THE NECESSITY OF BEING BOTH THE SERPENT AND THE DOVE

---

Peniel Okwuchukwu |
Being a harmless person should be by choice, and not because you lack the ability to be harmful. You shouldn’t lack the ability to be harmful, and dangerous.

 
I believe this is the divine wisdom embedded in Christ’s commandment when he said to his disciples to be as harmless as a dove, yet as shrewd as a serpent. I thought about that scripture for a long time, why Christ who is the embodiment of ultimate goodness and righteousness, would encourage anybody to have any attribute of the serpent, given that the serpent is the earliest archetype of evil and malevolence.

 
But then it makes sense when you come into the understanding that goodness, and perhaps righteousness, is not the absence of an ability to be extremely dangerous, but it is when the ability to be extremely dangerous, has been disciplined by a sense of morality and principle.

 
I think that before you choose to be a harmless person, you should first cultivate the capacity to be extremely harmful, and then you subject that lethality under a voluntary control and give it a sense of purpose.

 
Having the capacity to be harmful, but deliberately choosing to be the opposite gives a necessary kind of self-esteem, because in every situation that you allow yourself to be walked over, the innate knowing that it wasn’t because you are genuinely helpless keeps you at ease.

 
When you lack the ability to be dangerous especially in protection of others or yourself, and you put up with someone’s cruelty towards you as a consequence of your inability to be dangerous, it tends to build resentment, resentment being the primary ingredient for making you into a monster that’ll someday snap.

 
Having the capacity to be dangerous also gives you the ability to confront people who have the same skill sets but use it for evil.

 
It is why we love superheroes in superhero movies. Because the superhero’s lethal abilities can easily make them the bad person capable of catastrophe, but they deliberately choose instead to be good.  And in the absence of a superhero, we would rather identify with the villain as despicable as it may be, but the continuously helpless victim may be pitied, but is never desirable.

 
Therefore, I don’t think being good means being harmless, especially as we are in a society of extremities where you are either encouraged to be predatory and malevolent, or good and harmless.
If you are harmless and good, then it is hard to say for sure if you are good, or if you simply lack the ability to be bad even if you wanted to.

 
I believe it is the same philosophy that applies to true humility.

 
For you to truly be humble, you must have certain character traits or abilities that relatively increases your value, but you choose to overlook this reality, and stay humble, nonetheless.

 
If you are minded towards social justice advocacy, you need to know that you would be confronting the worst of humanity, and you damn well need to have the imagination to conceive of how sunken and evil humanity can be, and more importantly, must have the capacity to get down in the mud and stain your white when that’s what it takes to confront people who also have such capacity, but use it adversely.

Have principles; better yet principles that are extracted from the domain of the divine, beyond the realm of the natural and this mortal plane. But to have a moral high stand that encourages you to only be innocent, and consequently, incapable of formidability, only makes you feel good about yourself at a superficial level. Beyond that, it has no utility in this world or beyond.