Spiritual Plagues

Our responses to perceived threats can be more dangerous than the threats themselves.

Source: Richard L

A shepherd returned from the high pastures with news.

“I saw tracks in the snow, blood trails, and a mangled carcass,” he said.

Word spread. By nightfall, the village had changed.

One man began counting his neighbor’s sheep against his own. A woman wept and barred her door, demanding that guards stand watch until dawn. A villager recalled an old grievance with the family across the square and decided that they were somehow the source of the trouble. Doors that had stood open for a generation were bolted. Greetings that had once passed freely across the square evaporated.

Neither wolves nor lycanthropes ever descended on the village. They did not have to. The villagers had been struck by a sickness that needed no creature to carry it, a plague that travels along the arteries of trust and devours them from the inside. Such contagions can descend quickly, even if no predator ever does. And they can destroy the community more quickly.

Vulnerabilities

Every human lives with three vulnerabilities, reflected in three questions:

Who am I?
Will I survive?
Am I in control?

The first exposes us to threats against our identity. The second confronts us with insecurity or danger. The third casts doubt upon our agency.

Far from being flaws, identity, security, and agency are elementary aspects of the human condition. We need them to live in the world, yet these are the most vulnerable places. The world is full of threats, but we must temper our response to those threats, real or imagined, so as to arrest the plague before it spreads.

A spiritual plague originates not in the threat but in our response to it, as that response can be more dangerous than the threat itself. When the response settles into a permanent condition, we risk alienating ourselves or carrying the infection to others.

Symptoms

Envy is the symptom of a threatened identity. One feels diminished by what another possesses.

She has what I should have.
Her success makes me smaller.
Things would be just if all were brought down.

Envy is an ancient reflex, evolved in ages when one member’s hoarding could starve the whole clan. With its cousin guilt, envy confronts a perceived inequity: if another has more, I feel envy; if another has less, I feel guilt. In the roving clan, when people shared work and surplus communally, the clan survived. But when an emotion like envy becomes an internalized state—disconnected from a communal context or read onto a complex civilization—envy can turn into a destructive contagion.

Fear is the second symptom. It is the response to insecurity.

Danger is everywhere.
We need someone to protect us.
Freedom is a luxury we can no longer afford.

This is the voice of the witch hunt and the moral panic, of the security apparatus that promises to watch over us and instead keeps us in its grip, of the emergency measure that outlives any emergency. People in fear’s grip grow paranoid, then docile, then permissive. Those who offer safety in exchange for freedom are almost always stoking the very fear they offer to assuage, and they will return neither the freedom nor the power they seize so long as the people tremble.

Resentment is the third symptom, namely the feeling of righteous victimhood.

My suffering is someone’s fault.
Someone must answer for it.
If we cannot rise, let no one stand.

Notice how this differs from envy, though the two are easily confused. Envy covets while resentment accuses. Resentment begins in injury, real or imagined, and justice can only be served by destroying the resented. Envy wants your place. Resentment wants your punishment. The two sometimes travel together, but they are not the same.

Resentment animates the revolution that devours its own, sustains the feud that outlasts the grievance, and hunts the scapegoat to the altar. And it spreads. As the magisters teach us, an extended peace and swelling surplus breed a particular kind of mob, one bound together by a sexless grievance. Sometimes it seems as if this resentful mob is the tax that prosperous societies levy on themselves. Like locusts gathering at harvest time, the resentful arrive when there is much to lose.

Yet each of these, in its rawest form, is a human signal. Envy indicates when one feels diminished, fear where one feels exposed, and resentment where one feels inexplicably weakened, victimized, or wronged by society. One who has never known any of the three either lacks a heartbeat or has never been tested by the world. Still, our task is not to purge the signal but to read it, moderate it, and regard it in equipoise.

Contagion

Failure to control envy, fear, or resentment can unleash a plague. What starts as one man’s reaction can become a contagion of ten, then a hundred, and then a thousand. The fever passes from breast to breast until the collective demands that someone do something, which usually requires offices, budgets, and trained enforcers. As the feeling mutates into a creed, indulging the symptom is no longer a sin to be confessed but a duty to be executed. Officially, vice is crowned as virtue. The people no longer govern their envy, fear, or resentment.

They are governed by them.

Envy-based movements level everything. Their hordes cut tall poppies and raze high towers. Fear drives movements of conformity and suspicion. Their mobs chase specters by torchlight. Resentment mistakes punishment for justice, and revenge for recompense. All such movements, after welcoming chaos, invite tyrants who promise to make it all go away.

Tyrannies

Institutionalized envy becomes a regime of expropriation, in which those who seize buy the loyalty of supplicants with what they have seized. The regime can never rest because someone always stands head and shoulders above the crowd. So the regime punishes excellence, rewards dependency, and at last extinguishes the will to risk anything at all, short of scaling the wall.

Institutionalized fear becomes a regime of suspicion and censorship. Informants listen behind thin walls; the censor pins the dissident tongue to the table; men in heavy boots darken the door before the window can be reached. Such a regime corrodes the trust that makes watchmen unnecessary, silences the open inquiry on which any living culture feeds, and, having justified every seizure as protection, centralizes power.

Institutionalized resentment becomes a regime of the scapegoat and the demagogue. The resentful tear everything down, or else they invest their hope in an avatar who promises a reckoning. But the reckoning never comes, because the avatar needs the enemy more than it needs the victory. So it manufactures fresh enemies without end, binds all authority to the accusation, and feeds on an outrage it must keep stoking to survive.

Inoculation

If these plagues are native to our kind, we cannot pretend otherwise. We can only cultivate the practices that counter each affliction.

Against envy, there is gratitude. Gratitude turns the gaze from what another holds to what one has been given or has earned. The grateful soul sees that another’s flourishing subtracts nothing from her own, and that a life is a gift and not a debt owed to her. Train gratitude by giving thanks aloud, then by admiring openly what others do well, for admiration is gratitude for others’ excellence. Where possible, let gratitude ripen into generosity, as wise giving leaves both giver and receiver better off.

Against fear, there is courage. Courage does not abolish fear but keeps it in restraints. The courageous accept that to live is to be exposed, and that the freedom to take a risk is bound up in the duty to answer for the risks one takes. Train courage not only in danger but in the face of challenges: speak plainly when silence would be safer. Endeavor to act despite uncertainty, until dread loosens its grip on the heart.

Against resentment, there is responsibility. Where resentment places blame, responsibility claims agency. One’s locus of control lies at the center of his sovereignty. In sovereignty, one finds the power to choose how he will respond, even to injustice. Right action is possible. Train responsibility in service, self-government, and acknowledging fault. Always make things right. And when someone injures you, don’t pardon the offender, but refuse to let the wound dictate what comes next.

Transmutation

Envy, fear, and resentment are the price of having an identity that can be diminished, a body that can be injured, and a freedom that can be taken. They can turn into spiritual plagues only when we allow ourselves to be ruled by them. No civilization has ever endured by submitting to these plagues. The great ones learned instead to transmute them.

Self-possession keeps the wolves at bay.