So much of our culture inspires or at times requires us to relate to ourselves and the world around us purely through a lens of conflict:
Whose side are you on?
It insists that there is no nuance, that you are either on the right or the wrong side. It insists that the disengagement from these infinite wars will lead to certain death, that it makes you complicit, that you cannot be good unless you perpetuate the psychological warfare perpetuated against you against the very people you are supposed to be standing up for. This, it says, is the only way to truly be good.
You are constantly at war, it says, with every externality you can think of: you are at war with everyone and everything you can imagine. The price of losing is death. It tells you that they are going to kill you. It tells you that it is going to kill you.
There are no draft dodgers here: to be accepted into society you absolutely must pick a side. The people who claim allyship with you will turn around and ostracize you in an instant if you don't, and then you will have no allies, no friends, no support. The cost is isolation. There are no pacifists, we must all determine who we are in the face of never ending conflict, and who we are is defined by whose side we are on.
So whose side are you on? Huh? Are you a good person or a bad, evil person?
Have you ever stopped to consider that perhaps the only thing you really need to be fighting is your own lack of awareness? That regardless of how much you yell, or banter, or argue, or insist that you are GOOD, god damnit! you will do nothing but perpetuate the systemic failures that you claim so vehemently to be against unless you first recognize that everything is a mirror reflecting itself? And like that long, illusory hallway created by two mirrors reflecting one another, the ramifications of culture stretch from the macro to the micro, infinitely into the distance, but that it is the very same thing reflected the whole way down? That rather than believe the lie that disengagement is complicity, that you might have to recognize that engagement and perpetuating these never-ending conflicts is the complicity you fear taking accountability for?
Our culture insists we must take a side -- the easy choice. Stomping your feet at the edge of the trench and claiming you believe in the right things is much easier than getting into the trench and doing the work of doing the right things. In other words: our culture aims to absolve us of hard accountability through the perpetuation of constant psychological warfare that makes us feel better when we project it towards the next person but that leaves us ultimately unable and unwilling to look within ourselves and make critical changes where we are capable of making critical changes.
You are a victim in this unending psychological warfare that leaves you chronically stressed and stretched thin in an constantly emotionally reactive state, and yet you are also the abuser: the perpetrator of the crimes perpetrated against you, and on and on and on forever. You are a reflection of the reflection of the reflection. Just like any abuser with a trauma history that leads them to harm another, you ARE culpable for not taking the appropriate steps to recognize and reconcile your own patterns, and to find ways to cope that do no harm.
