessary to Human existence.” And then in 1916, the imminent psychoanalyst Carl Jung wrote as though he were speaking to us today, “The present shows with appalling clarity how little able people are to let the other man’s argument count, although this capacity is a fundamental and indispensable condition for any human community.” At this moment, it seems as if we are persuaded of our own moral superiority in ways that can lead to not only our intolerance of others’ views and opinions, but to the impoverishment of our own. Today’s politics, social media, and popular memes enthrone self-righteousness and moral superiority as we rush to tear down anyone’s perspective that is different from our own cherished views. As many of us may now discredit systems of thought and artistic expressions from earlier cultures and periods of time, in this podcast, we ask the question “How are we cheated by our own self-righteousness and what can we do about it?”