#140 | Escaping Enemy Mode, Pt. 1 | Jim Wilder

When you are in enemy mode, you are trying to figure out how to make the other person lose. You're not trying to figure out the least harmful alternative.

When you're focused but not in enemy mode, you're still trying to figure out how to come out of this with the least harm. For everybody.

It'S watering time, everybody.

It's time for Apollos Watered, a podcast to saturate your faith with the things of God so that you might saturate your world with the good news of Jesus Christ. My name is Travis Michael Fleming and I am your host. And today on our show, we're having another one of our deep conversations.

Several months back, we had Jim Wilder on the show to discuss God and the brain. Jim is a committed follower of Jesus, but he's also a neuroscientist.

And when you take a committed follower of Jesus trying to work out how our brains work, when we talk about Christ and how our spiritual formation occurs, we come into the realm of neurotheology. It's a fascinating field that is growing rapidly as many people are trying to understand how God has made us.

Not that it takes place or it takes precedence over the Word.

No, it just simply describes what the Word does and how the Holy Spirit is working in our hearts to bring the truth of Christ home and how our spiritual formation occurs.

Now, I enjoyed the conversation that I had with Jim, but I knew I had to have him back on the show when I learned that he was releasing a new book called Escaping Enemy Mode. Jim defines spiritual maturity as the ability to suffer well, and he takes that same idea into loving our enemies.

That a sign of spiritual maturity is loving our enemies. But how do we love our enemies when we go into enemy mode? When we seem to cut off all communication with people and we just want to bring them down.

And in our polarized world today, that is a question we really need to ask ourselves. How do we love our enemies? I would encourage you to listen in.

I would also encourage you to get the book because it brings out a whole lot more than we were able to talk about today.

In fact, as we ended our conversation off the air, I told Jim that I needed to have him back on again because I still have questions that I need to have answered as we discuss this subject. It's only because of you that we can even have these conversations.

We are finishing up this year and just give all praise and glory to what God has done. He has grown our audience.

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Without further ado, though, let's hear about Jim Wilder and how we can escape enemy mode. Happy listening, Jim Wilder. Welcome back. Welcome back to Apollo's Water.

Great to be with you, Travis. What are we talking about today?

Enemy mode. But before that, we have our fast five. Are you ready for the fast five?

I'm never as fast as that, but I'll try.

All right, number one, because I know you have to travel quite a bit, but when I travel. When you travel, the item you need most is what?

My toothbrush. Clearly.

Besides toiletries, what else do you need?

Well, what I really like to have with me when I'm traveling is some gift to give to the person that I'm going to be visiting.

Oh.

And it's often the person I'm staying with, not the person who invited me, but that I'm glad to be with them. So to bring a gift always makes me smile.

Did you learn that growing up in the Andes? Is that a typical thing?

Yeah, it was. It was.

Typically, you brought somebody something they called a recordal or a remembering something that would remind them of you and where you came from.

So, you know, trying to find something that reminds people of the Rockies is really hard to do because everything I go down to maybe buy and take is made in China. And it's like it says, welcome to Colorado. Made in China, you know.

What do you like to give then?

Well, best things are something that's handmade, you know, something sort of like local craftsmanship or, you know, it would be materials or something that would be just local to the area where I am. Obviously, my work doesn't particularly provide me with that sort of thing. You know, it's not like, well, I've just made another. What book?

Well, everybody can get one of those. They're also probably printed in China. I don't know. Yeah. So I go down to the local crafts fair when I can and say, ah, here it is. This is.

It's got, you know, a low. A local flower embedded in plastic by a local artist. It's like, oh, yeah, this is. This is the thing.

Do you. I know this isn't part of the fast five, but when you travel, do you like to stay in people's homes or hotels?

When I'm at a major conference, I'd rather stay in a hotel because people wanted to keep me up talking until 11 at night, and then I'm too tired the next day. And so I just need to, you know, get my sleep and focus on my presentation.

But when I'm traveling and actually trying to build a church in some way, I'd much rather live with a family and a home and find out, you know, how's. How's actual life here and how do you folks do things and how do we engage with each other? It's much more relational, but I still want them.

My condition is. But you have to let me go to bed pretty early at night, you know.

