| Photo by Fares Hamouche on Unsplash
I believe that whatever life dishes us, we simply have to make the best of it. It is not fatalism but an act of faith and humility. It is not a passive acceptance of fate but a willful act of facing the challenges and overcoming the hurdles. It’s easy to pass the blame on other people or circumstances for one’s failings, to find excuses for not achieving. It’s an abrogation of personal responsibility. And we see plenty of it today.
When we see ourselves falling behind or falling short of satisfying our wants and desires while others live a more ideal life, it’s easy to think we are being cheated. Instead of asking ourselves that maybe we need to try harder, we look outside for reasons for our failures. We eschew the value of hard work and look for an easy way to get to the top. Looking outside ourselves, we realize that external forces are beyond our control, and we feel hopeless and helpless. Forgetting that the outcome that accrues us is often the result of past choices. We look for a prophet with big ideas who can explain how the system was rigged against us and how a cabal of inimical forces conspired against our interests. We gravitate toward political ideologies that confirm our personal excuses, why we failed to make it, or why others are doing much better than us. We blame those we perceive as outsiders, minorities, immigrants, the Jews. people with different religious persuasions, etc., as robbing us of our privileges, denying us opportunities, and stealing our jobs.
When things don’t go our way, or we find the situation inconvenient, we spin many conspiracy theories to change the outcome. We reinvent the truth when we find reality difficult to accept. We lie when we run out of honest answers.
“When things don’t go our way, or we find the situation inconvenient, we spin many conspiracy theories to change the outcome. We reinvent the truth when we find reality difficult to accept. We lie when we run out of honest answers.”
It has come to a point that some turn their ire against the established order. To consider the government the source of everything wrong in their lives, they want to change it with a system and ideology that they believe is more perfect, one that favors them. They forget that there is no constructed system that is perfect. That whatever system we adopt will reflect our imperfections. The Founding Fathers created a government system, knowing that it wasn’t complete and perfect, and drafted a Constitution that embodies its ideals and standards against which we measure our achievements. What we have, no matter its shortcomings, got us where we are today. We survived two world wars and ended up on top. We have the strongest economy and the best military in a land of endless innovations despite its imperfections.
There is no “deep state” that secretly orchestrates how the government functions. No secret society that rules the country. When confronted with a reality that doesn’t conform to our preconceived notions of the world, some of us find comfort in divining some hidden meaning. The devil must be behind it or devise some paranoid conspiracy theory that simply explains it. What we have is a government system and civilization that mirror our stage of spiritual development. It’s like looking at our image in the mirror and not recognizing it.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR Dr. Fernando B. Perfas is an addiction specialist who has written several books and articles on the subject. He currently provides training and consulting services to various government and non-government drug treatment agencies regarding drug treatment and prevention approaches. He can be reached at fbperfas@gmail.com.
