VALIDATION AND THE NEED TO FEEL WE ARE COMPASSIONATE

 

 

When I was a lonely college student at Columbia U., I needed to find a way to validate myself and to feel that I was a good and compassionate person. I found a ready target in the park. I began to feed the pigeons. It wasn’t that I felt compassion for pigeons. They were probably enjoying a better diet than the stale bread I was serving them. I just needed to feel that I was a good person – no, I craved it.

I began to see that everyone craved validation in one form or another. It usually starts with positive affirmations, but then require the more substantial stuff of successes and societal affirmations. After that fails to satisfy, we might seek validation through serial love affairs, wealth, and even power. However, nothing ultimately satisfies the insatiable human appetite to see ourselves as good, worthy, and compassionate. One slight or failure can deflate us.

Others have found alternative ways of proving that they are worthy, a “somebody.” The drive to be significant is so powerful that it drove Mark David Chapman, a zealous fan of the Beatle, John Lennon, to gun him down after he had obtained his idol’s autograph. He explained:

• “I was an acute nobody. I had to usurp someone else’s importance, someone else’s success. I was ‘Mr. Nobody’ until I killed the biggest Somebody on earth.” At his 2006 parole hearing, he stated: “The result would be that I would be famous, the result would be that my life would change and I would receive a tremendous amount of attention, which I did receive… I was looking for reasons to vent all that anger and confusion and low self-esteem.” (George Weaver, The Significant Life, 47)

 Still others have found self-harm to relieve their stress, at least momentarily, from that vague and ever-present sense that “there is something is wrong with me that I need to be punished.” If not self-harm, then self-depravation. Sipping a chocolate milkshake stressed-me-out unless I had just received an “A” on an important exam. For the moment, this had validated and entitled me.

Validation earned from a group can even be more potent, even if more costly. A group enables us to submerge our uncomfortable identity into a more comfortable group identify, like in an Elvis fan club. The entry cost? Simple! Just to share enthusiasm for Elvis! We do not have to prove ourselves worthy in any other way.

However, an Elvis fan club may not provide the ego-boast we are looking for. Other groups offer something more substantial – the opportunity to feel good, worthy, and compassionate. However, in these groups, the membership fee is far greater. They require initiates to prove themselves worthy by believing and acting as they do.

Why is the newcomer willing to pay this exorbitant price? Some groups have learned to effectively capitalize on the human need to feel validated by a complete commitment to the group ideal. They offer a just and righteous cause and a just, righteous, and a compassionate identity. However, the newcomer is unable to see that group acceptance requires them to continue to prove themselves by sacrificing everything to the common cause. Once they begin to see what is happening to them, it might be too late. The price of leaving is greater than the price of staying.

Cults operate on these principles. Those who enter are assured that they are the only ones in-the-know, the only righteous ones. They receive the validation for which they had been hungering and a community of comrades until they try to leave. Then they lose everything, even their families.

White folks joining BLM willingly pay this entrance fee. They prove themselves worthy by taking-a-knee to their black “victimized brethren” and living according to BLM slogans – “No justice, no Peace” and “White Silence is White Violence.”

 

They are also required to believe in systemic racism and injustice even though the system now favors blacks through various affirmative action programs. They are required to believe that this is still a racist nation and to confess that they too had been racist because of their white skin color and had profited from a system that continues to victimize blacks. They are then granted a temporary absolution and a new identity as a “crusader for social justice,” even though it has already been achieved.

However, it is not only BLM that is using Marxist methods of systematic control and re-education. Universities and corporations have fallen in line with this Marxist racial variant by requiring “training” in which whites are required to confront the guilt of their whiteness, all in the name of counteracting racism.  For this gift of “redemption” and the assurance that they are now good and compassionate, whites have confessed their racist white guilt. They never consider that it had been black Africans who had kidnapped and sold their black brethren to white slave-traders and that we all might be sinners.

I too had been a racist. I had hated whites to such a degree that I felt that they had a putrid odor. I was brought to Christ 45 years ago, and His Word gradually purged away any lingering racism. It was through Him that I received His irrevocable gift of redemption and forgiveness. This alone has empowered me to gladly confront and hate my own sins.

This is because Christ has set us free from our bondage to sin and the need to justify ourselves. How? Because we are unconditionally and permanently validated and beloved by our Savior!

I had wanted to kill Germans because of the sins of their National Socialistic (Nazi) forebears, but now many of them have become my dearest brethren, to the Glory of our Lord.