Number two, here's your second question. We had all that for the first question. Here's the second question. The best place to eat in Colorado is.

Well, out here. Any place that's got really Good green chili. And so green chili seems to be the Colorado specialty, and lots of people claim they have it.

But Dos Potridos Mexican restaurant has really good green chili if you like it hot.

Did you. Did you learn that in the Andes you had to have it hot and spicy?

No. Oddly enough, Mexican food is hot and spicy, but Andean food is not, so.

Oh, interesting.

I did not grow up with any hot and spicy kind of tradition. So now I could give you some stories about when I inadvertently hit something hot and spicy. And it was a difficult part of that trip.

Well, that leads me to the favorite dish that my mother made growing up was.

Or father, whichever they liked to make. My dad like to make a chowder. He had learned it from his. His dad, who lived on the east coast, up and up in New York State. And so for the.

The fire, local volunteer fire department, they always invited him to make chowder. And my dad would spend a whole day or a day and a half making this chowder, chopping everything up. Right?

And, yeah, so that was, you know, that was the special food that. That he would fix. And it happened only every five years, maybe.

I lived in New England for a while and Manhattan, clam chowder. Actually, in Massachusetts state legislature, they voted to say that it's not clam chowder. I lived right in Gloucester, was the.

The area, and they would have this. Oh, yeah, that's serious chowder. That's how you say it. Chowder. You got to say it right? And, man, that's good. Oh, it's so fresh.

You just see the boat come in, and then it's right there on your plate. Incredible.

Oh, yeah. You're ready to go back on the spot, aren't you?

Oh, I am just thinking about it right now. My mouth. My mouth is watering. Number four, outside of the Bible, the book that has influenced you the most is.

And I'm assuming the Bible is the number one, but outside of that, number one would be.

It would actually be Tolkien's trilogy, Lord of the Rings.

Okay.

Very much taken by that from my high school years on. And a lot of the way he thinks about good and evil and finding out who we really are under conditions where there's hardship and stuff like that.

And a few of my friends call me Gandalf for various reasons. I'm not sure I like it, but.

That'S an honor, though. He's one of the cool characters.

I actually relate to Sam Wise Ganges best. He doesn't know what he's doing, but he knows enough to stick with Frodo. And, you know, sometimes I feel like that's what I do.

I don't know what I'm doing, but I know enough that I should stick with the people I'm supposed to be with, so. I could relate to that. That's awesome.

Number five, if you were a part of the brain, what part of the brain would you be and why? Now, this is one that you're going to answer, and I'm not having an idea what you're talking about, so you're gonna have to explain it.

Okay. I think that this is not a standard question for all your interviews.

Oh, no, I always. I always gear the question to the person. You know, the Fast five has to be geared to the person.

Right?

So here we go. What's yours? What part of the brain would you be and why?

Okay, so for the moment, I think I would be the basal ganglion. So.

Okay, but why would you be. Where is the basal ganglia?

It's sort of at the base of the brain, but it's the part that has your pleasure center, so it builds joy, but it's also the one that sort of regulates your energy and says, you know, I. How much we invest in things is controlled in here.

So if we energize to engage in something, this is what decides how much energy we invest into things.

And so I think for me right now, especially being over 70 years of age, how much energy I invest in things, finding the important things, the things that are rewarding, is increasingly big on my scanner. So that's why I picked that part of the brain. It could be the prefrontal cortex, of course. The executive control center.

Being an executive control of anything just doesn't seem all that doesn't sound like fun. Give me a break. And then there's the conscience area.

I don't know that I want to be the world's conscience either, but if I could help us direct what's important that we invest energy in, that'd be an influence I wouldn't mind having.

What part of the brain makes you it act like an idiot? That might be my part.

Yeah. An overloaded cingulate cortex.

That's what I am. This is the part where I go, maybe I shouldn't have said that. What part of my brain is working right now?

Yeah. Mm. It's very responsive and probably get over overly energized.

That would be me for sure.

There you go.

Okay, well, let's talk about enemy mode. Escaping enemy mode. I've got it right here and just came out In November, as we're doing this, we're having this conversation in November.

And it is a book that I've read a few of your books now, and this is one where it's got a lot more technical aspects of things in it. But I find it fascinating because you wrote this with your executive. Is he the executive director?

