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

no
one is allowed or interested to know more than necessary to get his paycheck.
For, ‘the man who knows too much’ is too much trouble. There is a growing
growl that humans are ‘untrustworthy and too ‘temperamental’. The second lost
‘capacity’ is our repeated failure to see danger that is crystal clear except, or even,
to the blind. Human history is replete with perils foretold and we have always
‘good reasons’ to disregard them. The latest and perhaps the most serious and
almost insurmountable danger to mankind comes not from other species or
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nature, but from man himself. The problem is that human character is, as David
DeSteno argues, not a black-and-white dichotomy of good and bad but a far
more nuanced ‘greyscale’ continuum.33 All of us at times behave in a manner that
we fear we have become, as RL Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll writes in a letter to his friend
Mr Utterson, “a danger that I cannot name”. As if that is not alarming enough,
the fact is also that the causes and compulsions of all our crises are ‘rooted in the
ordinary, daily economic activity of our species’ at this point in its history. And,
that is not because, or only because, we are all ‘bad’ who do some terrible things
now and then. One in fact wishes it were so. It is simple and surgical. Now, it
is almost everything we do any time and every time to live as modern or postmodern,
or some now call auto-modern, human beings.
Horrible as it is, actually killing in its broadest connotation is not the
worst about us. When we pluck a flower, the flower bleeds, and when we uproot
a vegetable, we are killing. No one doubts that trying to eradicate mosquitoes is
not evil, although scientists caution us that we still don’t know enough of their
role in our ecosystem. But then, who cares for the ecosystem? More than killing
it is cruelty that is the bigger and ‘treatable’ issue. Different shades of cruelty exist
deep inside each of us, manifesting most often in our tendency to deliberately
inflict pain, denigration, and suffering on others, although our mind usually
comes up with one or the other of the three ‘Es’—evasion, explanation, and
excuse—to escape the guilt and consequence. It is also necessary to remember
that while every act of evil is the same—murder is murder, and rape is rape,
genocide is genocide, whoever the perpetrator—, every individual is unique. In
fact, why a particular person does something is also unique, even if that reason
is horrendous. Some, like Polish philosopher Karol Wojtyla, who advocated the
school of thought called ‘personalism’, even say that not recognizing evil itself is
evil. And, even more, not recognizing that we are the source of evil is the chief
impediment to fighting evil. The Greek philosopher Sophocles said, “With so
much evil stored up in that cold dark soul of yours, you breed enemies everywhere
you touch.” But that ‘stored up’ evil makes us mistake those enemies for friends,
and friends for enemies. That is why some celebrity serial killers of our own
twisted times invoke the Gandhian remorse as an alibi, and say it was the evil
inside, or the devil within, which had made them do their terrible deeds. For
example, Ted Bundy, the American mass murderer of late 1970s, is believed to
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have told his girlfriend, “There is something the matter with me… I just couldn’t
contain it. I fought it for a long, long time… it was just too strong”. We have
long known, more by intuition than intelligence, that inside our essential being,
in some nook, corner or cranny of our soul, sinister forces lurk, waiting for an
opportunity to pounce and become deeds. It is deeds that in the end matter;
they shape us much as we shape them, and they affect others. A recent study
suggests that “dark personality traits—Machiavellianism, egoism, narcissism,
psychopathy, sadism, and spitefulness—all stem from a common ‘dark core’”34
that exists inside each of us. The study also says that while each individual dark
trait manifests itself in widely different ways, they seem to have much more in
common than initially meets the eye. If true, it means that we can no longer take
refuge in thinking that there are evil people out there in the wicked world and
the only thing to do is to flush them out and eliminate them. The fact is that we
are all potentially capable, if things go awfully wrong, of behaving like that very
evil ‘person’ we are looking for to ostracize from human society. Some killers and
jilted lovers, in Nietzschean tones,35 raised themselves above the rest of us and
proclaimed that their deed is so lofty that it was ‘beyond good and evil’. Some
others say that this doleful world anyway is all evil, and that a particular evil
action just happened to come out because of certain circumstances. Although
from the mouths of murderers that could be a ploy to evade responsibility, we
do know that circumstance can sanitize evil, and certain acts, while appearing
heinous or abominable, might actually have been committed for the benefit of
others; here, the individual is not only free from moral offense, but may even
gain great merit. In short, matter does not matter; motives matter and intent is
all-important.
Yet what is striking is that saints and sinners alike, heroes and villains are
saying the same thing: they are impotent before a more potent inner evil force
which induces them to harbor evil thoughts and to indulge in unwholesome
actions. Most of us in the moral middle, too, share the same helplessness—our
almost pathological inability to do good when we want to, and, even worse,
the compelling inability to refrain from doing bad. In fact, the Upanishads say
that all organs in our body are susceptible to evil except our breath. We see it all
around and in every relationship; we hear the sounds of the mocking laughter
of evil. Evil has become irresistible because it is seen as the short-cut to the one
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thing that is irresistible: making money. What we are allowed to see and hear
is designed for that, bringing to mind, upside down, what George Orwell told
us in his classic book, 1984 : “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your
eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command”. Now we cannot even
choose to ‘reject’ because once we see or hear we get hooked. We must avoid evil.
