Destroying Political Enemies Is a Waste of Time—Vanquish their Possessing Gods

The way to win in politics isn’t to defeat your enemies, but the ideas that control them.

Political debate these days is drenched in hatred. People don’t just disagree with opponents. They hate them. They don’t point out holes in their opponent’s ideas. They call them names, launch nasty personal attacks, and question their intelligence and motives. Their fans in the social media peanut gallery do the same and eat it all up. All of this is pointless. It fails to understand the way the world actually works.

I know politics is serious business intertwined with our identities and beliefs. I know threatening things people hold sacred frightens and wounds them, so they can turn to hate. I know intemperate nastiness has infected politics at various times throughout our history. The horrible campaign between once-close friends Thomas Jefferson and John Adams is a great example, where supporters convinced themselves their opponents genuinely wanted to destroy our young democracy. Jefferson’s dirty-tricks hatchet man James Callender published a famous hit piece about Adams in that campaign:

“Ye will judge without regard to the prattle of a president, the prattle of that strange compound of ignorance and ferocity, of deceit and weakness; without regard to that hideous hermaphroditical character, which has neither the force and firmness of a man, nor the gentleness and sensibility of a woman.”

As crazy as today’s political insults are, at least no one is calling their opponents hermaphrodites, although I wouldn’t put it past them.

It’s unclear whether these bad habits are trickling down from people in high office or trickling up from the people, although it’s most likely a mutually reinforcing downward spiral. We all can see the reasons behind the temptation. It’s a time of national turmoil. Social media elevates the morally flexible, nasty, and mentally troubled, often creating a public sewer providing the dopamine rewards of shock and entertainment in service to the holy metric of engagement. Congress is increasingly filled with entertainers, attention-seekers, and grifters instead of thoughtful policy-makers. Ordinary Americans are increasingly frightened and bewildered and seeking to identify the villains causing our decline. All of this encourages hatred. What surprises me is how many people believe it’s doing any good.

A lot of people appear to think you can win political and ideological battles by destroying enemies. They genuinely believe they can win an ideological war through personal destruction, wrecking the psyches and lives of their opponents. They strafe enemy soldiers online, and hope to take their generals off the field through cancellation, all in the belief this will cause rival ideologies to disappear. Anyone with awareness of how the world works knows it’s more like bombing Pearl Harbor, with the enemy simply building new ships and replenishing its ranks filled with a terrible resolve.

None of this will do any good because, as I’ve come to appreciate, ideological battles aren’t really battles between people. Ideological battles are wars between ideas, and ideas behave like angry ancient gods.

UNDERSTANDING THE GREEK GODS

I recently reread The Odyssey, and it changed my view of human conflict. I had always thought of the Greek gods as something like superheroes. They were giant powerful humans with magic powers who intervened in human events. In the middle of some human struggle, Zeus would show up and start tossing lightning bolts. Ares might appear in the middle of a fierce battle and mow down rows of soldiers for one side. During a tense moment, Athena could appear to impose wisdom. In fact, when the gods of Greek mythology intervene in human events, it’s rarely in their guise of gods. They almost always operate through humans.

Each ancient gods represents human emotions and ideas that reside deep within the human soul—anger and bravery of war, the cool deliberateness of wisdom, or the raw and destructive power of nature and masculine action. When humans fall into difficult situations, these emotions and ideas claim minds. A warrior is possessed by the hot temper and bravery of war. A diplomat in a tense situation discovers the cool calculation of wisdom. A man is flooded with the fire of passion, the foolishness of pride, or the anger of vengeance. He falls under the sway of some god’s domain, becoming a tool of that god’s agenda.

These gods are less characters and more ideologies given shape and name. Ares was not a man—he was rage. Athena was not a woman—she was strategic wisdom. They’re aspects of human nature embodied into human personalities, agendas, and forms. They think and act like people, have desires, enact plans, and have agendas for the world. They intervene in human events, but mostly through ideological possession that turns humans into tools of their divine agendas. They get into disputes and conflicts with other gods, but waged through the humans they control. Through these clashes waged over the earth through human action, they transform the human world.

Even when the ancient gods take direct action, it’s often in the guise of humans. At a delicate time, Athena arrives in the guise of an old man to say just the right thing to influence Odysseus. Are we meant to believe this is actually Athena in a costume, or simply an old man captured by the ideas Athena represents? Athena later goes to the docks to obtain a boat as Odysseus’s son to push him into making a journey. Are we meant to understand he obtained the boat himself, but under the influence of Athena’s domain? Poseidon sends a storm at the right moment to put the crew into a difficult but necessary situation. Are we meant to believe Poseidon did this, or that the chaos of nature instilled fear and danger causing men to panic and react?

I think the ancient Greeks understood ideology better than we do. The emotions, values, and ideas that drive humans aren’t mere abstractions, and aren’t entirely under our control. They’re forces acting in the world with their own logics, agendas, and plans achieved through the possession of humanity. Humans appear to be acting in the world, but they’re not really acting as purely rational and independent entities but tools of the feelings coursing through their bodies and ideas colonizing their minds. These forces follow a logic and intent. They have their own beliefs, agendas, and plans. These are the true agents of action and change. The humans are mere puppets.