Ray is coming from a military background, I find brings a whole nother element to understanding enemy mode and really brings it in. But for those who are listening and haven't read the book yet, what is enemy mode, and why is that important?

Well, the reason it's important is that probably most of the trouble that's been caused by one human being to another has been when they see each other as enemies. So half of the women killed in the United States are killed by their partner, husband, or whoever else.

So you get together because you feel like friends and lovers and then somehow turns to enemies. And so divorces are when relationships that were started out as joyful and good to be together turn into enemies.

Of course, we got the whole thing going on in the world right at the moment with Putin, you know, sort of, he seems to be an enemy mode. Then you look at the struggles that are going on in politics. The two political parties seem to see each other as enemies.

And think about enemy mode is you want the other person to lose as opposed to wanting what's good for everybody. So it's just a huge amount of damage. And how does the brain get into that condition so fast? And why does it like to stay there so long?

And why is it that generation to generation can pass hating another group onto each other?

You know, how do you actually make that contagious and more important than, you know, Dallas Willard always used loving your enemies as the benchmark for whether your Christian maturity was growing. It is a good measure, but only because almost everybody I meet says, well, I can't do it at all. And so how do you actually change that?

You know, so we're actually getting better at it, as opposed to going, well, I guess I'm just not that spiritual because I don't spontaneously love my enemies, I spontaneously dislike them. And then using what Dallas called sin management, we try to act like we don't dislike you as much as we feel inside. So how do you change that?

That's, to me, very fascinating.

It is fascinating, especially when you attach the idea of maturity to it, because I know some people will even buckle or bristle at hearing that idea that my maturity is based upon how I love my enemies. And then as you mentioned in the book, one young leader said, what if they really are my enemy?

We get that almost every week. I wonder if they really are.

Well, we're going to get to that, but let's delve into enemy mode here for a moment. You maintain that there are three kinds of enemy mode. What are these kinds of enemy mode?

Most obvious one you kind of alluded to a little earlier. And that's when we get stupid. We say and do things that are harmful.

I found out really quickly talking to married couples that got into enemy mode with each other. If they got stupid, someone would start destroying whatever it was that was of value.

So you know when you throw something in the room, when you break something, you don't break randomly the least valuable thing. You go and break something that the other person values. And so. And then afterwards you regret it and you go like so.

And when we get mad, we say something, we actually pick out the thing that we think will be most hurtful. And then afterwards we thought, oh man, I hope no one had their phone out and videotaped that.

And so this was like what most people can recognize that's a high intensity state. But the other one that causes a whole lot of damage is simple enemy mode. In that case, I just don't respond to you like you're a human.

I don't anticipate you're going to be on my side. So I start treating you as a non relational something or another right from the start.

So as soon as you walk in it's like, oh, I don't want to connect with you now. If I thought you were going to be my ally or my friend, I'd immediately, my eyes would light up.

I'd go like, oh yeah, hey, but why is it as soon as I see you, I go like, don't want to have anything to do with this person. Which is more than just indifference. It's already predicting this person isn't going to be on my side.

So your brain is making a prediction ahead of time that sort of poisons the whole interaction. Frankly, it's, it's pretty easy to do that with people. Even that, you know, like, you know, why are you here? To irritate me?

You know, all it takes is a certain name to pop up on my cell phone. You know, it's like, huh, why are they calling? So that's the second kind. And then the third kind is intelligent enemy mode.

And that's when somebody is actually out to get you and they're using their intelligence. It didn't just blow up, but they're thinking about it all day long. Like, I'm going to, you know, get my revenge on this person.

I'm going to beat them at something. And that's what politicians chronically do.

And, you know, and then that made a real interest in talking with Ray because, you know, he's coming from the military and you're supposed to find our enemies and make them lose. And so he kind of came in to this whole book writing project thinking, you know, I think sometimes that's necessary. I came into it was more from a.

Closer to a pacifist, you might position, saying, you know, we're actually supposed to build relationships with everybody in the world. That would be the best way to protect us from becoming enemies would be if we form good relationships.

He's looking at protecting us from, well, what do you do when things actually go wrong and then you get a Hitler or something like that going in that you actually want to have lose so that you can protect people. And it made a really good tension trying to write the book.