But we do not know how and where to begin, and how to fight it. That is because
what we see and experience are symptoms, not the root of the evil. It is like trying
to put out the flames without putting out the fire. This tension and tussle saps
our internal energy, and affects our behavior drastically and scars our psyche and
personality. We all live wounded lives, troubled by our own thoughts, unable to
be at peace with our own emotions, or with fellow-humans. So powerful is the
devil inside that when faced with a choice or a course, so many, despite free will
or in exercise of it, choose evil and so many succumb to seduction so easily. We
are distraught, feel terribly guilty and blame ourselves. Part of the reason is that
sometimes in despair, we look upon the evil inside as a standalone, we think
there is nothing else and therefore we think there is nothing we could do. But
then, we do good too. It is often said that God created man with both good and
evil inclinations, the two tendencies that pull him in opposite directions, and
also that it is His command that we choose good over evil. But if that were so,
why is that we all feel, with little effort, the tremors of the presence of evil inside
and not as much of the good? While all life is and everything we do is a binary
choice—between good and evil—why is it so taxing to choose good? The truth
of the matter is that human behavior is plastic, open equally to both altruism and
back-stabbing. In Shakespeare’s words, “The web of our life is of a mingled yarn,
good and ill together” (All Is Well That Ends Well). Science now says36 “nothing
is either good or bad, desirable or undesirable, or anything else except that it is
made so by laboratories inside us producing the emotions on which we live.”
The fact is that there is some evil in the best of us, and some good in the worst
of us. In fact everyone, even the most creative person is a blend of seemingly
incompatible qualities. That spirit is what Rumi referred to when he said, “The
human being is like a jackass, with wings of angels tacked on”. We are all mixtures
of good and evil, light and darkness, lower than the lowly animal, and as sublime
as the Supreme. There is something beautiful in the worst and hideous among
us as illustrated in the story of Jesus kneeling before a stinking carcass of a dog
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and exclaiming “Praise be to God, what beautiful teeth this creature has”. A great
thinker can be a mean man and a lustful man can love dearly. No one is pure or
perfect. And there is terror not only in the darkness of the unknown, but even
more in the bright lights of the known.
Evil we usually associate with sadistic violence, cruelty, and viciousness.
Sometimes, like in Hinduism, good and evil are equated with order and chaos,
and the struggle between the two is the essence of our existence. Good and evil
are extreme opposites, but they cannot do without each other. Gandhi, in his
comments on the Mahabharata, said, “Human life is like a fabric woven with
black and white threads—threads of good and evil”; and also that “None can be
said to be evil personified”. If everything is good then nothing would be good.
The reality is that we all contain within ourselves the capacity for kindness, as
much as for cruelty or evil. We have within us both the ‘Kingdom of God’ about
which Christ spoke, as well as the cave of the devil. We like to embrace good and
shun evil, but in the Bhagavad Gita, it is said that a sthitaprajna (person of steady
wisdom) sees the presence of God not merely in the good and noble, but also in
the wicked and ignoble. The point is that we all are capable of being self-serving
and generous, callous and compassionate, cowardly and courageous, treacherous
and trustworthy. Indeed, anything anyone can be, all of us are. The spiritual
guru Paramahansa Yogananda called evil the ‘shadow of God’, and said that ‘the
dark shadows of evil are interspersed with the pure white beam of the virtues
of God’. The idea of a ‘shadow’ inside each of us was famously propounded
by the Swiss psychiatrist Carl Jung. According to him, it is the deeper ‘dark
side’ of our persona that consists of the primitive, negative, socially or religiously
disagreeable human emotions and impulses like sexual lust, hunger for power,
selfishness, greed, malice, anger, or rage. We must also note that some emotions
like anger and rage are not by themselves necessarily ‘bad’ or socially disruptive.
If channeled in the right direction, they can do a world of good. Way back in
350 BCE, Aristotle (Nicomachean Ethics) wrote that “the man who is angry at
the right things and with the right people, and further, as he ought, when he
ought, and as long as he ought, is praised”. In fact, the most pressing need of
the hour is to have more good people really, really angry about inequity and
injustice all around. Similarly, righteous rage can be more socially beneficial than
passive acquiescence. Some, like biologist Jeremy Griffith, go to the length of
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saying, “What’s needed on Earth is love of the dark side of ourselves” (Freedom:
The End of The Human Condition, 2016). Our response generally is to either
pretend as if such emotions and impulses do not exist or to repress them. But
research and experience has shown that it only makes them stronger and erupt
more intensely when they no longer can be contained. Experts suggest that by
‘accepting’ the reality of their reality, we can reduce the harm they can do. Then,
how can you fight such an embedded evil, the sinister shadow? The answer is
three-fold. One, however distasteful, we must recognize and realize that there
is inside each of us, a dark patch, a part of the primordial past of our human
inheritance. Second, we must strengthen the opposite goodness and Yogananda’s
‘pure white light’ within. The way to strengthen the