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

those who are helpless as easy targets and remove everything from
them”. It is hard to assess which is a greater tragedy—killing oneself or others,
when one is down and driven to desperation. The stress and strain of modern life
is enticing some very vulnerable people into embracing necrophilia: love for all
that is violence and destruction; the desire to kill; the worship of force; attraction
to death, to suicide, to sadism.43 For far too many people these days, Edna St.
Vincent Millay’s Lament—Life must go on; I forget just why—is not good enough
to keep them alive. Suicide, even homicide, is alarmingly becoming the preferred
escape from suffering; the only way to terminate an intolerable situation. That is
happening although all religions prohibit it and call it a great sin, and although it
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attracts terrible punishment. The Garuda Purana, the Hindu text that describes
what happens after death and the soul’s journey, says that those who commit
suicide are stuck in the spirit world for 65,000 earth years. If, as has often been
said, life and suffering are inseparable, the sufferer takes the next logical step and
says, separate them through death and be rid of suffering. The fact of the matter
is that, despite breakthroughs in fields like psychology, the suicidal mindset has
remained impregnable. We can never typecast or stereotype a ‘suicider’. We will
never know, even if one survives the attempt, if they really thought through the
alternatives and consequences. It doesn’t matter how young or old one is. Money
has emerged as a malevolent motivator and a terrible trigger, shattering many a
life and family. The trail of money can be seen in many a suicide and homicide,
even a crime. While the earlier adage was ‘frugality is morality’, the metaphors of
the modern age are ‘obscene opulence’ and ostentatious living. Even Machiavelli
said, “Of mankind we may say in general they are fickle, hypocritical, and greedy
of gain”.
Through greed we have created a manic world nauseous with the pursuit
of material wealth. Many also bear their cross of imagined deprivation, while
their fellow human beings remain paralyzed by real poverty. That ‘real poverty’ is
taking real lives, and mutilating many more. The ‘double-tragedy’ is that, on the
one hand, the difference between life and death in many cases is so little money
and, on the other hand, so many have what it takes to ‘save’ those in need. And
yet, what is even more tragic, those ‘who have’ don’t do what needs to be done,
not because they don’t want to but because there is no social ‘connectivity’ that
brings the ‘needy’ and the ‘willing’ together in a world which is often called a
‘global village’. One of the urgent tasks in the world is to create the public policy
infrastructure for spreading money evenly; to reverse the flow, which is presently
from the ‘poor to the rich’, both from individuals and nations. Needless to say,
a mountain of money, like a mound of candy attracts an army of ants, and also
acts as a trigger for heartburn, envy, and hatred. Like evil, money has acquired
an identity and dynamic of its own, it influences human behavior, for good or
bad. The consequence is that on the ‘day of judgment’ or in the reckoning of
Chitragupta, the Hindu celestial record keeper of the earthly doings of all human
beings, one additional question that might be raised to decide our after-life fate
could well be this: how we earned and utilized money while on earth.
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We have never been able to come to terms with the certainty of death and
the uncertainty of where, how, and when. For the fact is that ‘as soon as a being
comes to life, it is old enough to die’. We claim, as a mark of our superiority, that
the human is the only animal that knows it must die, but that ‘knowing’ hasn’t
helped much. What ‘modern man’, a term usually used to separate him from
the ‘primitive or traditional’ man, is attempting, is to convert that ‘certainty’ (of
death) into uncertainty, and erase the ‘uncertainty’ (of where, how, and when)
altogether. And going for the jugular, as it were, instead of waiting for the call of
death, is calling it to his ‘aid’ as a route of escape, whenever he feels confused and
cornered, helpless and hapless, restless and rebellious. This ‘calling up’ has come to
such a pass that virtually any dispute, disappointment, and despair, even denial,
is now a potential incubator of induced or enforced death. What Walt Whitman
called “a voice from Death, solemn and strange, in all his sweep and power”,44 we
hear all the time, at times as a silent whisper, sometimes as a helpless wail, and
more often as hideous howl. We might, as the ‘voice’ pleads, ‘bow our faces’ and
‘veil our eyes’ but we cannot shy away from the almost daily ‘dance of death’, at
home, at work, on the streets, on the screen, in our otherwise uneventful lives.
Whitman reinforces in this poem the theme that death should not be deemed
as a threat, and urges us to bear in mind the briefness and brittleness of life,
and reminds us that life is time-bound, and to live it to the brim because every
moment is a gift.
