Lin Weeks Wilder

Lin Weeks Wilder

Books, conversion, faith, Happiness, medical mystery, New Testament, novel, peace, Prayer, Virtues

Us Versus Them: The Deliciousness of Moral Outrage

Us versus them: the deliciousness of moral outrage

Us versus them: the deliciousness of moral outrage

Moral outrage: Is there anything more satisfying? More captivating…even delicious?

“Can you believe what he said?”

“Did you see what he wrote?”

“Can you believe what she is wearing?”

It’s endless, isn’t it? Even before the advent of social media- if any of us can recall back that far, that is, men and women of all races, creeds, and ages have and continue to feel delight in expressing outrage. And when it’s moral outrage, well, the gloves come off, don’t they?

I recall vividly knocking, more accurately pounding, on the door of my good friend Almita back when we lived in Nevada. I was drenched in it, moral outrage, it was pouring out of every orifice.

“I just had to talk with you!”

She listened patiently to my rant. There was no other word for the torrent of my words.

When certain I was done, Almita was quiet for a long minute. Then she spoke.

“Lin, I have found that when such strong emotions are evoked by the actions of another, it is often something in ourselves that we are reacting to. Something we dislike intensely because we are embarrassed or perhaps ashamed of the feeling when it appears unbidden.”

WHAM! POW!!!

Staring at my wise friend, I was flabbergasted, dumbfounded. Because rather than joining me in my righteous vitriol, she looked through it to the other side where truth lies.

I despise precipitous judgement, made with an incomplete knowledge of facts, context, injustice. When I do it, I feel shame at my unfairness to others-at my rush to judgement. Because, of course, it’s the me I cannot stand that stares back at me. It has nothing at all to do with them.

We find, if willing to look and then listen, that those most justifiable of feelings of moral outrage., cannot be justified.

Consider Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s comments about his horrendous treatment in the Gulag by Russian officials.

“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

Indeed.

Carl Jung termed that part of each of us the ‘shadow.’ For Jung coming to grips with the darkness in ourselves was the most critical work of life. Jung’s last book, Modern Man is Search for a Soul was instrumental in my return to God and faith. Just as it was for Dr. Lindsey McCall. The protagonist in my first novel.

Keep in mind as you read this next few paragraphs that Carl Jung considered himself an atheist throughout much of his life.

“It had taken Lindsey just two days to read Jung’s Modern Man in Search of a Soul.

“She had enjoyed the book so much that she had read it twice, the second time slowly, enjoying the thoughts of the man who had begun his career as a protégé of Freud, but who had diverged from the Freudian school of psychiatry after only six years with his brilliant but tortured mentor. Lindsey reflected on the many surprises she had found in the book: Jung’s nomenclature, for example. He was emphatic about the essential aspect of the confessional stage of the psychoanalytic process for the therapist and patient to establish a therapeutic relationship.

“Confession: the word had seemed to proclaim itself to her as she had read and then reread sections of his book. The power of the word itself and of Jung’s conviction that the physician psychiatrist could not be of assistance to anyone past the age of thirty-five—for Jung, the onset of middle age—without the aid of some religious belief on the part of the patient, reverberated in her heart. She wondered if Jung’s theories were perceived as radical when he wrote what would be the last book of his life? Radical indeed seemed an appropriate description in the contemporary age of psychiatry, one that predominantly relies on medication—the chemical cure.

The Fragrance Shed By a Violet
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a search for the sacred, catholicism, catholocism, forgiveness, god, happiness, healing, lindsey mccall medical mystery series, thinking, writing

2 thoughts on “Us Versus Them: The Deliciousness of Moral Outrage”

  1. Pingback: Religion Begins with Experience – Lin Wilder by Lin Wilder | Crossmap Blogs

  2. Pingback: In the Belly of the Whale: Jonah, The Reluctant Prophet – Lin Wilder by Lin Wilder | Crossmap Blogs

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Lin Wilder

Lin Wilder has a doctorate in Public Health from the UT Houston with a background in cardiopulmonary physiology, medical ethics, and hospital administration. 

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