Modern political ideologies behave like these ancient Greek gods. The Greeks were concerned with forces like anger, wisdom, and pride. We add modern ideas like conservatism, liberalism, communism, progressivism, capitalism, democratic socialism, and nationalism. Even ideas like America, liberty, constitutional democracy, and the American Dream fit the bill. These ideas are powerful self-replicating agents, almost like Dawkins’ memes. They have domains, interests, and agendas. They exist inside us and act like the archetypes of Jung. Once a person is under their influence, they form opinions, protest, vote, and post on social media in these ideas’ service. They shape policy, forge alliances, and wage wars through their human hosts.

Each idea acts as an ancient god. They’re new gods after Nietzsche proclaimed the old ones dead.

Ideological fights aren’t really battles between people. The real combatants are the ideas themselves. The ideas have wills. They have agendas. There’s logic to their actions and a desire within them to transform the world according to their rules. They’re almost sentient, powerful consciousnesses at war with one another seeking to transform our world through their schemes.

If you think politics is about fights between people over interests, you fight people to win. You try to hurt them, destroy them, and eliminate them from the field. What if people are merely thralls drafted into service of ideas that have enslaved their wills? Destroying the people then does nothing, since there’s always more fodder to replace them. Even the generals on the fields are functionally irrelevant because they’re not truly driving events. You can’t defeat a god by defeating worshipers it enslaved. You must actually defeat the god.

THE BIRTH OF BETTER GODS

It’s pointless to hate the followers of an ideology you hate. They’re mere vessels of the ideas. If you want to win a war against an idea, you must defeat the idea itself.

The ideologies are gods manipulating people and events behind the scenes. Like the ancient gods, they’re single-minded and relentless. They have goals they pursue. They push policies and ideas. They capture institutions. They transform nations. They even launch wars. When their agendas conflict with the gods of other ideologies, they push back hard and eliminate agents. They capture minds and bodies, claim institutions, and even control entire nations to advance their goals just like Ares, Athena, or Zeus.

Defeating people without eliminating the idea that drives them at best creates a short-lived cease fire. When better conditions arrive, the war starts up again. You see this in conflicts across history over land, nations, or religions, that stopped and started over centuries. Time and again, one group tried to annihilate another. They occupied their land and put them under the other’s boot without extinguishing the idea of the rival nation or values that drove it forward. With time, the flames of war began again. After the Second World War, on the other hand, Germany and Japan weren’t just defeated, but their ideas were broken and discredited, putting Germany and Japan on a different democratic path. The same happened to communism, discredited by the failure and collapse of the Soviet Union. Although the god of communism wasn’t entirely killed, it was so wounded it has lost most of its global power and a new Russia arose around ideas of Russian nationalism.

Destroying opponents personally is like Clausewitz’s clueless Napoleonic generals seeking to string together victories in bloody battles, while Napoleon zeroed in on fights that would allow him to break their nations. Political hatred is fighting the wrong enemy. If you want to win the war, discredit the ideas they follow. Extinguish the idea. To kill the idea, destroy the god.

Those with a more combative view consider this naïve. Politics, they say, is warfare, and wars must be fought with fire and blood. Arguments are for the ivory tower. People don’t really care about ideas. Those who push immoral ideas must be held morally responsible and punished. They’re not mere victims of ideology, but perpetrators. Democratic politics is a team sport about controlling institutions, so the other team must be weakened so that your team can win. No one is saying be nicer. No one is saying ordinary people read wonky policy white papers. No one is saying to fight campaigns around high-concept abstractions no one understands. Attacking people on social media, getting people cancelled, insulting the appearance of rivals, cutting off friends for how they vote, or refusing to talk to your uncle at Thanksgiving because of politics, is pointless. It accomplishes nothing and diverts focus, resources, and society from what actually matters to winning ideological wars.

It’s the ideas that matter, because it’s the ideas really waging war through us. If you want to make the world better and defeat opponents looking to move your country in the wrong direction, discredit the ideas to defeat their gods. There’s no point hating mere soldiers enslaved to a powerful ancient god. Target the ideas with real and devastating arguments. Forget the propaganda meant to trick people, but prove their false gods never had the magic they claim. Expose the stupidities and lies. Demonstrate how their ideas are wrong and cannot work. Challenge their assumptions. Expose the contradictions in their arguments. Collect better data and evidence. Conduct studies and be truthful about the result. Run real-world experiments and pilot projects. Study history. Build functional institutions. Enact reforms and demonstrate through the result why they work. Show the rival gods to be weak, powerless, and ineffective and they will crumble.

Then give birth to wiser ideologies and set them into our world. Craft a new compelling story about how to build a better world. Develop new ideas that inspire others to charge into battle on your behalf. Fill your churches with adherents, and drain the churches of your rivals until their false ideas fade into obscurity. Watch your better ideology awaken with its own consciousness and mind, and see it transform the world around a better vision.

Politics isn’t a clash between rival people. It’s a clash between ideas. If you want to win this war, focus your fire on the thing that matters—not your enemies but the ideas your enemies follow.

What do you think about ideologies as gods? Join the conversation in the comments.