Welcome to my mornings. This is the sort of thing I wake up with. It’s good. I feel some mild guilt getting up at 9am, but then I look at how hellish my sleep was, and pronounce it good, and look forward to my coffee–Peet’s Major Dickason’s Blend. I’m glad to see they are expanding, although I assume they are damn hippies too (I’m a damn hippy, but one who considers Reagan a centrist and Fox center-Left).
Here is what I think is an important hypothesis: Evil is mainly constituted by learned helplessness with respect to full nervous system integration, aka the sense of emotional individuation. For those who exhibit what we call sociopathy or psychopathy or antisocial personality disorder, existence is a transgression.
Think of the experiments that could not be done today, in which dogs were put in one cage, and allowed into another, which had an electrical plate that shocked them. After a time, they would not venture out, even if the floor was not electrified, because the pain of even anticipating the shock was too much.
Children who are beaten cannot feel anger. You are not allowed to yell back at the parent. You are not allowed to express justified rage. You are not allowed access, in other words, to normal systemic responses, to instinctual responses, to natural reactions to troubling times.
This creates dissociation, which is a textbook clinical response to trauma. Dissociation is a disconnection between the sense of self and emotions most would consider appropriate at some given time. Traumatized men, for example, in my view make excellent soldiers, because they lack the sense of fear that would paralyze others. They simply shut it off.
And think about this: conscience consists mainly in ANXIETY, in the sense that doing x, y, or z makes you uncomfortable. You imagine cheating on your spouse, or robbing or killing someone, and some part of you becomes profoundly discomfited. It doesn’t like it. It says “I don’t WANT to be the sort of person who does that”.
It may be that you don’t want to be SEEN to be that sort of person, that you value your honor, which is to say your social standing.
It may be that your conversation is solely internal, such that your “social standing” is related to your internal sense of worth, your internal and fully honest sense that if you commit this transgression, you will no longer DESERVE to be integrated into a social space. You should be homeless. You should be exiled. You would feel guilt, which is to say anxiety and emotional pain tied to your sense of self.
This is what the voice in your head tells you. But here is my thesis: that “voice” is an emergent property of a gut sense, of signalling originating in the gut, which perhaps at a very primitive level is concerned with clean/unclean, itself a distinction related to edible/inedible, which at one time had enormous survival implications.
The A-10 is a plane built around a gun; the human being, in some sense, is a machine built around the gut, serving it. Figuring out what it tells us constantly is thus a matter of considerable importance.
Sociopaths, in this rendering, have lost–through socializing, in all likelihood, with infant trauma largely being absent from the psychotherapeutic arsenal of diagnoses, but certainly possibly having been born this way, or a predisposition to it–the connection between their rational, social brain and their gut brain. The gut sense that something is inedible/unclean/wrong is simply not there. The gut either is not telling them, or they do not have the capacity to process it. Either way, the conscience is absent. Lying, cheating, stealing: these evoke no emotional response other than a concern with getting caught and punished.
And such people typically have an exaggerated need for thrills, for living on the edge. Some, with some other factors in place, become serial killers or rapists; others ride their motorcycles much too fast, and tell so many lies and cheat so much it’s almost like they want to get caught, when in reality it’s the thrill of the possibility-and the sense of victory when they get away with it–that makes their engines run.
On this rendering the distinction of sacred and profane, seen nearly everywhere in religions around the world, would be one arising in the gut.
And the preponderance of fascination with horror movies, particularly among young people, could be seen as arising from the felt gut sense that the distinction between sacred and profane has been eradicated. Leveling is the fundamental notion of Socialism–moral leveling, to be clear, since politically an oligarchy always emerges on top–and that eradicates primitive emotion-based distinctions.
As rational beings, of course, we can say that such distinctions should be erased. Homosexuals should not be beaten and killed. We can allow Irish to apply. Women are pretty damn smart. All of this makes sense.
But some part of us still needs these distinctions. The Hindus built peace (for most) and stability for thousands of years based upon pervasive and permanent and complex graded systems of difference, of sacred and profane. To this very day, tens or hundreds of millions exist outside the social system, and are routinely abused in horrible ways.
To abuse is to exist. This is the logic of some part of our evolutionary wiring. It is countered, of course, by more recent developments, by our social brains. But when the two exist in conflict, the sense of home is prevented. Rest is disrupted.
This is the issue of our modern age. One can easily see the totalitarianisms (Communism, primarily, with Nazism arising in reaction to it) as arising from this felt sense of displacedness, of disconnection, of homelessness. Verworfenheit. One can readily grasp Heidegger’s initial embrace of Nazism simply by noting the importance he placed on Heimat: me and mine, if necessary against all others.
And I think it necessary and useful to derive a sort of Sociopathy Light (Lite?), which is to say the evisceration of the conscience brought on by disconnecting the gut from abstraction. In order to socialize ourselves, we must employ abstract reasoning, rules. Fairness, for example, is an abstraction. It says “I must make sure (the gut adds–in order to prevent violence and to foster intra-group solidarity) to make sure all the children get equally large slices of chocolate cake.” As an abstraction, this works.
But our social mind can easily be disconnected from its concrete milieu, from the actual, real world. It can perform the same symbolic operations, which make sense in the abstract, but which do not apply to anything in the real world. “Social Justice”, for example, is in almost all cases encouraging one group not to embrace the principles of hard work, self restraint, long term thinking, and patience; and of punishing another group for doing so. It rewards those who should not be rewarded, and punishes those who have in fact been rewarded.
More importantly, it discourages morality. Virtue remains a type of sacred; and its contrary a type of profane. These are still usable categories, and will in my view still satisfy the gut.
But contemporary “virtue” consists precisely in undermining all other sorts of virtues, at least on the left. They do not say “the rich are rich because they busted their asses over the long haul, took large risks, endured many sleepless nights and endless frustration, and in the process created many jobs and wealth for others.” No, they mimic a bygone era when aristocrats existed, and could be assumed to be the beneficiaries of an ancestors rapacity and capacity for successful theft in the near or distant past.
So what you get, practically, is a combination of inaccurate abstraction–really, I would call it in nearly all cases rationalization–and a very real felt sense of hatred and anger and violence which come from an otherwise disconnected gut.
And this basic phenomenon is common. On the Religious Right you have people who spend all week reading about the importance of love and kindness, and who spit out hatred and anger at all who disagree with them.
And everywhere you will find self righteous people who claim to be for the “Good” who are angry, spiteful, and emotionally disconnected.
All abstract tribes are prone to this, although it is not a necessary element.
I think it is perhaps in the Dionysian that we reconcile these opposing tendencies. Apollo has never fully run the show. Wine has its place. The gut must have its say and its day.
And I think this is also the role played by many authentic spiritual practices. As I have mentioned, I do a Tibetan practice called Kum Nye, and they talk about the nastiness of gut energy, which they locate in an energy center below the navel, but also speak of how to release and integrate it. (In my own case, I have what amount to attacks of shaking nearly every night, which originate in almost all cases in my solar plexus; my view is that both the orthodox physiologists and the “energy” interpretations are correct, on different levels).
And this is the point: existing methods can be researched and refined, and new methods can be developed and deployed to deal with this energy in socially useful ways, such that we can exist as being who FEEL whole without being subject to attacks of violence and a need for ritually defined social distinctions.