Well, having a pacifist and a retired brigadier general I would think would make a very interesting secret sauce.

Yeah, it certainly would. Yeah. And then he's trying to solve the problem, well, how do I get all, all Christians and leaders to actually participate in this?

And I'm trying to figure out at the same time, well, how does the brain actually do things? And because the science has not been developed very well.

And so that's why the book, as you mentioned, has a good deal more technical details than the average, because we're actually trying to explain, I think for the first time in any written material, how the brain actually does this.

Well, I think that because it's such a new concept, as soon as you say it, I think people, people get it there. There was a movie in the 80s called Short Circuit where there was this robot. He had been trained to be an enemy.

And of course something happens and he becomes this kind of kind robot. But something would trigger him. His lenses would go really narrow, fast and he would have a laser that would come out and he was in enemy mode.

And I immediately that image came into my mind. When you, when you had that was this Johnny Five, he'd gone into enemy mode, ready to fight. And I thought, how many people are like that today?

It's everywhere, everywhere that I turn. I was reading the book in the afternoon and I'd been reading it the day before.

And we came home from church and I had been teaching a class and we had my Wife and I had driven separately for different reasons with our kids and, and we, we pulled into the driveway together and I'm waiting for her to say hi and, and she, she gets out of the car and she goes, I'm mad at you. I mean, she and I had said something in class that had, did not represent really what she had said or felt.

And we had this discussion and I noticed that in this discussion it went immediately from being pleasant to see her migrated into the bedroom when the door was shut and our voices were becoming tense. And I recognized immediately, wait, I'm going into enemy mode.

She doesn't feel like she's on my side when she says, yeah, well, at.

First I was like apologizing. Well then I got defensive because I felt she had understood my position. She felt like I didn't understand hers.

But when I recognized the enemy mode, I started to de escalate. I remained relational, maintained eye contact. And then after I got done, I was so happy I went, I just came out of enemy mode.

I tell you, there's a victory, you know, especially with people we care about. It's like, whoa, no damage done.

Well then immediately my 9 year old son started crying and I went in to rescue him from enemy mode. And I'm like, this is awesome.

Oh yeah, yeah.

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Because understanding the Bible changes everything. And the NLT is the Bible you can understand. But how do you differentiate between enemy mode, someone being an enemy, and just being focused?

I'm still trying to understand this because enemy Mode.

Like today, my wife, as I'm preparing for this conversation, she mentioned something to me and immediately I thought, I don't have time, I need to prep for this. And I saw her. But I was, I can't say I'm going to an enemy mode. I'm still trying to understand where does enemy mode play in the everyday.

Like how does it differentiate between everyday life and is it always that I'm getting ready to battle or is it I'm constantly battling it throughout the day?

Yeah, well now this varies from person to person because some people live in enemy mode all the time and they just see the world is against them and you know, a lot of narcissism and things like that, defensiveness grows out of it.

So we knew the question would be coming up, so we actually created an appendix in the back of the book, the only one that is for how to differentiate those things. But here's the basic thing. When you are in enemy mode, you are trying to figure out how to make the other person lose.

You're not trying to figure out the least harmful alternative. When you're focused, but not in enemy mode, you're still trying to figure out how to come out of this with the least harm for everybody.

So here's what. We'll have to cut a little bit here, we'll have to cut a little bit there. But I'm being very careful not to harm you.

Going through the brain is quite capable of becoming over focused. So we don't notice some details that we should have paid attention to. But that's still not enemy mode.

Just because we got over focused and we missed some details that would be important relationally. If we're still trying to come out with the least harmful solution, we're not in enemy mode.

If actually what I'm trying to win, harm to you is to my benefit.

So if I can upset you, if I can push you away, if I can do those sorts of things, that's probably the best sort of Occam's razor for the dividing enemy mode from focus thought.

With enemy mode, it's such a new concept, but yet a profound, simple concept at the same time and having the brain science behind it. But what is it about us? Are we wired intrinsically to want to win? And what do we attach to that?

Well, we're wired for two things. First, we're wired for attachment. But if you suppress the attachment signal, then the only one left is wanting to win. And when that's.

That's how people operate. We call them either Sociopaths or psychopaths, in other words, they don't care the harm to other people as long as they win.

