Politics & Power Quote by Neale Donald Walsch

Walsch takes the polite fiction of “difference” and drags the real engine into daylight: superiority. The line works because it refuses to treat violence as a mystery of ancient hatreds or clashing values. It’s not that we merely disagree; it’s that we rank. By stacking “ethnic group, our society, our political party, our God” into a single escalating list, he collapses the usual moral hierarchies we use to excuse ourselves. The move is slyly leveling: nationalism, partisanship, and religion get the same grammar, the same pettiness, the same deadly output.

The subtext is a critique of identity as a competitive sport. “Our” repeats like a chant, less a marker of belonging than a verbal fence. The phrase “better than your God” is especially barbed: it implies that even the divine gets drafted into tribal scorekeeping, as if transcendence were a brand comparison. Walsch’s “we” matters, too. It’s accusatory without granting the reader an easy perch of innocence; the indictment is collective, implicating the comfortable spectator as much as the obvious fanatic.

Contextually, this lands in late-20th- and early-21st-century spiritual commentary: post-Cold War ethnic conflicts, culture-war politics, and resurgent religious absolutism, all amplified by mass media. Walsch isn’t offering policy; he’s offering diagnosis. The intent is to make the reader feel how thin the line is between “identity” and “permission,” between pride and the logic that turns neighbors into targets.