The Ring = Pride

I never was much of a fan of "The Ring" series by Tolkien, but I found this article at The Imaginative Conservative on "Are We Becoming a Nation of Gollums?" by Joseph Pearce to contain some useful truths without forcing me to read all of Tolkien.

"Those who possess the Ring become possessed by it. The Ring promises empowerment but delivers overpowerment, subduing the will of the wearer. The Ring can be seen to symbolize Pride, the one sin to rule them all and in the darkness bind them. If we succumb to its power and its promises, we begin to live the lie with which it overshadows us. We become slaves to our addiction to Pride and its narcissistic self-centredness. We become Pride’s prisoners, unable to escape from the confines of the ego. We cannot sacrifice ourselves for others, which means that we cannot love. In such a state of self-imposed self-isolation, we begin to shrivel into a pathetic shadow of who we are meant to be. We gollumize ourselves... 

 ...As we watch our culture succumb to the power of Pride, we are witnessing the gollumizing of our brothers and sisters. Demanding the right to self-destructive addiction, they are shriveling into pathetic wrecks of the people they are meant to be, while simultaneously making a wreckage of the society in which they are living the wreckage of their lives. Paradoxically, their only hope is to be found in the enemies whom they refuse to love. It is those who are striving to become more than halflings who are the only hope for those who have become less than halflings. As the gollumized souls are killing themselves with Pride, humble souls must lay down their own lives for their gollumized friends. As Bilbo, Frodo, and Sam learned to love and pity Gollum, and as Christ laid down His life for his friends who were determined to be His enemies, so must we do likewise. 

The only antidote to the poison of Pride is the healing power of humility. The only escape from the hell of hatred is heavenly love."

Today's Gollums do no realize what they are. What they see in the mirror is more likely a good looking, easily offended, progressive, non binary, anti-racist who is always right and never wrong.

That is the person we must love.

Just remember that to show someone the truth is to love them.