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

some three million years
ago, the human is a disillusioned animal. He is not sure if he is intrinsically a
‘civilized brute’ or, as Prof. Higgins sums up, “we’re all savages, more or less”.
Man is perplexed about his own behavior. But that ‘disillusionment’ is itself
a delusion: the delusion about our ‘natural’ nature and unvarnished identity.
Billions and billions of words exist, some very profound, and others banal, about
who we are at our core, about our divine essence and original sin, about the
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wages of evolution and costs of culture. But none of them stick or satisfy even
our severely stymied powers of perception and reflection. We don’t know but
want to know; that is because ‘knowing’ is not always the way. As Taoism puts
it, ‘you can’t know it, but you can be it’. Not only that, but the instrument with
which we want to know is itself skewed. That instrument is the brain/mind,
which is inducing and enticing us to do things that channel our vital energy in
the wrong direction. None other than the Buddha, who delved deeper into the
causes of human misery than anyone else, said, “All wrongdoing arises because of
the mind. If mind is transformed, can wrongdoing remain?”
Schadenfreude, the Modern Pandemic
Whichever way we might act or react contextually, man is essentially a pleasureseeking
animal; we instinctively yearn for pleasure and avoid pain. That does
not stop us from mixing the two; deriving pleasure from pain, and pain from
pleasure, and getting addicted to both, or to a blend of the two. Masochism
(pain from pleasure) and melancholy (pleasure from being sad) are connected.
It also often happens that in life, one man’s pleasure causes another man’s pain.
From the ancient Greeks, through 17th- and 18th-century British philosophers,
to 20th-century psychologists, this hedonistic or pleasure principle has come
to dominate efforts of scholars to understand people’s motivation. Epicurean
philosophy sprang from the attainment of pleasure, which was described as ‘the
beginning and the end of blessed life’. It is the basic motivational assumption of
theories across all areas of psychology. While it is commonplace and conventional
wisdom to say that we turn towards pleasure and turn away from pain, in actuality,
human motivational behavior is more complex. Although we tend to view them
as opposites, they are the two sides of the same coin. One can easily switch from
one state to another. Alfred Hitchcock, the master of suspense, said, “Give them
pleasure—the same pleasure they have when they wake up from a nightmare…
Always make the audience suffer as much as possible”. Scientists say that actually
parts of the neural pathways for the two perceptions overlap. We are among the
very few in nature who deliberately derive pleasure from others’ pain. For us, it
is not enough to succeed—others must fail. It is this twisted trait, our greatest
moral failing, which has come to play a stellar role in contemporary life. From
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the Roman gladiatorial blood-and-gore combats to public hangings that people
travelled from far to participate in, to our latest terrorist beheadings of hostages
and the popularity of gruesome YouTube™ videos, we all show a voyeuristic
streak of getting a kick out of others’ torment. It is not only interesting but also
titillating. This was what Edmund Burke possibly had in mind when he wrote,
“There is no spectacle we so eagerly pursue as that of some uncommon and
grievous calamity; so that whether the misfortune is before our eyes, or whether
they are turned back to it in history, it always touches with delight”.61 Burke
held that the pleasure we derive from others’ suffering—our ‘aesthetic pleasure in
the terrifying’—was a ‘brute and perverse fact of human nature’. The only thing
we can question is the association with the brute: we are brutal, not brute-like,
in our behavior.
Studies have shown that the feeling of joy at seeing someone else fail
or suffer is so commonplace that we would be inclined to believe it is a basic
biological response in humans. It was always a part of human propensity. The
Book of Proverbs has this caution: “Rejoice not when thine enemy falleth, and let
not thine heart be glad when he stumbleth. Lest the Lord see it, and it displease
him, and he turn away his wrath from him”. The modern malaise is Schadenfreude,
a German word that literally means ‘harm-joy’, or pleasure derived from
the misfortunes of others. The philosopher Arthur Schopenhauer remarked,
“… it is Schadenfreude, a mischievous delight in the misfortunes of others, which
remains the worst trait in human nature. It is a feeling which is closely akin to
cruelty, and differs from it, to say the truth, only as theory from practice”.62 To
feel envy is human, but to enjoy other people’s misfortune is diabolical. While
humankind and human culture have long harbored sadists of all sorts, their
numbers have greatly multiplied in modern times, and they have become more
sophisticated. We encounter sadism in movies, entertainment, even sports. Our
fascination with crime and horror stems from this. Glory and gory are mixed up.
In modern sports, in even the so-called ‘gentleman’s game’ of cricket, people have
been seriously injured while playing. Yet, the rules of the game have remained
unchanged. In 2014, an Australian cricketer died after being hit on the neck by
a bouncer. There was much shock, tears, and touching ceremonies but the lethal
delivery of the ball stayed and the game goes on. Experts argued that without such
a risk the game would lose its sheen. Put differently, people won’t turn up at the
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stadium, or turn on the TV, and the sponsors and cricket boards will lose money.