And that's hardwired in, but it's supposed to be controlled by our attachment to other people in which it becomes my win is when all of us win. So after age 14, well up until age 14, we really are only thinking about ourselves. The brain is wired for that.

But at age 14, the brain goes through an apoptotic period in which it takes out some of the self centered wiring and makes the survival of our group more important than our own. And so group identity, and the survival of our group identity becomes the crucial thing.

The problem of course we have currently is that families are forming very weak group identities if, if at all, especially as they disintegrate and you've got sort of serial marriages and stuff like that going on. And then with the advent of the Internet, adolescents have a very vague and diffuse sense of who their people are.

It's whoever happened to be connecting to over the Internet rather than the people that they live with. And on the Internet, the survival of your people has more to do frankly with who you can unfriend and making other people lose.

So if you got a really smart alec put down sort of thing, it's seen as a winning view in much of the virtual world. So this is becoming very, very difficult for our brain to figure out, you know, who are my people and why is their survival more important than mine?

Whereas if we have strong attachments to other people. The way that I win is making sure that my people are doing well. Right. Again, we're polarizing around the country with who my people are.

Basically we define who my people are as anybody who doesn't like so and so. You know, we share the same enemy. And every abusive government in the world finds that as the easiest way to gather a following.

That is, we're all going to oppose those American imperialists or those Russian whatevers or those Arabs or Jews or there's, you know, you pick an enemy, we all gather around as our identity group and I'll dislike them. And my enemy's enemy is my friend becomes the way that we, we form a group identity that's highly toxic.

No shade, the way you put it down is how you have a hold on me. In the book you talk about, and I'm not sure who it was who turned off the television of a certain news channel.

I mean it turned off the sound and just watched.

And the word outrage appeared every 15 minutes because it was designed to evoke the enemy and then create this community and most advertisements, that's how it's all working. People are playing on this idea of us versus them. We know that it's their advertisers are playing on it.

Even in, in as we're creating this ministry, you hear about branding and the idea is, is who's your enemy? They want to know who your enemy is, and that's who you're speaking against. And I'm like, well, our enemy is the world, the flesh, and the devil.

I mean, that's biblically who our enemy is. But we people want a name. They want you to put a face on it, whether it's whatever it might be. How do we understand and direct?

Or is there a correct way to ever look at enemy mode? Like, or be in enemy mode? Is that even a thing or.

No, no. Every time your brain is in enemy mode, it's running in without all its circuits on.

So it's always a matter of diminished capacity and where you're not calculating the least harmful alternative. Now, is it a good idea to identify who our real enemies are? And that would be the ones you just mentioned.

We, we fight against, not against flesh and blood, but against principalities and powers. There's no, no reason we should ever be making friends with the devil.

And so his perspective and what he thinks is a good idea is not, not beneficial for human life, basically. Right. So in that sense, we should have a pretty good strong firewall built on that point.

We're not trying to figure out the least harmful effect on the devil's plans, but also we're not nearly intelligent enough to figure out how that should run. So the other question then is how do we be befriend other people?

And the answer is, if we're trying to raise the status of their flesh, it's not going to last and it's not going to work. If we're trying to find out who they are as eternal beings and who are they meant to be, and we befriend that as a consistent basis.

You can actually do that with the person you find most obnoxious. I said, would you. Let's just think about holidays that might be coming up for people.

You know, there's going to be some obnoxious people there that are going to argue and fight and disagree and that sort of thing. You ask yourself, would I want to bring out in them the person God intended them to be?

And the more obnoxious they are, the more we would say, yes, I would really like to bring out who God meant them to be. You know, anybody with a bad parent who's got to put up with them in some ways, you know, do you. You want to just befriend their flesh and their.

Their misunderstanding of who they were created to be? The answer is no. You know, that that's very hard to put up with.

Would you like them to become who God created, which always a person, that's good news to other people. And the answer is yeah, I hope, feel hope hopeless about it, but that would be what I would. Would want to do.

And so actually bringing people out of enemy mode is helping them discover who they were intended to be and how they can be a blessing to others when they, based on their life experience, are really bad at it. And they're probably good at making other people lose.

So, yeah, there's no, no time with other people that we want to be in enemy mode and just be a destructive influence. Otherwise, how do you return blessings for cursings?

