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Word Gems
exploring self-realization, sacred personhood, and full humanity
Evil as illusion of separateness:
"Let's get rid of the Bad Guy!"
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that baby!
I know a young woman with two children, a third on the way, each of whom has a different father. She is downcast, depressed, disgusted with her life and the choices she has made. She does not want this coming baby, and she recently referred to it as "that baby" and does not want it to be with "my children."
Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugly Duckling : "So it went on from day to day till it got worse and worse. The poor duckling was driven about by every one; even his brothers and sisters were unkind to him, and would say, 'Ah, you ugly creature, I wish the cat would get you,' and his mother said she wished he had never been born. The ducks pecked him, the chickens beat him, and the girl who fed the poultry kicked him with her feet. So at last he ran away, frightening the little birds in the hedge as he flew over the palings."
Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago: "If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?"
Tony Hendra: "All evil begins with this belief: that another’s existence is less precious than mine."
Albert Einstein: "A human being is part of a whole, called by us the Universe, a part limited in time and space. He experiences himself, his thoughts and feelings, as something separated from the rest - a kind of optical delusion of his consciousness. This delusion is a kind of prison for us, restricting us to our personal desires and to affection for a few persons nearest us. Our task must be to free ourselves from this prison by widening our circles of compassion to embrace all living creatures and the whole of nature in its beauty."
Dr. Philip Zimbardo, Stanford Prison Experiment: "Dehumanization is one of the central processes in the transformation of ordinary, normal people into indifferent or even wanton perpetrators of evil. Dehumanization is like a cortical cataract that clouds one's thinking and fosters the perception that other people are less than human. It makes some people come to see others as enemies deserving of torment, torture and annihilation."
I have come to see that cursing another becomes a kind of prelude to Evil, a kind of predictable ritual. Before injuring another, the Small Ego will attempt to confirm separateness, to minimize another's humanity. This is the deep reason behind the need to condemn a fellow human being whom we desire to injure.
The Small Ego will try to make the case that one is utterly separate from a purported Evil one; that the "bad other" is so bad that "it is no part of me." And even mothers who do not want their children will attempt to make themselves separate from their own flesh-and-blood.
the apostle Paul: "...the vicious habit of depersonalizing everyone into a rival; uncontrolled and uncontrollable addictions; ugly parodies of community. I could go on." (Galatians 5:19 - 21, The Message translation)
There are many forms of this attempt to separate oneself from one's intended victim. Probably the most perverted is that of claiming "God is on our side," God loves us best, and we are separate from the mass of humanity; that we have God's true doctrines, true Dear Leaders, true forms of worship, and that "God hates the wicked every day" - that is, all those who disagree with our teachings.
And since God is on our side, and since he hates the wicked, he will sanction any atrocity toward those who disagree with us, God's agents on the earth. This is the psychology behind Gott mit uns, God with us - the slogan on the SS belt-buckle.
These verbal attempts to manufacture a sense of separation are meant to deny to the soon-victim a dignity, an honor, which allows the perpetrator good conscience to treat the newly-minted "Bad Other" as something vile, worthy to be abused, and now relegated to subhuman status. This is what cursing is about.
Carl Jung, Two Essays on Analytical Psychology: New Paths in Psychology, 1912: "If people can be educated to see the lowly side of their own natures, it may be hoped that they will also learn to understand and to love their fellow men better... for we are all too prone to transfer to our fellows the injustice and violence we inflict upon our own natures."
And in this process we make ourselves "separate," isolated from this other human being to whom we are soul-connected. This is necessary before we can feel justified in inflicting Evil.
Michel Houellebecq, The Elementary Particles: “Love binds, and it binds forever. Good binds while evil unravels. Separation is another word for evil; it is also another word for deceit.”
Hans Christian Andersen, The Ugly Duckling: Now the tom cat was the master of the house, and the hen was mistress, and they always said, "We and the world," for they believed themselves to be half the world, and the better half too.
George Steiner: "We know that a man can read Goethe or Rilke in the evening, that he can play Bach or Schubert, and go to his day's work at Auschwitz in the morning."
Robert F. Kenedy: "What is objectionable, what is dangerous, about extremists is not that they are extreme, but that they are intolerant. The evil is not what they say about their cause, but what they say about their opponents."
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