Pity the Fool, Don’t Hate Them

“To feel affection for people even when they make mistakes is uniquely human. You can do it, if you simply recognize: that they’re human too, that they act out of ignorance, against their will…And, above all, that they haven’t really hurt you. They haven’t diminished your ability to choose.” – Marcus Aurelius

My most popular blog post, by sheer readership, is “The Struggle Within.” It is about how to cope with having MAGA within your family. I think it’s been popular because many people don’t know how to cope with this uneasy situation.

I know I didn’t, which is why I wrote the article.

I intentionally left the conclusion somewhat vague and open ended. Ultimately, I don’t know how to totally cope with the fact that people I love gave an objectively horrific man the presidency (again). And, I’m not presumptuous to believe I know how everyone should deal with their own MAGA family trauma.

Even though I wrote the article, I have continued to struggled with the question: How do I reconcile having MAGA in my own family with what I believe America is becoming?

I think after much thought, consideration, reading, and soul searching, I have come up with the answer – for me at least.

Pity. Let me explain.

It is one thing to watch politics from a distance and shake your head at strangers. It is something else when the people supporting or saying things you find cruel, dishonest, or plainly wrong are people you know. People you have eaten dinner with. People you have laughed with. People you love.

That part has been difficult for me, and so many others.

I have watched people excuse behavior they would never have tolerated from anyone else. I have watched racism get rationalized, cruelty get presented as false machismo, and resentment get sold as patriotism. I have watched people twist themselves into knots defending a man who has made an extraordinary business out of convincing people that he understands their pain (perched high above them on his golden toilets) while profiting from it.

And for most of this time, my response has been anger.

My anger felt justified. In many ways, it still does. There are things happening in this country, and the world, that should make decent people angry. There are ideas that need to be opposed and behavior that should not be normalized simply because the person engaging in it happens to be family, a neighbor, or somebody we once respected.

But anger has a way of changing you if you hold onto it too tightly. It did for me.

Over the last several months, I came to a self-realization I could no longer ignore. My anger hardened into hatred, and I was becoming a person I didn’t like. This grew into a different problem. I could tell myself that my hatred was more righteous than theirs, more informed than theirs, more justified than theirs. But hatred does not become healthy simply because I have “better” reasons for it.

Hatred turns into suffering. I became bitter, resentful, contemptuous, and consumed by the people I opposed. In an important way they had changed me, and the world was no better off than it was prior.

I did not want that. I needed to crawl out from this place, from those feelings, from becoming the thing I thought I was crusading against.

This is where the idea of pity comes in.

I do not mean pity in the arrogant sense of looking down on someone and congratulating yourself for being smarter or more enlightened. I mean something closer to sorrow. The recognition that underneath a lot of anger is fear, disappointment, loneliness, humiliation, or a life that did not turn out the way someone believed it would.

When I look at the MAGA movement through that lens, I see a lot of deeply unhappy people. People who feel that something was taken from them. People who think the world changed without asking their permission. People who feel ignored, disrespected, economically insecure, culturally displaced, or simply left behind. Some of those feelings may be grounded in real experiences. Others are exaggerated, manipulated, or directed toward people who had nothing to do with creating their problems.

Then along comes a conman with a remarkably simple answer.

It is not your fault. It is them.

The immigrant. The Black family. The gay person. The trans-person. The teacher. The journalist. The woman who got too independent. The college professor. The person in the city. The government employee. The expert. The neighbor who looks different from you.

That is a powerful thing to sell someone who is frustrated with their life. You give people a villain, and suddenly their pain has a shape, a form, something to latch onto.

The uglier part is what happens next. People begin justifying things they once would have recognized as wrong. Racism becomes “common sense.” Cruelty becomes “toughness.” Humiliation becomes entertainment. Hatred becomes honesty. And while everyone is fighting with each other, the conman keeps collecting the money, attention, loyalty, and power.

I can oppose all of that without hating the people caught up in it.

As with many things in my life, philosophy has helped me better understand that.

The Stoics, in particular, keep bringing me back to the same basic lesson: I am responsible for my own character.

I do not control how my relatives vote. I do not control what someone posts on social media. I do not control what millions of Americans choose to believe. I control my judgments, my choices, my behavior, and the kind of person I become in response.

Marcus Aurelius spent a remarkable amount of time reminding himself that he would encounter selfish, dishonest, ignorant, and difficult people. His answer was not to become like them. It was to remember that another person’s failure of character does not excuse your own.

“The wrongdoer has a nature related to my own… We were born to work together like feet, hands, and eyes,” Marcus wrote to himself.

