How important are your enemies in your life? Do they take up most of your thought? Enemies are a part of life whether we want them to be or not. People hold extremely divergent ideas from ours, and that leads them to commit acts that harm our own values. Combatting enemies is a part of life that is often foisted upon us. However, are all enemies to be combatted? How much should an enemy preoccupy your thoughts? Although enemies can give a sense of urgency or threat, at some point, a person has to focus on their life instead of their enemies. One’s primary purpose in life is the living of one’s life, not the battling of one’s enemies. Life isn’t an arena for combat between enemies.
Enemies are people whose values are starkly opposed to ours. They hold assumptions and ideas about the world that drastically conflict with our own (For example: The north of the United States of America being against slavery during the civil war, and the Confederates being for slavery). One of the most concrete cases of this is a murderer holding his right to kill you and you holding your right to be free of him. Enemies make our lives harder by resisting or directly opposing the things we hold dear. They’re in our lives whether we want them to be or not, often. Our worst enemies force themselves upon us, and we’re forced to deal with them or perish. Indeed, punishing our enemies has a place in our lives. When we go to war, our goal is to destroy and subjugate our enemies, to make them live as we see fit. As well, during war, we invest most or all of our strength, including the deaths of people we hold dear, to end what our enemy has planned for us. It can sometimes seem that we must put all of our energy into stopping our enemies in order to live a normal life.
However, enemies come in varieties with different scales of power, and, for many enemies, it is not in your best interest to pursue them. Many enemies don’t have the capacity or will to directly destroy you. Instead, they undermine you and your ideas regularly through their basic words and actions. You don’t necessarily need to destroy your enemy. Going after your enemy until destruction can be harmful to yourself. It may seem like they need to be completely destroyed because your enemy wants to appear larger than you and may want to completely destroy you, but your enemy can often be impotent to do so. Hunting down and destroying your enemy can take precious time and direction out of your life and can implicate you in a pointless struggle merely because someone is opposed to you. Attempting to crush every enemy misaligns your purpose in your life. Instead of your purpose being to live your life, it becomes the destruction of your enemies. Only when an enemy sufficiently disrupts your life is it wise to pursue them. It must be beneficial to you to combat your enemy; if it is not, then you are making yourself suffer in the combatting of a person who is trying to make you suffer. Indeed, in a way, your enemy wins when you combat him on ground that isn’t worth fighting over.
It may be generally good when one’s enemy suffers. However, one’s life and the achievement of one’s values is one’s primary goal. To fixate on the well-being of your enemies outside the well-being of yourself is to take your enemy’s life as being more important than yours. Stopping our enemies can be important, but our own joy and life is always more important. Indeed, it is our joy and life that makes stopping our enemies worth it.