No matter it might happen again and more people might die. The blame is put
on the players: if they did have protective gear, then their reflexes have slowed
down! The audience, the spectators who fill the stadiums, and those sitting before
the TV, that is ‘we, the people’, don’t want changes. They, and we, like it, even
if ‘occasionally’ someone else gets killed—that is part of the game, like a soldier
going to battle. And if the rules are changed, it would mean terrible losses and we
will be deprived of the visual and visceral thrill and thrall of anticipating someone
getting hurt or slain right before our eyes. The ‘extremeness’ of American football
(National Football League, NFL) is well known. A report said that “nearly every
current NFL player can expect to suffer from chronic traumatic encephalopathy,
a degenerative disease that leads to memory loss, impaired judgment, depression,
and dementia”.63 Turning to the media gives us a thrill and takes our mind off
the tedium and irritation of daily life. The games are not safer but we still want
to voyeuristically partake in the violence on the screen, perhaps partly to avoid
facing up to the far greater mayhem churning all around us. In fact, in a strange
way, we are more compassionate on the screen in front than in the real world
before us. Many of us often walk or drive past horrors and tragedies without
even a second glance, while we are moved to tears watching similar events on
TV or in the theater. The screen makes the experience ‘hyper-real’. Whatever
we experience while watching, it does not end when we turn it off. All those
thoughts and feelings seep into our consciousness and adversely affect the course
of the ‘war within’.
The main message of all this is two-fold: one, increasingly, the main source
of the appeal of competitive sport and the mainstay of entertainment is a shade of
Schadenfreude; two, the participation, visually or vicariously, in acts of cruelty has
become pleasurable, even necessary for man to face the drudgery and decadence,
the ennui and emptiness of daily life. For, as author JK Rowling said, ‘to hurt
is as human as to breathe’.64 That is perhaps why all of us should fervently put
our hope in Tolstoy’s words—“Here I am alive, and it’s not my fault, so I have
to try and get by as best I can without hurting anybody until death takes over”
(War and Peace). A central feature of the pleasure-in-others’-misfortune notion
is the belief that the other person deserves his or her misfortune. What is truly
unsettling is that we cannot dismiss this phenomenon as an aberration, or dub
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people who entertain such thoughts as deviants or mentally twisted people. They
are among us; they too are us. According to psychological scientist Erin Buckels,
“Some find it hard to reconcile sadism with the concept of ‘normal’ psychological
functioning, but our findings show that sadistic tendencies among otherwise
well-adjusted people must be acknowledged. These people aren’t necessarily serial
killers or sexual deviants but they gain some emotional benefit in causing or
simply observing others’ suffering”.65 Most of us watch movies with a lot of
violence, killing, cruelty, and blood-letting. And when we read reports of some
favorite celebrity getting into trouble our instinct is mostly wicked titillation,
rarely empathy. Does it mean that deep within we are all infected by the malaise
of Schadenfreude? One of the most basic conflicts in the human psyche is the
friction between selfish impulses and self-control. When we see something good
happening to someone else, many of us would stop and mutter to ourselves: Why
not me?!
If God Does Not Exist…
In popular perception, God, morality, and religion are virtually inseparable and
indistinguishable. The fact though is that they are not identical, but intertwined
and interdependent. It is possible to believe in God without being religious, and
to be independently moral without any kind of allegiance. There is no one ‘God’,
although most agree on His attributes; and when it comes to worship, every
religion depicts a different picture. There is no general definition of religion, or
of what true religion is, and of what false religion is; nor is there any agreement
relating to valid religious values. Nor even about what we mean by the truth of
religion. Yet, what we conjure as ‘religion’ plays a huge part in human life. The
same thing goes for morality, too; we cannot agree what it means; nor on any
criteria to judge moral behavior. Even if we do not know most often what is right
and what is wrong, we still want to be, or known to be wanting to be, moral,
good, upright, and so on. Without getting bogged down with questions such as
when, how and why religion gained its foothold in human consciousness, we
can safely say that it has been a part of human history. The same thing can
be said with equal force about morality. We cannot pin a date of its entry or
what need it was intended to fill. More important is the question how the
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three—God, morality, and religion—have affected each other. Some say that
a principal purpose of religion is to enable man to lead a moral life. And that
man stumbled upon morality as a way to survival as a tribe or community. If
religion is understood to mean, in Alfred North Whitehead’s words, “a system
of general truths which have the effect of transforming character when they are
sincerely held and vividly apprehended”,66 then one must conclude that it has
not yielded the desired result; man remains untransformed, or one might say
‘mis-transformed’.
Some say that religion is both necessary and sufficient to lay a moral
foundation for an ethical life; some say that it necessary but not sufficient; others,
that it has no need or place as a moral base. Some might be tempted even to argue
that religion, or the way that it is put into practice, makes people dogmatic,
intolerant, and that it actually subverts morality. Some scientists suggest that
‘religious experiences shrink part of the brain’ and some other studies show that
‘having a strong religious belief acts as a buffer against anxiety’, and that it has
a calming, egalitarian effect. The fact is that the way such views are expressed
bristle with value judgments, and it depends on what we consider as religious
mindset, as distinct from any religion, and what we qualify as moral behavior.
The essential question is what we might call religious outlook: Can we say that,
‘if one is disposed to be good, religion helps’? And, on the other hand, ‘If one
is already drawn towards bad, would religion actually make that person more
of a menace’? The way it is churning in our mind and the extent to which it is
sundering the social fabric in the world, this is a vital issue to ponder over in
the context of the war within. Which side is religion on? How are the religious
people in the world influencing the endogenous war? Whom are