The paradox is that while over the past half a century, millions of lives
have certainly been bettered, millions in the material sense, millions more, at the
same time suffer from deep deprivation, dejection, and depression. It is not an
economic or sociological problem, or of upbringing or alienation, or a problem
of youthful disillusionment or disgust with a soulless society. All of them have
something to do with such issues, but more fundamentally something terrible
has snapped in the human consciousness and no one has a clue. We have all,
in different degrees and ways, turned into a ‘human bonsai’: potted, trimmed,
controlled, cut to size—to suit the taste and temper of human culture. Maybe,
that is the way to contain the human hubris! So forbidding is ‘life within a lie’,
that many, while still bodily breathing feel suffocated, while being mobile feel a
sense of being boxed in, and feel that the only way to break out is destruction,
the most direct way to which is ‘death’. Many, tragically too often the makers
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of our future, are breaking the ‘mirror of the modern man’ even if they know
they are the ‘mirror’ itself. In a twisted sense, death (rather fear of it) holds us no
terror. We have both demonized and trivialized it. We ‘demonize’ it by believing
that everything goes up in smoke at death, that it is a bottomless pit into which
we are all thrown, that life is in vain because we die. Death can be a form of
entertainment. Once you cast aside your humanity, it is easy to make fun of the
sounds and faces people make as they die. It is not uncommon to encounter
macabre music lyrics or movie dialogues and blood-and-gore that trivialize
death, such as, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die”, and “I am a false
prophet, god is a superstition!”
‘Induced or enforced’ death’ is fast becoming just another option, often
escapist or opportunistic, even the preferred route, to settle scores, disputes,
depression; a hole to hide, as it were, a refuge from alienation, hurt, humiliation
and a way to vent hatred. A time comes in everyman’s life when a certain
single situation or a problem or pain overwhelms everything else, and all other
experiences and aspects of life, however weighty they might be, recede into the
background and we feel utterly helpless, hapless, distraught and despondent.
In most cases we still cling to hope, but in many situations, when people, for
reasons still mysterious, feel bereft of any hope, they come to the determination
that the only way out is to end it all. Then the very prospect of being rid of that
problem becomes more irresistible and alluring than anything else that we value,
like religion, family, friendship, or that we obsessively pursue in life like money,
sex, pleasure, and power. Sometimes, the ‘problem’ or the cause of disaffection
is such a trifle that it blows our mind away even to believe that such a thing is
possible within the human consciousness. Whatever is true for suicide equally
fits well with homicide. Indeed, both are the two sides of the same coin. In
one sense, man has taken away the power of life and death from the gods, and
how gods react and how much of the ugly and horrific of what we see around
us, can be explained away. This way only gods can know. As a self-professed
‘rational’ species, one would have thought that since we all meet the same mortal
fate, death would be a unifier. Poet John Donne wrote “All mankind is of one
author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of
the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so
translated…”45 Donne’s words cannot be more apt: “… as therefore, the bell that
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rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation;
so this bell calls us all… No man is an island, entire of itself; every man is a
piece of the continent, a part of the main… Any man’s death diminishes me,
because I am involved in mankind, and therefore never send to know for whom
the bell tolls; it tolls for thee”. Such is the hold of death, and the lure of life, on
the human mind. Donne underlines two central themes: interconnectedness of
mankind and the common destination of death. Neither of these has taken a
firm foothold in the human consciousness, and human behavior is as though
every man is an island unto himself, and death is what happens to others. From
that mindset to that of a ‘killer’ is but a short leap.
Death—the Default Mode
Modern science is trying hard to comprehend the basic facts about the cognitive
conditioning of a ‘killer’, but the fact is that the human, at least since the times
of the Old Testament, has always killed himself, and others, in more ways than
one. But what was once a ‘last resort’ is now, in a growing number of instances,
an ‘opening option’. While homicide was condemned, suicide was usually
condoned, often viewed as an escape from evil, shame, dishonor or insufferable
sufferance. What is new is the growing ordinariness and the casualness of
both suicide and homicide. Many are turning towards that route as they find
themselves incapable of either accepting or enduring or escaping or transcending
the superficiality, sordidness, coarseness and callousness of modern-day human
life, which largely revolves around the Trimurti, the three gods, of free will, free
choice, and free markets, not only in the economic domain but also in the social
and political spheres. They are no longer on the margins of human life; they
are in the mainstream of normal life, and the seeds are sown deep in our own
consciousness. Too many people too often feel that anything, absolutely anything,
nothing excluded, is better than living through, what to them was an obscenity,
‘life’, and coping with what it has come to entail and demand—make a living,
climb the profession ladder, manage a marriage, raise a family, repair a broken
home, reform a rebellious child, handle spurned love or a jilted lover, keep the
wolf at bay, keep up with the Joneses… And they ask if, after all that struggle
and stress, we are anyway destined to end up being ‘dead’, why not advance the
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deadly date? In his work The Myth of Sisyphus (1942), Albert Camus raised the
mother of all existential questions: Does the realization of the meaninglessness
and absurdity of life necessarily require suicide? He himself answered: “No. It
requires revolt”. What he does not clarify is ‘revolt’ against what and how? You
cannot ‘revolt’ against ‘meaninglessness’; that itself becomes meaningless. We
have not done well with revolts or with revolutions. They have always been messy
and bloody and have led to greater misery than what we revolted against. Our
love for orderliness, ordinariness, our longing for an unwrinkled life, and our
lust for lasciviousness and luxury abhors the upheaval of what revolt entails, and
devours its idealism and chasteness. Since we do not know what happens next,
the questions remain unanswered. Is suicide running away from responsibilities
or taking up new ones? Is it an escape or an opening, a sacrifice or sacrilege? Is
the world better off with or without us? Are we helping or hindering nature if we
choose to eliminate ourselves?
Morality