Whether you consider someone your enemy or not doesn’t really matter if they turn out to actually be your enemy. If those people turn round and stab you in the back one day and leave you dead then their ideology has effectively won and yours has lost. This was how a lot of imperial empires operated, first befriending and then betraying.
I would say that hiking groups definitely have enemies. Land owners are hostile to the idea of ramblers rights and in the UK they are trying to dismantle them - look at the back and forth over the right to wild camp on Dartmoor in the UK. You might not hate these people or spend any time even discussing them, but that doesn’t change the fact that they exist and they dislike you, or at least the activity that you do, on land they perceive to be theirs.
Same with the arts, you only have to look at the amount of HN comments clapping their hands with glee at all the AI tech that is putting actors, writers and artists out of work. There is a sizeable portion of society who see the arts as “not proper work” and have an intense envy and hatred that people can make a living doing it.
No matter what you do, you literally can’t get everyone to like you. As the famous joke goes, look what they did to Jesus, the guy who loved everyone, they killed him. You might not go around trying to actively find or create enemies, but that doesn’t change the fact that they probably exist.
> Whether you consider someone your enemy or not doesn’t really matter if they turn out to actually be your enemy. If those people turn round and stab you in the back one day and leave you dead then their ideology has effectively won and yours has lost. This was how a lot of imperial empires operated, first befriending and then betraying.
Ok ... weird, but this is a strawman. Even if my groups have actual enemies that we are unaware of, we are still not worrying about these hypothetical backstabbers and, as such, do not "have a common enemy as a bonding factor".
> As the famous joke goes, look what they did to Jesus, the guy who loved everyone, they killed him. You might not go around trying to actively find or create enemies, but that doesn’t change the fact that they probably exist.
Jesus was a mythical character; but in the Christian mythos: Jesus had actual enemies, was very much aware of those enemies and explicitly chose to turn the other cheek and to love them, ironically to your reference of him, making him not their enemy.
Isn't there a middle ground between "getting anyone/everyone to like you" and "I'm declaring anyone/everyone (out of my group) to be my enemy"?
If someone dislikes me, am I required to consider them my enemy? Is this not just a self-fulfilling prophecy towards conflict creation instead of conflict resolution?
> Isn't there a middle ground between "getting anyone/everyone to like you" and "I'm declaring anyone/everyone (out of my group) to be my enemy"?
I don’t understand where this take has come from. I simply said that the enemies likely exist, whether you are aware of them or not. I didn’t say anywhere that you should start treating everyone not in your group as an enemy.
> If someone dislikes me, am I required to consider them my enemy? Is this not just a self-fulfilling prophecy towards conflict creation instead of conflict resolution?
Again, I didn’t say this anywhere. You are free to treat someone who dislikes you however you wish. You could be indifferent, hostile or try to reconcile differences.
The response you take will likely be based on your interest, power levels and assessment of the threat. If a person is just moaning about you in the pub you might not take much interest. If the person is a kingpin who tells you to stop or he’ll have someone kill you, now you have a decision to make as to whether you want to fight for what you’re doing or acquiesce. Of course the guy in the pub and the kingpin are two ends of a large spectrum of activity and where you choose to define enemy depends on what level of activity you personally think warrants it. Someone like Jesus might not even consider the kingpin an enemy, just misguided and unenlightened - “forgive them father for they know not what they do”.
I would say that hiking groups definitely have enemies. Land owners are hostile to the idea of ramblers rights and in the UK they are trying to dismantle them - look at the back and forth over the right to wild camp on Dartmoor in the UK. You might not hate these people or spend any time even discussing them, but that doesn’t change the fact that they exist and they dislike you, or at least the activity that you do, on land they perceive to be theirs.
Same with the arts, you only have to look at the amount of HN comments clapping their hands with glee at all the AI tech that is putting actors, writers and artists out of work. There is a sizeable portion of society who see the arts as “not proper work” and have an intense envy and hatred that people can make a living doing it.
No matter what you do, you literally can’t get everyone to like you. As the famous joke goes, look what they did to Jesus, the guy who loved everyone, they killed him. You might not go around trying to actively find or create enemies, but that doesn’t change the fact that they probably exist.