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

at the societal level, and medicine is replacing morals and physicians
and priests as sources of authority. Existential anxiety bordering on panic is a
part of everyday existence, and risk is now round the corner, in the realm of
high probability, not remote possibility. To top it all, we are wholly driven by
our mind; for a wholesome human life, we need both intelligence of the mind
and intuition of the heart. For too long, our mind has been our nemesis and
has come to control the commanding heights of our consciousness. Our whole
perspective has focused on narrowing things down to a point and denaturing
things. The content has overshadowed the context; we are adrift in the labyrinths
and purblind to the big picture. The need of the hour is, “no matter who says
what, spare your time for the places, events, ideas, people, and activities that
make your heart shout loud”.7 Einstein once said, “I never came upon any of
my discoveries through the process of rational thinking”. It is important to bear
this in mind when man is facing an unprecedented array of mostly man-made
existential threats. Our benign passivity in living under the shadow of such
threats to our very survival suggests the existence of what in French is called
l’appel du vide—the call of the void—and an apocalyptic barrier where, not too
long ago, our way ahead looked almost clear. It now looks very clouded and
foggy. And the world, surveys show, is “sadder, angrier, and more worried than
ever before recorded”.8 That is as much due to what is happening in the world
outside as in the world within. There is an interiority to everything we do and
to all that happens, and our failure to factor that in is responsible for most of
our misjudgments. To that we must add another ‘factor’: we humans simply
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can never know how to judge anything truly and justly. In fact, we are better
‘judges’ of others than of ourselves. We instinctively assume that the world is
nothing but the human world, and that our fate is a cause for cosmic concern.
Is that so? Or is our story as a species almost done, save collecting the ashes
and embers? Looking at the toxic footprints of humanity, it is necessary to tell
ourselves that, in Admiral Adama’s words, “It is not enough to survive. One has
to be worthy of survival”.9 A central question we have to address before going
any further is this: are all the problems that we have created, that make us doubt
our ‘worthiness’, merely offsprings of modern civilization, or do they stem from
something more basic and inherent from the core of being human per se? The
real answer is, none of the two. It is our ignorance of what goes on inside us;
how the balance between our virtues and our vices plays out in the war within.
Whatever is the truth, even terminal patients simply don’t want to ‘survive’.
They too have priorities besides just surviving no matter what. They have things
to do before they die. We, collectively, are not very different. What about our
unfulfilled desires before we become extinct? And should we give away our lives
before we can spoil any further? What is it that we can sacrifice just to survive?
We must remember what Byron said: “Who on earth could live were all judged
justly?” For, ‘being human’ is living unjustly—that is the awful burden all of us
have to carry. Sadly, what is naturally possible to other species is denied to the
species that desperately aspires to be a moral species. At a time when man seems
prepared to surrender everything at the altar of becoming an immortal interplanetary
species (a.k.a. god), this is particularly pertinent. What we also forget
is that, to paraphrase Emily Dickinson, there is no forever if there is no ‘now’, and
that we seem intellectually prepared to offer at the altar, the Now of everything
that is human to live ‘forever’, regardless of where. Instead of worrying if we are
‘worthy’ of survival, we behave as if we have come to believe that the planet is
not worthy of saving.
The fatalistic way we negate, nibble, and nullify each other, the casual
cruelty we show to animals, the reckless abandon with which we abuse the
planet, and the contempt we shower on nature is getting worse by the day. A
time might well come, as the Book of Isaiah prophecies, when “the wolf will live
with the lamb, the leopard will lie down with the goat, the calf and the lion and
the yearling together… the infant will play near the cobra’s den, and the young
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child will put its hand into the viper’s nest”. But such is our genius and genre that
man cannot let his guard down when dealing with another man. We need peace
inside for peace outside. Man has become a blend of bad and mad, blindsided
and blindfolded; ‘a scurrying mass of bewildered humanity crashing headlong
against each other’.10 It is worth noting in passing that, as Richard Powers (The
Overstory, 2018) so well shows, this is in sharp contrast to how trees, with which
we still share a quarter of our genes, ‘live’. And the ways they help and provide
for, and take care of each other, and other living things too numerous to count.
Man must go for the sake of man. Like they used to say in the olden days, “the
king is dead; long live the king”, we have to both bury and resurrect the man.
First, we have to officially announce his death. And his epitaph might well read
as: ‘Abundantly blessed by nature, the Homo sapiens has had his time, had his
golden moments, mastered much but fatally failed to get a grip on his world
within; in consequence, he hopelessly went awry, courted his own abolition;
became someone no one missed much when no more’.
What we have to fully grasp is that even as we struggle to survive on
a daily basis, the ground is shifting and the foundations are shaking. And we
have nothing to hold on to, no anchor to keep us in place. We cannot massacre
other species in millions and stake a claim for ‘survival’ simply because we are
human. And we must remember, as EO Wilson puts it in proper perspective,
that “If all mankind were to disappear, the world would regenerate back to the
rich state of equilibrium that existed ten thousand years ago. If insects were to
vanish, the environment would collapse into chaos”.11 Even more, one could
argue that it is only humans, of the millions of life forms on earth, who have
proven themselves ‘unworthy’ by their conduct. In Franz Kafka’s classic The Trial
(1925), the protagonist, Josef K claims he cannot be ‘guilty’ as he too is human
like the other, to which the priest answers, “But that is how the guilty speak”.
