The War Within - Between Good and Evil - Bheemeswara Challa (psychology books to read TXT) 📗

them. Despite the ‘dark core’,
all of us are still capable of compassion, which science tells us can be sharpened
like any other skill, similar to a muscle that can be strengthened with exercise,
and enhanced through systematic training programs. It means that man is in no
way predestined to evil, although he is constantly tempted by malevolent forces
which, like a wild beast, lie in wait, ready to leap on its prey. We do not have to
cringe and crawl in the face of the evil within; we can still lead a virtuous life if
we muster the will and skill to do good. That will beef up the forces of good in
the war within.
Even though they have not explicitly focused much on the war within, all
religions and scriptures, ancient archetypes and great men, spiritual and secular,
have grappled with the prickly issue of good and evil in human life. For instance,
the conflict between good and evil is one of the precepts of the Zoroastrian faith,
first enshrined by Zoroaster over three centuries ago. It is central to Manichaeism,
an Iranian religion, which the founder called the Religion of Light. Manichaean
theology taught a dualistic view of good and evil. A key belief in Manichaeism
is that the powerful, though not omnipotent, good power (God), was opposed
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by the semi-eternal evil power (Satan). Humanity, the world and the soul are
seen as a by-product of the battle between God’s proxy, Primal Man, and Satan.
The human person is seen as a battleground for these powers.47 According to
Buddhism, desire is the root of evil; and Vedanta says that ignorance of our true
nature (avidya) is evil. Nietzsche, on the other hand, said “Not necessity, not
desire, no—the love of power is the demon of men”. Whatever is the source of
evil in the first place, let us face it: the evil we encounter in the world is more
devilish and daring. It is tinged with malice, designed not to derive maximum
gain but to inflict maximum pain and misery on another person. What has
happened, and is happening, is that the evil within us has gained the upper hand
in the war within; it has infiltrated and corrupted our interpersonal life and
is strutting triumphant in the world. We must bear in mind that life without
suffering is a virtual oxymoron, and that in fact, our own body is the source of
our suffering, subject as it is to decay and disease. And much of our suffering
in fact emanates from our relationship with other people. What is now getting
blurred is the boundary between what is called demonic or sadistic evil and
everyday evil, between acts that are merely bad and those that are truly depraved.
The evil we encounter today is raw, naked, unashamed, and unapologetic. That
is so because it overwhelms the good inside us. And that is because the ground
within is now more suitable to the seeds of evil. What evil stands for is what we
want from life. That strengthens both the evil hiding in the crevices and corners
of our conflicted and beleaguered soul, and in the thick and humdrum of our
daily life. What is glaring is that evil-doers don’t just do bad that hurt and harm
others. They choose to make their actions even worse by behaving sadistically
and by deliberately ignoring or intensifying the damage and suffering they cause.
It is yet another sign that forces of evil and adharma have gained an
almost unassailable dominance in the struggle within. What many of us do not
understand is that not only do both good and bad coexist in each of us, but they
combine with other kindred forces to wage a war to gain the upper hand in our
consciousness. And the fortunes and fluctuations in this war eventually determine
our behavior, what we do and what we don’t—and no amount of laws and ethical
codes can make any significant difference. One pivotal factor we should never
lose sight of is that we cannot be moral simply because we want to appear good.
Morality per se cannot ward off or fight evil. And we need to widen the ambit
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of morality. Many evil perpetrators convince themselves that they are acting
morally in doing what they are doing. We also have to rethink who qualifies to
be a ‘perpetrator’. Is it only the actual doer or should it include the ‘mastermind’?
We often ask how a mass murderer can kill innocent people and children. At
least they have a twisted cause in their warped minds; what about ‘official’ mass
murderers who authorize launching of drones to kill a ‘terrorist’ suspected to be
hiding in the vicinity? Is the manufacture of a nuclear weapon itself or of toxic
chemicals, not only their use, a sin? Or the development of technologies that we
know we don’t have the wisdom to put to good use? What is the best thing we
can morally do, saving ourselves, or sacrificing ourselves? Is morality a matter of
numbers or a question of intent? Can ‘loyalty’ to a family, company or country
no longer be deemed to be a virtue by itself? We have to redraw the boundaries of
what is right and what is wrong, and what is ‘larger good’ and ‘lesser evil’. Should
there be anymore different moral norms applicable to the rulers and the ruled,
the state and the citizen? Which is a lesser evil, kleptocracy or kakistocracy? We
cannot arrive at precise and ‘fool-proof ’ answers; we have to constantly improve
and improvise.
The only way to minimize errors is to cultivate the right kind of mindset.
