Epiphany While Listening To Diane Rehm

Alan: While listening to Diane Rehm this morning, it occurred to me that she has been probing two topics a day for more than 20 years. 

I suddenly realized that a great swathe of America has no interest in the show's diversity or depth because the complexity of both threaten the faux calm in which they've embedded themselves, dwelling on well-defended island's of deliberate thoughtlessness and equally ardent advocacy of the mouldy sound bites they tucked in Middle School memory.

Because their psycho-spiritual equilibrium can only be maintained in the false tranquillity of isolation, they are threatened by any troubling wind from the larger world and are determined to avoid all challenge to their simple and simplifying beliefs.

In short, they never think outside the comfort of hackneyed convention, a subtly egotistical dodge whose purpose is prevent personal perturbation over the intractable problems of people who are neither wealthy enough nor wise enough to live in moated "pleasure domes" or gated communities.

This refusal to think deeply recalls the Christian heresy of "Quietism" which -- "in the broadest sense is the doctrine which declares that man's highest perfection consists in a sort of psychical self-annihilation and a consequent absorption of the soul into the Divine Essence even during the present life. In the state of "quietude" the mind is wholly inactive; it no longer thinks or wills on its own account, but remains passive while God acts within it." http://www.newadvent.org/cathen/12608c.htm

The Latin roots of "compassion" mean "suffering with another."

And so it is that a quietist's preciously cultivated egotism shuns compassion, mercy and forgiveness.

Quietists (like many pro forma Christian traditionalists) are "in it" for their own peace of mind. 

"The troubled" be damned.