Pointing the finger is useless

As I write, jackhammers start making unbearable noise. I blame it for my writing woes.

Blaming feels cathartic at first, but I’ve found that staying the victim isn’t very productive. Neither does Taylor Swift when she sings: "It's me, hi. I'm the problem, it's me."

By dropping the blame, we confront the true problem.

Recently, Lewis Howes interviewed the yogi Sadhguru, who says if you are willing to die for something (i.e. your family, religion, or country), you are willing to kill for it too. He calls this willingness to die or kill for a cause as "over-identification" and hence a "crime."

Being overly identified with “good” causes can be dangerous as well, such as the canceling of books and monuments. We can’t cancel history. It happened. It can’t be changed. What we can do is to confront it, grieve it, and learn form it.

Humans have been extremely cruel. After all, we used to sacrifice children to the gods!

Take Michelangelo's statue of David. Did you know that David killed a man to hide his own adultery? Knowing this, are we going to cancel him? Are we going to tear down his statue and destroy it? Perhaps, there’s a difference between putting a human on a pedestal in order to worship him and putting a human on a pedestal as a work of art.

Where do we draw the line?

Where’s that perfect human?

Reading about cancel culture, I can’t help but think of the Native American proverb: “When you point a finger at somebody else, there are three fingers pointing back at you.”