That, that is an amazing point. And I'm curious hearing how that works. How do, how does that work as a soldier?

Because I know we have a lot of military personnel that listen to the show. What do you say to them who are going off into places where they're facing enemies?

Yesterday I was talking with a friend of the officer in front in charge of the Kim Lai massacre in Vietnam.

Vietnam, right, right.

And he was very much regretting that the least harmful solution wasn't found there.

Whenever we find vets that are really suffering from their military experience, it's when they did something that looking back on it is not the least harmful solution. So it's a moral injury that occurs to them.

When we hear at least the news reports about Kim Young from North Korea and his, you know, his threats, the reaction is we don't like his use of nuclear weapons because it doesn't sound like he's looking for the least harmful solution. You know, and so the military actually has been eliminating officers and generals who are not concerned about the least harmful solution.

It doesn't mean there is a solution in which no one gets hurt.

But especially if you want to talk about who do you want to have in control of nuclear weapons or major offensives, do you want the person who doesn't care about the least harmful solution and just goes for the worst win?

You know, going back to some of the commentaries about General Patton in World War II, he would often disregard apparently the least harmful solution in order to get the fastest win possible. And there's some military debate Obviously within that, as whether that might in the long run be the least harmful solution.

But that was actually how the logic for the nuclear bombs in Japan played out. It was, in the long term, the least harmful solution.

But we've continued to debate that as societies and cultures for, you know, ever since, you know, those bombings. But we want people even in military, to think about what, what is the least harmful solution in terms of even taking over a country.

And again, Ray, the retired general, was talking about how when you get fresh troops, they're very much focused after basic training on getting the win. And when they were in Afghanistan and they tried to help them actually interact with their communities.

So the US influence, the reason that we were in Afghanistan to begin with, was supposed to make a better country for them.

They had a very hard time doing it because they were so focused on getting a fast win that they couldn't really talk through with the local people what the least harmful solution was.

But troops that had been experienced, had been out there for several years, were very much by that point had developed an additional awareness of what are we going to do here?

So that what we leave behind as a result of our military action is actually beneficial for the people on the ground that we're supposed to be helping by being here.

And so again, you see, if you think about gives us the creeps every time we have a military leader who doesn't care about the least harmful solution, that's where war crimes are going to happen. So enemy mode thinking, it's very helpful for us to understand how it works so that we don't let enemy mode thinking take us out.

Because intelligent enemy mode, you got to really stay one step ahead of their intelligence if you're going to actually come up with the least harmful solution. But we don't want people in power, we don't want police officers in power that aren't thinking about the least harmful solution.

There's no place that we can think about it to go. Like, no, everybody we want to have, they have to be thinking about police, arms, the whole solution, or we don't want to give him a gun.

I forgot my pistol. I don't have my gun. When I shoot, I miss. I have to focus right now. The beats, the stakes are running very hard. Drive through.

You see, my hands are tied. I was talking to a police officer the other day in the city that's really close to us, very large metropolitan city.

He's a large guy, he's 6 foot 5, very intimidating presence. And we were talking about being a police Officer. And he said, you know, it's very hard today. He said, you know, we have body cameras.

Everybody is very conscientious. You don't want to make a mistake.

They would hire police officers, they would ask you the question if you've been in fights because they wanted you to know, to be able to handle yourself.

Now they ask you that question, but they're hoping that you have it because they know how you know how to de escalate the situation rather than result of physical violence.

I find that very interesting because that's going directly with what you're saying, is that people are saying now we're recognizing that violence isn't always the right solution. Going forward, I have to be able to de escalate and get out of enemy mode, which is not an easy thing. As you cite in the book.

You're talking about lawyers, you're talking about corporate executives, that winning is everything. And if they don't win, they don't bring home the bacon. You know, they don't, they don't understand how to have everyone win.

And it reminded me, as I was reading your book of an honor shame culture in some ways, because honor, there's only a limited amount of it. Not everybody can get it. And it's a zero sum game. How do we help people change their mind?

Because this is a massive shift, especially here in America. It's always you win or you lose, that's it. And rarely do you hear anymore. That's how you play the game. Because no one cares and justifies the means.

Right?

