Psychologist Eric Berne taught that people sometimes get caught up in interactions that follow a pre-defined pattern and progress to a predictable outcome. He called these interactions “Games” and described a number of these games in detail in his 1964 best-seller, Games People Play: The Psychology of Human Relationships.
One game that is common in the Church is the one Berne calls “Ain’t It Awful.” We started playing this game recently in a Gospel Doctrine (Sunday School) class when the instructor used a quote from the 1960’s and the class started to bemoan the “exponential explosion” of sin in the world and how “things were better back then.” I spoke up and disagreed. I said that things were NOT better back then, especially for racial minorities and women, and that we still needed to improve. I mentioned that we improve by going forward, not by going backward. I pointed out that there has ALSO been an “exponential explosion” of (LDS) Temples built around the world, and that I remembered when the thirteenth Temple (Oakland) was dedicated (1964). (There are now more than thirteen Temples in just Utah alone.)
My comment did cause the tone of the class discussion to shift a bit, until one brother mentioned how, when he was a boy in a small town in central Utah, they didn’t ever lock the doors of their house. This, of course, was intended to support the point that the world is more evil than it used to be. I did not challenge his point because I have great respect for this particular gentleman, and because I had already spoken. The response I would have given is that he is not wrong. There IS more evil in the world. There are many more PEOPLE in the world (exponential explosion!) than there were fifty years ago. My point, which people tend to forget, is that there is also much more GOOD in the world as well.
Eric Berne points out that the “payoff” for playing the “Ain’t it Awful” game is a sense of smug self-righteousness. “We” are better than “Those” awful people. When put that starkly, most Christians would probably realize that they should stop playing the game because Jesus warned against it. (See the parable of the Pharisee and the Tax Collector, Luke 18:9-14). My hope is that we would at least try to refrain from playing this popular game in church. I try to speak up or change the subject whenever I hear the game starting.
The best comment in class that day was about a person who was learning how to “Heli-Ski.” This is a form of off-trail downhill skiing that consists essentially of being dropped off by a helicopter on the top of a snowy mountain and finding your own way down. The trainer pointed out that if you “focus on the trees” you will, inevitably, hit a tree. The trick to steep, off-trail, downhill skiing is to “focus on the spaces between the trees.” The life lesson, of course, is that it is more productive to focus on the path, not on the obstacles.