Delphic Maxm 116: Flee enmity
I’ve set myself the challenge of responding to each of the Delphic Maxims for 15 minutes a day.
116. Flee enmity
Always with the fleeing.
I know that for a lot of these maxims I’ve been engaging in fairly anodyne chit chat about how to feel good and live a good life and so on. This is partially because that was the function of these maxims, and it was an obsession of the ethics of the time. Aristotle, Epicurus, Cicero, Aurelius, movement after philosophical movement posed the question: what does it mean to live the good life. Which is great.
But having discussed avoiding enmity previously (or at least, I feel like I have because these maxims can get super repetitive at times), I want to flip it on its head and respond to Roxanne Gay’s excellent medium piece ‘The Pleasure of Clapping Back’.
In this piece, Gay describes her nemeses — the many people for whom she nurses a low-key enmity. She cultivates this hostility. She wishes petty grievances on her nemeses: “I hope that she loses her sunglasses on a really bright sunny day”. She adds people to her roster of nemeses, for trivial things, and often these people don’t know they are the target of Gay’s narrowed glare.
And yet, while this seems like a really petty, time-consuming practice, the way she describes it seems healthy. It’s light-hearted heaviness, a flippant loathing that allows her to let off steam. She is particular about her nemeses: they must be worthy of the title, not a mere enemy, but someone who has earned the right to occupy mental bandwidth (even if it is just for a moment).
In a way, I think this is a healthier way to ‘flee enmity’. Rather than feeling the genuine enmity that comes with being slighted or wronged, nurturing a petty enmity through identifying a nemesis or three can help diffuse the emotional drain from actual loathing. Looking back, I realise this is something that my friends and I have done for years now — there’s something joyous about a petty hatred, one that you’ve acknowledged is petty, one that can be dropped without loss of face but which sustains you in an intellectual way.
My friend Jason and I have maintained a loathing for Sonia Kruger for some time: Jason from her time hosting — I think — Big Brother, me because Jason started it and then for her fairly racist commentary on national television. I enjoy petty hatreds of celebrities: they are people I will never meet, and there’s no consequence to either them or me for my maintaining them as a nemesis. Eddie Redmayne is one of mine. Jordan Peterson is another.
I even have nemeses with whom I get along in real life, but staging a conflict with them is also fun. A colleague of mine at Sydney University is an expert in shark attacks, but I maintain that he is an apologist in a vast conspiracy to cover up shark murders. People think this means I hate sharks: I do not. I get joy from the absurdity of the conflict.
I suppose I am fleeing enmity by running towards it. Life is too short, too busy, and too interesting to waste on being deeply hurt, even if there are certain enemies worth fighting. Instead, channelling enmity into a nemesis — contrived or otherwise — adds a sense of import to the conflict. Embrace the enmity, in order to escape it.
