How To Create An Enemy

by Sam Keen

Start with an empty canvas.
Sketch in broad outline the forms of
men, women, and children.

Dip into the unconsciousness well of your own
disowned darkness
with a wide brush and strain the strangers
with the sinister hue of the shadow.

Trace onto the face of the enemy the greed,
hatred, carelessness you dare not claim as
your own.

Obscure the sweet individuality of each face.

Erase all hints of the myriad loves, hopes,
fears that play through the kaleidoscope of
every infinite heart.

Twist the smile until it forms the downward
arc of cruelty.

Strip flesh from bone until only the
abstract skeleton of death remains.

Exaggerate each feature until man is
metamorphosized into beast, vermin, insect.

Fill in the background with malignant
figures from ancient nightmares - devils,
demons, myrmidons of evil.

When your icon of the enemy is complete
you will be able to kill without guilt,
slaughter without shame.

The thing you destroy will have become
merely an enemy of God, an impediment
to the sacred dialectic of history.

I found this poem at the beginning of Juan Gomez-Jurado's international bestseller The Moses Expedition (2007). Perhaps more moving than the poem itself was the author's plea at the end of the acknowledgments... "Dear reader, I don't want to end this book without requesting a favor. Go back to the beginning of these pages and reread the poem by Sam Keen. Do it until you memorize every word. Teach it to your children; send it to your friends. Please." I trust that neither author will mind that I chose to share their words here.

Viruses of the Mind (Pt I)

"If human beings are capable of both good and evil, what can be done to ensure the realization of their positive potential?"

Any honest blog post has a back-story, and this one is no different. Recent events brought to mind, among other things, an episode of Law and Order: SVU that I had seen recently. The title of the episode was Infected, and the plot revolved around a scientific study that could 'explain' why a young boy shot and killed a man. The 'explanation' is captured in this bit of dialogue: "This study equates gun violence with an infectious disease. Anyone exposed to it is infected."  Today, as I was reading the paper, it occurred to me to wonder if this particular episode hadn't perhaps been 'inspired' by an actual scientific study...

A little googling brought me to a popular press report of just such a study. A lot of googling brought me to a copy of the actual study, published in Science in 2005. [pause for a disparaging glare at those publications that lock valuable knowledge behind pay walls] After measuring 153 other factors, including demographic, temperament, behavioral and family data, the authors concluded simply by saying "[W]e estimate that being exposed to firearm violence approximately doubles the probability that an adolescent will perpetrate serious violence over the 2 subsequent years." The catchiest bit of the idea that had brought me here - that violence could be likened to an infectious disease - didn't show up in the original paper, but rather in comments by the authors to the popular press publication. 

By this point I had scented a potential blog post, but what to say about all of this...? Did this study have any bearing on the recent event that still dominated today's front page? Is the value in the whirling creation and spread of the meme 'violence as contagion'? Where has this meme gone from here? (Follow-up studies, whose existence was hinted at, were hard to find.) Was a digression into memetics appropriate? Should I invoke the secular guru's essay, Viruses of the Mind? And what of a 'cure' for this 'infection'? If "viruses don't win every time", what keeps them from taking over, and how do we transmit that to the infected?

It's the last question that finally brought me back to this blog. Not because I think that I have the answer, but because I want the answer.