That is harder than it sounds, which is why he wrote to himself a lot throughout his Meditations about continuing to work with difficult people.

It is easy to be decent toward people who agree with you. It is much harder to hold onto your humanity when you believe someone else is abandoning theirs, but I need to remember that is it not approval of someone to refuse to hate them. I can recognize their ignorance, fear, resentment, or moral confusion without allowing those same things to take root in me.

Still further, Buddhist thought has helped me with the same problem from another angle. Buddhism takes suffering seriously, but it also recognizes how easily suffering reproduces itself. Fear becomes anger. Anger becomes hatred. Hatred becomes cruelty, which creates more suffering, which creates more anger.

“Happily do we live without hate amongst the hateful,” he said.

The wheel keeps turning. You do not stop that cycle by adding your own hatred to it.

Compassion does not mean pretending harmful behavior is acceptable. It does not mean avoiding conflict, excusing racism, or refusing to draw boundaries. Sometimes doing the right thing requires confrontation. Sometimes it requires walking away. Sometimes it requires saying clearly, “No. That is wrong.”

But you can oppose someone without allowing them to occupy your mind and poison your character.

And you cannot force another person into understanding. You cannot make someone curious. You cannot bully someone into wisdom. In fact, the harder you push, the harder many people push back.

Which brings me to Plato.

I joke sometimes that I was expecting Plato’s Republic—an imagined ideal society governed by wisdom, justice, and people performing the roles best suited to them.

Expecting the unattainable? That’s on me.

Somewhere along the line, I apparently convinced myself that people were basically waiting for better arguments. Give everyone enough information, encourage rational discussion, educate people, expose contradictions, and eventually we would reason our way toward something resembling the Good.

But I remembered the cave.

In Plato’s allegory, people spend their lives chained inside a cave watching shadows on a wall. Because the shadows are all they know, they mistake them for reality. One person escapes, sees the outside world, sees the light, and understands that everything he had accepted as reality was incomplete.

When he returns to the cave and tries to explain what he has seen, the others do not celebrate him. They resist him. That’s part I keep missing.

We usually focus on the person who escapes. We like that character because we naturally imagine ourselves in the role. We are the one who saw the light. We are the enlightened one trying to help everyone else.

But what about the people who remain in the cave?

Some people stay because they genuinely do not know anything else. Others stay because the cave is comfortable. The cave tells them a story they prefer. It gives them certainty. It confirms their suspicions. It gives them enemies. It tells them they are the victims and also somehow the heroes. It protects them from the discomfort of reconsidering what they believe.

Thich Nhat Hanh said it so beautifully. “People have a hard time letting go of their suffering. Out of a fear of the unknown, they prefer suffering that is familiar.”

People are in the cave because they want to be there.

That realization has been freeing for me, even if it’s unsatisfying.

I cannot make someone see the light. I cannot spend my life dragging people toward a truth they are determined not to examine. I cannot make another person care about something simply because I believe they should—or even if it’s in their best interest to.

And I no longer think that is my responsibility.

My responsibility is to live outside the cave as best I can.

I can tell the truth. I can treat people with dignity. I can stand up for people who are being mistreated. I can reject racism without becoming consumed by racists. I can oppose cruelty without becoming cruel. I can refuse to participate in the politics of humiliation and resentment. I can try to do some good.

And perhaps most importantly, I can refuse to allow somebody else’s anger to decide what kind of man I become.

That is where pity has become useful.

Because there is something deeply sad about spending your one life furious at people you have never met. There is something sad about being convinced that your neighbor’s success caused your failure. There is something sad about living in a constant state of grievance, waiting for a politician to punish the right people so that your life will finally feel whole.

I do not want that life.

And I do not need to hate the people who have chosen it. I can pity them.

I can hope they eventually see something different. I can leave the door open where it makes sense and close it where I need to. But I do not have to climb back into the cave just to keep them company.

Maybe that is the lesson philosophy has finally given me.

My job is not to save everyone. It is not to win every argument, or any argument really. It is not to correct every terrible opinion I encounter. It is certainly not to spend the limited years of my life furious at people who have chosen resentment as their identity.

My job is much smaller and much harder. Control what is mine. Let go of what is not. Do good where I can. Stand against what is wrong. And be careful that in fighting something ugly, I do not slowly become ugly myself.

I was expecting Plato’s Republic.

That’s on me.

Moving forward, I will do my best to live outside the cave and be a little bit of light for anyone who eventually decides they want to come out.

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