Yeah. But let me back up just a little bit to what you're saying because it brings up a comment about a part of the basal ganglion.

Since you asked me what I wanted to be striasomes, because there's a striata area in there and they control your energy.

And one of the interesting things that they, that going back to police officers, that military, and that is that when people are not fighting for an attachment, coming in with overwhelming force is actually the best way to reduce violence. The least harmful alternative because it'll make people freeze on the spot.

So, you know, you see it in all, all the programs, you know, where you're, you surround somebody with seven people with guns and suddenly they freeze right there. And it's like, you know, drop your weapon and come on out.

Which works all the time, except when they're fighting because the, the people have got their daughter.

Then you see the attachment.

Yeah. Which is one of the huge miscalculations I think probably happened with the situation in Europe right now, the it goes back in military history.

When Rome was invaded and people were fighting for their homes and attachments, they put up a huge fight.

And again in Vietnam, people fighting for their homes and families put up a huge fight and overwhelming power produce awe in them by your how good your bombs are doesn't work when people are fighting for attachments, but it does work when there isn't that isn't on the line.

And so very often police officers that are great big huge guys come in really loud and they shut down the energy center just by freezing somebody like, okay, the least harmful alternative is there's no point in fighting here, just give up. Which there's a certain again, as long as you're thinking about the least harmful alternative.

There's some very interesting elements involved with that that are the reason why the US ended up trying to be the most impressive military force in the world. Shock and awe doesn't always work in all circumstances.

Well, I'm still trying to understand the contours of enemy mode because I do know that, as you mentioned, attachment affects how we go about it. But getting into enemy mode, whether it's simple, whether it's stupid, or whether it's intelligent, seems to be negative.

And you were mentioning that it actually can have, even for soldiers, it can have a detrimental effect morally on who we are when we do things in enemy mode.

Yeah.

Having worked even as soldiers with the.

VA hospital, the people that are suffering the most are the ones that didn't find the least harmful alternative to whatever kind of situation they were in.

Well, that's where I go back to the win at all costs where the end justifies the means. Because having been in the church, churches don't say this, but this is how they operate.

It's like we talk about loving our enemies, but it's this general thing until the enemy is really someone who would be construed as a liberal or conservative, depending on what part of the spectrum you come from. And then suddenly there is no the love your enemies, you are now my enemy, and therefore you need to be eliminated.

And even in churches, this happens all the time. People go into enemy mode and churches don't want to talk about it.

They walk around and they say praise the Lord and they think, oh, if you can, you know, Jesus is great. And yet the pastor is angry at everyone on his staff and he's manipulating every single one of them.

And I've seen this at churches, but even as you mentioned in the book, pastors are some of the most reluctant embracers of understanding or even acknowledging that there's an enemy mode. Why is that?

Well, I think the simplest way of tying all this together is saying that the brain is extremely sensitive to status, some indicators.

And so the pastors that are having trouble, the people who are fighting enemy mode, are all people who have to protect their status, which, again, as he pointed out, in an honor society, for example, honor is limited. And so status goes with honor. And, you know, to think about this in a. And maybe a different way.

At the time that the New Testament was written, the highest status a human being could achieve was to be a demigod. So demigods had a father who was a God and a mother who was a human.

And if you were a demigod, you had a father who was God and a mother who was human, you had the highest status a human being could have. It was a sort of bulletproof status.

And into that context, we have Jesus coming in, who, by strange coincidence, has a father who's God and a mother who's human. And this is official demigod status. Now, if you have status that is bulletproof, no one can lower it for you.

But what you can offer to other people would be to raise their status.

Now, the brain notices somebody else's status in about 40 milliseconds, and it takes three times that long to figure out what their gender is under the best of conditions. So it's much more sensitive to status than it is to gender.

And of course, gender is causing all kinds of trouble and figuring out what it is in her culture currently. But to our brains, it's a relatively trivial consideration compared to status.

And so you'll find that the gender fight has really become a status fight, because status is what, you know, what. What status do you give me because of my choice of gender or sexual preference? And something like that. You see, if you look at the fight, it's.

It's now primarily about who gets status and who doesn't and under what conditions. Again, human beings are wired to have the status fight.

