Toward the end of my slow recovery from a frustrating and fatal conflict with my two closest friends, with nonnegotiable sides drawn by a unanimous group of our oldest friends, now mutually dead to me, I heard a political scientist say this:

People get so invested in their belief system that they don’t care what’s true.

The simple truth of this hit me hard, explains so much about our tribal species. The dear old friend of fifty years who accused me of sadistically torturing her poor husband, my closest friend, “to bend him to my will”, is known to everyone as someone with a very strong will. People tend to do what she wants, it’s always easier than locking horns with her. If anyone was bending anyone to their will, it was far less likely to be me than her.

Then there are the facts, a year of cause and effect, my continued attempts at healing a conflict, her silent, steely ignoring of each try, punctuated by fits of rage, her determination to silence me, to be right no matter what. 

The alternative to my death and banishment from our group was unthinkable to her, the humiliation of being exposed as an angry, deeply damaged person incapable of vulnerability, or acknowledging fault when conflict arises.

Of course, when you are part of a cherished group and filled with attachment and belief, as in unquestioning love for a charming, charismatic friend who endearingly needs your admiration, you do not care what the “truth” is.  Her hurt is all that matters.

Faith is the strongest force in human affairs, it is rarely subject to the back and forth of discussion, persuasion and compromise.  Things that should be easy to resolve, in light of clear cause and effect, and empathy for the weakness each of us has, become impossible to ever fix. 

If there is unquestioning emotional faith on one side, and a strong need never to be wrong, no matter what, faith erases any “truth” that might call its rightness into question.  

There in a nutshell is the tragedy of human history.