I know that this link and that article will raise some defensive questions. Like “who are the Brits to criticize us?” Exactly. Yet it sometimes takes someone outside of our culture to see something with a little more clarity.
Notes On Evil; Evil Notes
If there is such a thing as transcendent, objective evil, part of its roots lie firmly in our ability to fool ourselves. This would include the mechanisms by which we lie to ourselves, while trying not to be conscious of the lie: the defense mechanisms. Thinking more about it, how could we lie to ourselves without at least planning on lying to others?
Our defensive lies protect us from fear and panic. Is that all they do? What happens when we are the origins or at least the inspiration for fear and panic? When we “enable” fear in someone else, for our own satisfaction. Last night someone close to me told a mutual acquaintance how, when she had hurt me the most, much more than most others in my life, that she had done so for my own sake! It was not out of fear, not out of rage, or delight in my torment, and the rush of petty power a bully feels, no, it was out of love!
This is captured in an extreme way in a movie, “Misery” starting James Caan. He was playing a fiction writer who was kidnapped by a fan. After one escape attempt, she “hobbled” him by breaking his legs. After doing so, she expressed how much she loved him. No doubt she felt love at the moment, which is why the scene sends chills up and down our backs. Hatred, conscious and active, is something we understand, and are even guilty of at times. It leads us to do things we can scarcely imagine, let alone enact. If only we had a comforting lie we could believe in, like, “we are doing it for their own good.”
In the wake of trauma today
I have always been interested in the banality of evil–or it might be more accurate to say that I have, since the age of eleven, been interested on why there should be banal evil. I was going to make a prediction, but a quick browsing of my local mega-corporate bookstore beat me to it. The prediction was that we would soon see some great works from distinguished authors that link violence to our neurology, and that this violence came to our neural structure via our genes, and that in turn was created by some evolutionary moment. The fact that we are the only species we know of that creates evil and concepts by which we try to understand it will not puzzle the new socio-biologists among us.
