The deepest and most insidiously profound evil is the evil that best masquerades as goodness. It seems “good” to “count our blessings.” It isn’t. It’s evil. It is how The Father of Lies is so successful at deception and bankrupting human souls. By appealing to that which is not good or bad in itself, but which we all have as necessary to our existence as unique individuals. Comparison is its fuel, and the engine is
Ego.
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‘Count your blessings’
I can understand how this meme might be “positive,” to inspire practicing an attitude of gratitude, especially to someone with an ‘external locus of control’ and tendency to compare.
Soothing the low feelings of sadness to uplift a deflated ego.
I can see its appeal as a first step in therapeutic recovery, but, I have to call bullshit. It’s a mindset that can keep one stuck in the superficial early steps, because, spiritually, it is abominable – as is any therapy that manipulatively neglects the human spirit in favor of ego appeal packaged as self-esteem.
It horrendously encourages development of a superiority complex as a privileged class. Can you see how profoundly offensive this is to the “someone-else” dreamer? So how can it be anything except codependent on materialism and spiritually bankrupt?
Authentic gratitude is never, ever based on comparison.
How perverse is it to be thankful we’re not as bad-off as someone else? We are blessed because God favors us over them. The evil horror of “prosperity gospel.”
That’s nothing more than a manipulative mindfuck to elevate one’s ego above one’s spirit.
Authentic gratitude is, therefore – I contend – much rarer than the average person appreciates.
Average notions of gratitude reek of this false, ‘comparison’ flavor. An external locus of control means, quite simply, that we value our self only by the standards which others erect. That’s a fancy way of saying “comparison” – which isn’t only unhealthy, but spiritually evil, despite common reliance on it by our religious cultures, which are, in that regard, evil. It’s not just prosperity gospel preachers; it’s any dogma which suggests we merit God’s favor by what we do, to earn and deserve. It is why we get love so wrong. We are twisted by indoctrination and social conditioning to expect reciprocation of our good deeds and goodwill.
We are told in virtually every way of the world that this is how God loves, so why shouldn’t we? I need to improve so that God will love me more. So that my loved ones love me more. And my loved ones need to improve so that I can love them better.
Comparison is competitive egocentrism, and profoundly immature emotionally.
Yes, I appreciate that this criticism of the meme sounds extremely harsh on its surface. Yet I think an effective way to examine its fundamental wrongness is by deeply considering a sort of “survival guilt” evoked in response to not “counting our blessings” as the meme encourages. To illustrate, here’s a possible reaction to this meme:
“I try to practice an ‘attitude of gratitude.’ But sometimes I mourn all that I’ve lost.”
By the meme’s horrendous principle, this person who has suffered loss then suffers MORE – when they recognize their ingratitude. They don’t want to be like the “someone-else” dreamer. Shame on them for not being thankful for what they do still have, after their losses.
This evil “blessings” principle undermines and REVERSES the truth of authentic blessing and gratitude, of authentic grace. It is an untruth. Falsities never, ever serve and satisfy the human spirit. The human spirit accepts only honest truth, never denial. Only the ego accepts denial and untruth. That’s the currency exchanged when inflated egos seek control over deflated egos. It’s ego economy. Egology. Egonomics.
To “know” the deepest root truth, we must go to the deepest inner human “place.” Descartes fails us with, “I think, therefore I am.” The full human person also has the affective faculties of emotion – a form of knowing that’s both deeper and transcendent, at the same time.
The fullest truths we can “know” are by harmony of BOTH emotion and reason – never in conflict. This is why the blessings principle fails and is evil, and the false gratitude it encourages is not authentic. It preys on a dissonance between our logic (look how good you have it) and our low feelings, then preaches a privileged supremacy which rests on competitive comparison by logic, not love. It cannot be deeply true. It can only be relatively true. Comparison means “relative to.”
It’s not surprising that, since most of us get love wrong for much of our lives, most of us get gratitude wrong. When memes like this one dominate the landscape of common therapy, we shouldn’t be too ashamed that we don’t actually “know” what authentic love and authentic gratitude are. If you think that assertion is exaggerated, I remind you about the state of marriage in western culture, and drop the mic. Your objection ain’t got a leg to stand on.
