The last article was on how weak so-called conscience is, the arbitrariness of the terms good and evil and how we’re better off in terms of personal development if we stop kidding ourselves about how moral we are or how immoral others are.
But last time any really astute people reading may have noticed that I focused on the lack of individual resistance to commit evil under the guidance of authority. I never covered people who commit evil irrespective of authority – who even go against authority to commit evil. Surely those are the really evil people, right?
Minds of the initiators of evil
Evil people don’t think they’re evil. I’m not talking about insanity either (as people who are severely mentally unwell don’t have a sufficient grasp of morality). Evil people think they’re moral or amoral. Evil people believe, most importantly, that they are right. Good and evil both require conviction, and conviction requires an individual to believe he or she is right.
I know I’ve said we’re all evil, but of course I’m not really grasping that fully. In textbook terms we’re evil but on a deep emotional level I can only understand us as being amoral. That inability to really see myself and others as immoral is what prevents me from selling all my luxury items and dedicating my life to the service of others.
This is largely because our great sin is apathy – we don’t really want Africans to starve, we just can’t be bothered to do much about it.
Most of us are at least one rung of the ladder above rapists, serial killers and spouse beaters. And these people are either psychotic (and thus not definitely evil, as such) or just understand themselves emotionally as being amoral.
Why is this?
The reason we never see ourselves as evil on an emotional level is because the term can only ever be applied by one person to another in an emotional way. To think of someone as evil to the point that you get an emotional reaction from that belief is to feel any number of negative things towards that person: anger, hate, disgust or fear, for example, each of which is rooted in ignorance. Because we are never ignorant of ourselves we can’t feel that those kinds of negative emotions aimed at ourselves.
But, I get angry at myself and I can hate myself too…
In English we use the same words for the anger, disgust, hate and fear we have of others as we do for the anger, disgust, hate and fear we can apply to ourselves – even though they’re not the same.
Think about it: have you ever been as angry with yourself as you have been with others? Have you ever been as disgusted with yourself as you have been with others? Have you ever really been frightened of yourself? Have you ever hated yourself like you’ve hated someone else?
Self-hate seems an increasingly common ailment these days but the Dalai Lama had never heard of it until the early 90s. See The Art of Happiness: A Handbook for Living
According to Wikipedia psychologists prefer to use the term ‘low self-esteem’ rather than self-hate and when you really think about it it’s easy to see why.
As Cutler muses in his book, self-hate is impossible on one level. Love isn’t easy to define, but a definition that Cutler offers is the absolute desire for a person to be happy regardless of what the person does to you or anyone else. Every single person wants him or herself to be happy and in that way each of us profoundly loves ourselves.
Just as we can’t feel negative emotions for ourselves to the depths we do for others, so we can’t feel we’re evil, even if can sort of grasp it in an intellectual sense.
So…we can’t feel someone is evil if we love him or her?
That’s right. In fact there are two things that prevent us from feeling deeply negative emotions for others: love and understanding, and both needn’t be working in tandem.
This is one reason for why battered husbands and wives stay with their spouses and why parents continue to love their children no matter how awful they turn out. The more you either love or understand someone the less negatively you can perceive him or her.
This article thus contains the hidden (and not much repeated these days) message that to be more at peace with someone you should endeavour to understand them better.
In fact all negative emotions you have for others can be reduced or even wiped out through love and/or understanding.
What does this tell us about evil?
Evil and other emotional negative beliefs about others are rooted in ignorance. How can something be really authentic and inherent, existing regardless of chance human perception, if knowledge wipes it out?
Throughout our lives, and especially in our childhoods, this idea of protagonists versus antagonists is heavily romanticised and endorsed. From fairy tales to Harry Potter: evil is this definite, self-aware thing that has to be wiped out by good. And the reader is made to hate the evil and feel alienated from it and rejoice when the evil-doer dies, preferably in much suffering.
Christianity, Buddhism and modern psychology all acknowledge that this way of thinking works out badly for everyone, yet on it continues and many, many suffer for it.
In a logically need extension from the last article, let go of the idea of ‘true’ evil and we’ll all be better off for it.
Check out the other articles in this series: Part 1, Part 3.
If you liked this article and would like to make a donation to Reaching A Better Place please click below.
Related Articles:
Leave a Comment