Tradeoffs about values leave me feeling like ‘double-minded man’

By David McElroy · October 7, 2017

I feel like a contradiction lately.

I want to withdraw from the modern world — from the intellectual, psychological and spiritual rot that’s leading humanity down an ugly path — but I don’t want to give up the conveniences that have come with that modern world.

I suspect the internal rot which I see around me inevitably comes right along with the technological marvels we’re building for ourselves — and it requires some kind of terrible tradeoff that I don’t want to make. I want to have the shiny technological toys with none of the downsides.

It’s hard to know where to strike a balance. On one side, there’s an Amish-like life of being grounded in the warmth of community and personal connection. It’s the ideal or fantasy of country life — of being rooted to land and a slower pace and more traditional values. On the other side is a post-modernist life of shallow connection with little meaning, but filled with technological progress and urban excitement — along with opportunities for success and wealth and ego gratification.

Like most modern people, I want to pick and choose the best of both, but my heart knows I can’t ultimately have both. I want to avoid making those tradeoffs, so I lie to myself. If I just stick with an empty and meaningless path long enough to make the money to save myself, then I can live a fuller and more meaningful life. I just have to live a life of meaningless daily misery for awhile. Then it will somehow all be worth it.

But that’s what I’ve told myself for years. I’ve known plenty of other people who started out believing the same thing — that they could somehow have it all — but along the way, they all seem to forget that they ever seriously wanted something more meaningful. I’m burdened with a heart that constantly reminds me that the modern life isn’t worth living, at least not for me. My heart constantly whispers that there’s more to life.

In the New Testament book of James, verse 1:8 says, “A double-minded man is unstable in all his ways.” The verse is referring to a man who prays for something but doesn’t expect what he asks for, but the phrase is broad enough to feel applicable here. What’s worse, I feel as though that applies to everyone in this culture who is trying to have it both ways — trying to live a modern life of success while also acting as though there will be a life of love, connection and value at the end.

British writer V.S. Naipaul reminded us what we do to ourselves with our internal lies. He wrote, “The only lies for which we are truly punished are those we tell ourselves.”

If you’ve reached a point in spiritual and psychological development to understand that value in human life comes from connection and love with those we choose to be attached to — but you’re also trying to live according to the script you received from the modern world — you are lying to yourself just as much as I am.

The miserable lives most of us are living is our self-inflicted punishment for that lie we’re telling ourselves.

I wish I had a way to allow other people to directly experience an epiphany once I’ve had it, but I can’t, so these things I’m learning stay inside my own heart and make me feel more isolated. Not only are my words not powerful enough to express most of the truth I’ve experienced, but — more importantly — nobody can experience a truth that is new to him until he’s ready to give up a false narrative that keeps him from understanding a broader and more inclusive view of reality. Unfortunately, most people are very comfortable with their narrow and rigid narratives, so I might as well be speaking to most people in a language from another planet.

That makes me intensely sad at times and it makes me feel very alone.

When it comes to all of this, I increasingly write things lately for which there’s no real audience. I can’t seem to help myself. I feel like an actor performing a one-man play to an empty auditorium, but I feel compelled to do it anyway.

I need an audience for what I’m doing, but I also need a co-creator. I need someone who is driven toward the same things I’m pursuing — and as much as I’m addicted to certain things about the modern world, it’s not worldly success that I’m going after. It’s personal growth and spiritual truth.

For now, though, I feel hopelessly caught between two worlds. On one side is the modern and soulless world which promises me everything but delivers little of lasting value. On the other side is the world which guarantees a more difficult and more complicated road but has the hope of delivering truth and meaning.

Until I fully commit to the path I need and give up on the ego-driven fantasies of the modern world, I’m going to keep feeling like a double-minded man. But it’s hard to commit to that path all alone.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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