To checkmate, contain, and combat evil in the world we have to stem the tide in
the war and strengthen the forces of good inside. For that, we have to aggressively
enhance the good we do in our daily lives. We must remember that whatever we
do all day, whatever we put into our body through any of our sense organs, serves
and feeds one or the other of the ‘two wolves’ inside, wolves that are constantly
at war with each other. Everything we ingest is ‘natural’ nutrition to either of
them. Like everyday evil, we also have to have everyday good, a good that, in
the words of the humanist William Morris, we can do with a consciousness
that makes us act as if harm to one would mean harm to all. In fact, some say
that it is the purpose of evil to throw things into disarray, and that it is the
very reason why God created it and allows it to exist. We can do good in many
ways if we recognize that in human life, luck (or whatever one chooses to call
it: fate, destiny, karma) plays a huge role—from birth to death—, and that we
should make it our manifest mission to help the unlucky, the disadvantaged, the
handicapped, and to do what we could to make life less difficult for them and
lighten their burden. For, as George Eliot said, “what do we live for, if not to
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make life less difficult to each other?”48 And make life less difficult particularly to
the less fortunate among us. No other species is as disparate and divergent as the
human, and it is precisely that disparateness and divergence that offers immense
opportunities to do good.
The subject of what Lars Svendsen called the ‘philosophy of evil’, and
the fight between good and evil, has been a perennial theme in great literature
like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein (1818), Robert Stevenson’s The Strange Case of
Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde (1886), JRR Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937–1955),
William Golding’s Lord of the Flies (1954), and John Steinbeck’s East of Eden
(1952). The common theme in all of these is that humanity is continuously
immersed in a struggle of good versus evil. Steinbeck sums it up: “I believe that
there is one story in the world, and only one… Humans are caught—in their lives,
in their thoughts, in their hungers and ambitions, in their avarice and cruelty,
and in their kindness and generosity too—in a net of good and evil”. Steinbeck
calls it, “the way in which this sense of opposed absolutes rises from deep within
man, representing something profound and inevitable in human consciousness”.
Before Steinbeck, we have Shakespeare in whose entire oeuvre the fight between
good and evil is a recurring refrain. In Hamlet, he says, “for there is nothing either
good or bad, but thinking makes it so”. And in Macbeth, throughout the play,
Macbeth and his wife, after the murder of Duncan, are engaged in a constant
combat between the good and evil within themselves. A much-acclaimed work of
this genre is Joseph Conrad’s classic Heart of Darkness (1899), which highlights
the struggle that humans go through, with their own morals, and their own
battles with their hidden evils. In the Harry Potter books, there is no magic in the
world without a fight between good and evil. All things are limited to being what
they are and nothing more, and the world becomes a boring and burdensome
place. You have to escape to the realm of magic to make things interesting and
discover the potential for human flourishing and wholeness. Not only modern
literature but also scriptures underscore this issue. According to Jewish belief, the
focus of the battle between good and evil is not mastery over the outside world,
but over the soul of the human individual and the power it contains; a moral
struggle that takes place in the heart, not in the outside world. The contestants
are man’s conscience against man’s urges, man’s spirituality against the physical
life force. The Indian scripture Katha Upanishad says that all life is a choice
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between two paths—sreyas (goodness) and preyas (pleasantness)—and implores
us to tread the former. The wise prefer the good to the pleasant; the foolish,
driven by sensual desires, prefer the pleasant to the good. Preyas sizzles with
sensual pleasure, while sreyas leads to spiritual joy. In the Bhagavad Gita, Krishna
compares sense-born pleasures to ‘wombs of pain and sorrow.’49 But the reality
is that all through our lives we want pleasure, which we equate with happiness,
while pain we equate with misery. That is perhaps why so few are ‘happy’, and
studies indicate the emergence of yet another inequality: happiness inequality. As
Jeremy Bentham says,50 pain and pleasure are ‘two sovereign masters’, and it is
under their governance that nature has placed mankind. The two are a package,
inseparable. But all life, we travail in vain to embrace pleasure and shun pain.
In fact, Freud went to the extent of saying that what decides the purpose of life
is simply the program of the ‘pleasure principle’.51 Some say that our difficulty
to tread the path of sreyas instead of preyas is a structural shortcoming of Homo
sapiens; that we are, as Kant said, ‘made out of crooked timber’. Unable to face
up to the fact, we have been living in denial and despair. That denial has become
defiance in the modern era, and of late it is this defiance that is manifesting as
a direct dare to the gods to stop us, if they could, from becoming one of them.
Homo sapiens to Homo Deus
Our longing not to be a man anymore has become a desperate cry to be a god.
The crystallization of man’s will to attain god-like powers is a result of his hubris
that he no longer needs, in order to live wisely, what the Greek poet Aeschylus
described as the ‘awful grace of God’. At a time when the mantra is ‘greed is good’,
the ultimate ‘greed’ cannot but be the desire to be a god. It is this genre of desire
that Miguel de Unamuno implied in his book The Tragic Sense of Life (1912):
“Every created being tends not only to preserve itself in itself, but to perpetuate
itself, and, moreover, to invade all other beings, to be others without ceasing
to be itself, to extend its limits to the infinite, but without breaking them”. In
effect, we do not want to cease ‘to be human’—we don’t want to be a God in
the flesh like Jesus Christ or Lord Krishna—but want to extend the limits of the
infinite, and become a god. Desire, as the Buddha said, is the source and cause
of suffering. We already have a multitude of desires that cause so much suffering.
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And we, as Adam Curtis says, “have become the slaves of our own desires”.52 God
only knows if this desire is a delusion, and what it will do to us. How and why
did it arise in the first place? Is it an external implant, a sinister and