Do you see the enemy?

Look around you, who is your enemy? Is it your brother who is jealous of all your success and trying to take it away from you, or is it that one friend whom you can’t seem to get along with? Maybe that person who keeps talking bad about you despite you being nice to them. Yet again you might consider the enemy to be the system of government you are in which seems to favor some and neglect others. Or maybe you might be humble enough to think the enemy is the person in the mirror. So do you see the enemy?

I feel like it's still very hard for you to see the enemy, all I want is for you to put an image on what you consider the enemy. Is it going to be a person, a place, a system or whatever?

What possible representation could you give to what you consider the enemy?

Through our experiences in life, the enemy ends up wearing multiple faces, it could be a person we know, or it could be a group of persons we don’t even know. It's difficult to accept an enemy who isn’t physically identifiable, and we tend to prefer when the enemy is a person because we can easily associate our feelings with the whole show. Your enemy is never a car or the writings on paper, it's always a person or something you can associate emotions with.

Emotional Creatures

It's much easier to think that a person had malicious intent than to accept that they might have flaws, It is easier to feel like the whole system is corrupt than to admit that it is run by incompetent persons and the reason is that in one scenario we can associate our plethora of emotions and in the other we can’t. There is always a desire for us to get our emotions involved in everything we do. Think about it, every single thing you think of doing has to be associated with your emotions or else it won’t grab your attention and that’s why robots feel so weird, they have no emotions.

This isn’t to say it’s a bad thing because it isn’t. That’s actually who we are and what we are all about, so it comes as no surprise. The difficulty is the fact that this can play against us in the end. It prevents us from seeing where the real enemy is, we rather focus on what makes us emotionally satisfied.

The real enemy

The enemy isn’t a person or a system of government, which are all changeable. The real enemy are ideas, emotions, and opinions which people adopt and which leads them to make certain choices which might not be in the best interest of everybody. Think about a robot for example, if a robot does something we don’t like, we can easily revise its programming, in just a few clicks we can get it to do what we want and how we want it. This is not the case with people, you can’t just change the mindset of a person by snapping your fingers, it takes more work and effort to get a person to change their opinion.

I’m sure whatever representation of the enemy you gave to yourself all circles back to a set of ideas. We tend to focus so much hatred, resentment, and frustration against others because we can easily associate our emotions with them because those emotions lead to dopamine release which makes us happy.

We are happier when the enemy is a person rather than an emotionless machine or a soulless paper.

I’m not saying people can’t be bad, yes they can be, but people are just vessels into which ideas have been placed. They are much more victims of their environment rather than some malevolent creatures born to cause destruction.

Fighting the enemy

It doesn’t matter if all your enemies were to disappear right now, it will take you just a couple of hours to get new enemies and restart the cycle. There are so many ideas in the world that we don’t agree with. So if we are going to consider everybody who doesn’t align with our own ideas as the enemy, then we are up for a long battle. The battle is fought at the level of the mind and in order to win this battle we have to surround ourselves with like-minded persons.

You can also try to change a person’s mind so they see things the way you do

Conclusion

Making a person or a system your enemy is just an emotional coping mechanism we use to avoid addressing the real problem, which are ideas. Since fighting against ideas is a tough battle, we prefer to focus on our emotions and get relief from those, even though they never give us the results we expect in the end. When you think of it, your enemy isn’t a person, but rather the ideas implanted in them.