We are all ‘guilty’ but, being human, we are incapable of accepting responsibility
for it. Does that mean that nature and life in general will benefit with our early
departure? Some outcomes, even the most worthy ones, should not be brought
about if we have to give up everything to achieve them. But then, some skeptic
with a sneer might say, ‘What is there to become? We already are!’ What Kafka
called ‘monstrous vermin’. And an ancient theory (of the Greek philosopher
Empedocles) even says that we came from ‘monstrous creatures’. Be that as it
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may, what we now have to ponder over is what there is to ‘save’ in saving the
human species, and why should we be ‘saved’ if we are not only self-destructive
but also nihilistic. In any case, ‘saving life’ itself has lost its sheen; it is easier to
grab our attention with news about the latest software than with news about how
to save lives. The French ‘existential’ philosopher Simone de Beauvoir (The Ethics
of Ambiguity, 1947) pertinently posited that man, “conscious of being unable to
be anything… then decides to be nothing”. And from ‘nothing’ to nihilism is a
small step. Let us not forget that the sole serious threat to our ‘survival’ comes
from our own activity, and creativity, not from any extraterrestrial or colliding
comet or crashing meteorite. Even the most benign of inventions can be turned
toxic by the human mind soaked with malice. No one has ever explained why
we are the only animal with malice in its mind. It is malice, not violence, that
‘transformed’ the human from a fairly average species of large mammals into a
dreaded menace. And, in EO Wilson’s words, a ‘danger to ourselves and to the rest
of life’. If we cannot get rid of it or at least keep it under check, nothing good can
ever happen. And the only way to do that is to ‘win’ the war within. With malice
reigning over our mind, and our mind supreme reigning over our consciousness,
we cannot even trust our own inventiveness. In some cases, even the inventors
have come to regret their accomplishment. For example, the Wright Brothers,
pioneers of powered flight, thought they would make everyone essentially equal,
and therefore remove the specter of war. Much later, Orville Wright lamented,
“We dared to hope we had invented something that would bring lasting peace
to the earth. But we were wrong. We underestimated man’s capacity to hate and
to corrupt good means for an evil end”. Alfred Nobel regretted the invention of
dynamite, and to atone for this ‘accomplishment’ and to relieve his conscience,
he instituted his award for the promotion of peace. Another famous ‘regret’ was
that of Einstein, for his contribution to the development of the atomic bomb. It
is said that the guy who invented television (in 1927) became so disenchanted
that he forbade his kids from watching it. Our mind empowers us to create
extraordinary things and yet entices us to misuse them.
The terrible thing is, what can we possibly do if what we do for good
comes back to haunt us? What the human has now become is well captured in
the Latin proverb, Lupus est homo homini, non homo, quom qualis sit non novit:
“One man to another is a wolf, not a man, when he doesn’t know what sort
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he is”. And even if we do want to end human presence on earth as penance or
reparation, what more could we do? Maybe we should unleash a global nuclear
Armageddon. But that will do irreparable harm to the planet, and that nullifies
the purpose of our voluntary exit, to save the planet from the human predator.
Our presence is so pervasive and deep that anything we do to harm ourselves
endangers the earth as well. That prospect, instead of being a deterrent, seems to
act as an incentive for unhinged recklessness and frenzied hara-kiri. Although a
few of us still actually take the ‘extreme step’, we have long been self-destructive
as a species, whether it is evolutionary or existential. By any reckoning, it has
now reached an unrecoverable tipping point, and we are clueless about what we
can do to arrest, much less reverse it. It is a terrible thing to say, but the best we
can do is to ‘accelerate’, push the pedal to the metal, so to speak. Some are even
asking: ‘Has procreation itself become immoral?’ They say that the morality of
bringing new human life into the world is “the most pressing question of our
time”. Is all this hype and panic warranted? The answer is yes. For the stakes
cannot be any higher and what needs to be done cannot be any more challenging.
Just as the proof is in the pudding, what matters to nature is how we
behave, no matter if we are in essence man or machine, madman or mahatma,
god or goat, devil or donkey. It is ‘behavior’—how we do what we do—that
impacts on the planet, now more than ever. And more than ever, our choices,
however minute or mundane, do matter. Just as human behavior influences
our warming planet, the climate crisis influences human behavior. It is this
‘behavior’, particularly our preferences and habits, in the ‘ism’ in which we live,
what Shoshana Zuboff12 calls ‘surveillance capitalism’, that has become the chief
source of commercial concern, the primary platform for ‘making money’. The
aim is to make us behave—through ‘behavioral modification’—in a way that
is advantageous to the producer or provider, often at the cost of the individual
and society. Ultimately, behavior is, as Goethe said, a mirror in which everyone
displays his own image. What we have been forgetting is that that ‘image’ is
formed inside, a reflection of the state of