So the way that enemy mode works is that I win by lowering your status, but the way that Jesus went about it is I win by raising your status. Because if you understood who you could be, you would also be a child of God. You could have human parents and. And a divine parent as well.

And so the way out of enemy mode is to see in other people what would really give them bulletproof status, that is to be children of God. And Jesus says, blessed are the peacemakers because they shall be called the Children of God.

It's not just, you know, you get this title, but actually you're operating like somebody who says, yeah, I'll give you the highest status possible and that'll produce peace for us right here. And that's supposedly pastors and churches and all the rest are supposed to be about that business of raising the status of others.

And the funny thing about it is if you're raising other people's status, you can either raise the status of their as if self, which is another little thing we talk about in the book, that is my image. And again, Dallas Willard thought there was a few things that corrupted the church worse than image management.

And so if I'm trying to raise the status of your image now, in that case, I could do the Hollywood thing and we'll fluff your podcast as being the most influential thing in the nation and probably the world. And if anybody really understood how important all that was, you know, then I'd be very important because I'm on your podcast and that sort of stuff.

You would fluff me up.

I'm the important one because you're on.

My podcast each other.

And you know, we try to raise each other's status here, as you know, and anybody who passed on this podcast would be a high status individual and you know, we would establish ourselves as the ones who should be listened to by the world. But that's a puffing your artificial self.

If who Travis was meant to be the reason why God thought at this time in history, I really want to have Travis Michael Fleming talking to people because I put something in him that if it is seen by others, is going to help them understand why I created the world. That is your true status. And it may or may not be liked by other people, but if I draw that out of you, you'll think to yourself, wow, I don't know.

That was somehow that interview touched me. It was like an important thing to me right there.

And that is the kind of status that the last 500 years from now in eternity, when we look back at each other, will smile at that moment, at that influence having come out. And if that's what we're about, that's what transcends into me mode.

We're actually building in each other, encouraging one another to be something more than we could have been otherwise, except for this transcendent experience. And that is our always our least harmful alternative to bring out who you were actually meant to be.

And when I do that, I raise your status and it makes me feel like, yeah, that's who I was meant to be as well. Makes my status, in a sense, bulletproof, whether people like it or not. It's hard to put it into words, but I see Jesus doing this all the time.

He goes to talk to the woman at the well. You know, he's correcting. His disciples were always talking about who's got the highest status among them.

I mean, you know, but he says the real status here comes from becoming the person God meant you to be. And even though you're all going to deny me, you know, I'm going to call you back to be who you were meant to be.

After that, you know, even that loss of identity has occurred. So these are, you know, these themes are really embedded in who we're supposed to be as people who are getting to know God.

Obviously, we are just barely scratching the surface here, but, man, is there so much in just this first part of the conversation to think about three kinds of enemy mode. The very real world issues for police and the military, let alone the rest of us.

If you watch this on YouTube, you saw me pause and contemplate what Jim was saying. More than once. He brings up ideas that I have to sit with for more than just a little bit, because, as I said, it's new, but it really isn't.

There's a lot here that is just simply intuitive, but it's also really challenging. Do I really love my enemy? Do I truly even believe that it's possible? Do I really want the least harmful outcome of those?

For those I disagree with, these are hard questions. CS Lewis once said that forgiveness is a really great idea until you have someone that you have to forgive.

Is it any wonder that we need the saving power of Jesus left to our own devices? Left to my own devices, it's not happening. I can't get there from here. But God, and He has wired us so that we can actually praise God. Change.

I still have a lot to think about with this episode.

I have a lot of questions, and we'll get to some of them next week, including things about attachment and evangelism, how we change the way we're doing things in the church.

But if you come away with anything from this episode, I want to remind you that what Jesus offers all of us is the ability to become who we were meant to be.

And that's what he came for, so that we would be his children and we would fulfill the purpose that he has for us as we trust in him and as we reflect back to him what he means to us. That's why Christmas matters.

I do want to thank you for listening to our show and please prayerfully consider partnering with us to help meet our year end goal of $50,000. We have 25,000 left to go, so any amount you would like to give helps and goes a long way in helping water people around the world.

I do want to thank our Apollos water team for making this a reality. And if you want to watch this or any other of our conversations, go to our YouTube page.

This is Travis Michael Fleming signing off from Apollos Watered. Stay watered everybody.