Advent 2 - Peace

Peace

The Timothy Keller Sermon Archive The Failure of Religion

In the 1970s was this enormous best seller, as some of you may have heard. It has actually kind of passed into the language a little bit. It’s a book by Thomas Harris called I’m OK—You’re OK. It was a little self-help book. It was on the top of the New York Times best-seller list for two years.

In the 1990s a woman named Wendy Kaminer wrote a devastating critique of the self-help movement, and the name of her book was I’m Dysfunctional, You’re Dysfunctional. It’s a tremendous critique. Basically, she shows how narcissistic the whole idea was.

She says, “How in the world can you say this is mental health to say, ‘I’m okay. You’re okay. We’re all okay,’ yet out there in the world there is all the blood of the innocent crying out from the ground for justice? There’s genocide. There’s terrorism. There’s all this awful stuff. How in the world can you say it’s the sign of mental health to go out into the world and say, ‘Everybody is okay. You’re okay. I’m okay. We’re all okay’? That’s silly. That’s narcissism.”

She just hilariously deconstructed it. About 10 years later, after she really showed how silly it is to say, “I’m okay. You’re okay. We’re all okay,” she came back with another book that showed she was a bit in a bind, because her whole point was, “Hey, with all the injustice, with all the innocent blood crying out from the ground for justice, how can you say everybody is okay?”

She came back with another book in which she was very critical of what she called the “hard right,” because she saw a lot of people saying, “Yeah, there is evil out there, and we have to bring back the death penalty. We have to go to war.” She suddenly saw all these people saying, “I’m okay, and the rest of you are no way okay.” In fact, that was the subtitle of her book. The New York Times gave the book a subtitle: I’m okay, and you’re nowhere near okay.

She says the trouble with that … She says, “ ‘I’m okay. You’re okay. We’re all okay,’ was narcissistic. That’s narcissism, but to say, ‘I’m okay, and I have the truth. You all are evil, and I’m going to punish you,’ that’s how you get death camps. That’s how you get, ‘I’m the superior race. You’re the inferior race. I’m the superior person. You’re the inferior person.’ ”

She says that’s moralism, and that’s as bad as narcissism. Narcissism is, “We’re all okay. You’re okay. I’m okay,” and moralism is, “I’m okay, and you’re not okay.” Wait a minute. So she was just saying, “I’m okay. Everybody is okay,” is narcissism, but then moralism is bad. What’s left? There’s masochism: “I’m not okay, and everybody else is.” Of course, that’s not right. What’s left?

So many of us do it: You get into bed, turn off the lights, and look at your phone to check Twitter one more time. You see that coronavirus infections are up. Maybe your kids can't go back to school. The economy is cratering. Still, you incessantly scroll though bottomless doom-and-gloom news for hours as you sink into a pool of despair.

This habit has become known as doomscrolling--the act of consuming an endless procession of negative online news. As protests over racial injustice and police brutality join the COVID-19 crisis in the news cycle, it’s only gotten more intense. The constant stream of news and social media never ends. According to a recent survey from the Pew Research Center, 66% of Americans feel worn out by the amount of news available.

Recently, Dictionary.com named doomscrolling one of its “New Words We Created Because of Coronavirus.” There’s something else in the etymology, though. Particularly in the word doom. The act of doomscrolling, then, is to roll toward annihilation. Taken biblically, it has a Revelation tone. Simultaneously, each person watches the demise of so much, while also slowly destroying themselves.

Doomscrolling will never actually stop the doom itself. Amidst all of the pain, isolation, and destruction of the past six months, it’s not worth it to add on to the strain with two hours of excess Twitter every night. Try these things instead: Put down your phone, turn off your news notifications, and focus on good news to lift your spirits.