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Descartes sought to exclude relative truths and arrive at absolute truth, and bound himself to do so by ‘pure’ reason, without relying on emotions, of course: Reason is outside the realm of emotions. See the untruth here? We ARE beings with BOTH – logic and feelings.
When philosophical logic is ‘escalated’ to exclude the fullest human experience of being… well, it cannot serve the full human being. For thousands of years, philosophers have tried to excise our wonderful powers of reason from the drives of our body. Of course, every such attempt is bound to fail. Our mind is not separable from our body! This is how we are made. Those efforts are entirely artificial, and so, not surprisingly, of very little service to the human being with mind and body, brain and heart, ego and soul.
(If you’re interested in more about the mind-body question, I suggest you google cognitive scientist and philosopher David Chalmers; you can watch “closer to truth” YouTube featuring him for brief glimpses into his thoughts on updating the Cartesian philosophy of Descartes and mind-body dualism. For another modern scientific angle, find the current thought of Donald Hoffman on YouTube.)
What is wonderful is that Descartes did arrive at the deepest ground of authentic gratitude, grace, and blessing:
“I am.”
This profoundly deep and absolute truth litters both biblical testaments. Medieval theologian Thomas Aquinas describes God as “being itself.” In the evil blessings meme, what does the speaker have in common with the ‘someone-else’ dreamers? Being. What’s the last name of every Human Being?😉 At the absolute ground of a human being is being.
Nonbeing is, of course, the deepest fear of being human. Biological death is equated to nonbeing when one excludes the deepest and fullest experience of being human, which includes the human spirit. In this regard, materialistic atheism is not a fully human belief, and so of course must be spiritually dissatisfying. It is “rationalism” and “materialism” and is not far afield of three millennia of philosophers artificially dreaming that our spirit is our mind separated from our body.
(If you don’t think Pharisaic Judaism and the legacy of Yeshua the Nazarene added anything new to that conversation, I gently encourage some real study.)
Authentic grace requires understanding of unearned and undeserved gift. For us to count any blessings, the prerequisite is being. And being is a grace itself. We did nothing to deserve or earn being. Therefore all which follows from being is grace, in no complicated sense whatsoever!
Our ego wants to believe that we earned or deserve our job, home, etc. If we lose those, it is the ego which mourns those losses only because it believes those possessions were earned or deserved. When we know in the fullest sense that we *can* know – as human beings being human – we know that is not true. It is not the ‘Lord’ which “giveth and taketh away”; it is this mortal world, this biological realm, in which our being currently is. Our ego, for now, feels only at home according to the ways of this world.
It is the ego which suffers when we mourn loss.
It, too, is the ego which can be consoled by a false attitude of gratitude.
We did nothing to deserve or earn being.
We can be authentically grateful for being, itself. If we also understand our job, home, etc. to be grace – undeserved and unearned – we can be authentically grateful, and do not have to have any sense of “survival guilt” for a gift we have not earned.
When we “lose” something we have not earned, is it truly a loss?
When we most fully and truthfully are present, living in the now, abiding in the moment, we of course have no awareness of our possessions. That’s what authentic happiness is. The average person knows this, yet lives in ignorant denial.
The average person knows plenty of materially wealthy people who suffer unhappiness. Our brain tells us possessions are not a key to happiness, yet we lie to ourselves and console ourselves by status and possessions. And we always will – each time we cannot displace competitive comparison by authentic gratitude for the grace of being.
We can’t build authentic gratitude unless the foundation of that building is also true gratitude for merely being.
We know this to be true when we more fully “know” by all of what we are.
Sadly, we have been conditioned to deny this easily knowable truth, to rely on our ego rather than our fullness. Unlearning that conditioning, unknowing falsities, is a monumental challenge. But therapy must lead there, or it’s not only false, but evil.
The human heart can never be satisfied by a bad means to a good end. You’re bigger than that.
We’re each bigger than anyone can grasp in any moment.
Practice at remembering that deepest truth is pretty therapeutic.
Or maybe not. Hell, I don’t know.
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Neil D. 2024-05-17 (4th anniversary)
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