If you’re like most people, though, this exercise may have helped you see that while delivering righteous judgment feels fabulous, receiving it feels awful. When we’re attacked—even with the very words we use to attack others—we feel confused, scared, misjudged, angry, rigid, and intensely inclined to lash back. As Friedrich Nietzsche wrote, “Beware that, when fighting monsters, you yourself do not become a monster.” When we go to war on something that we see as a war on us, the ultimate winner isn’t either side of the conflict, but war itself.
