One thing that has come out is that both of my parents watched the light fade from my eyes. Whatever hope and spontaneous joy and innate creativity I was born with died at some point. I became dull and listless, then angry for reasons that were unclear to me.
But it occurred to me that there should be a word for either failing to feed someone’s light, and certainly for actively encouraging defeatism, failure, cynicism, and moral and emotional death. Hence Psychicide, which seems to be unique to me. Google comes up with nothing, although to me the idea seems obvious enough.
And as I ponder it, it occupies a unique place between homicide and suicide, because the root of the death can be, and usually is, a combination of Others (Sartre’s les autres might here be apposite) and one’s own being, as divided into a combative, self destructive component, and an unexpressed capacity to return to home and authentic goodness.
I was watching an interview with the killer they called the Iceman, and he loved to watch the light of life flicker and fade when he killed people, and loved that the last thing they saw was him.
There are people in this world who love this equally, but not as the result of physical murder. It is the love of power, the root of the love of power. When you have power, you can suppress the innate individuality of everyone who is subject to you. You can lessen everyone else. You can dim their light. And in many cases, you can sap their will to live outright, which again is what I am calling Psychicide.
And I wanted to emphasize that true morality, true goodness, flows from an authentic and spontaneous, free sense of self. As I have said before, the Tibetan Windhorse is a fantastic image. It is a horse, running freely, with speed, for the love of movement, and a fantastically bright shining jewel on its back, spreading light wherever it goes.
The opposite, of course, is killing movement, killing freedom, killing the joy of movement, making everything dark and unclear, and destroying beauty, substantially all of which were, AND REMAIN, core objectives of Communists like George Soros.
If I were Trump, I would assign a group of highly intelligent and well funded people specifically to counter Soros and other well funded propaganda.
Far too many people are talking about human survival as a race of animals, as if our mere physical continuance is a major victory. What I see is that if we do not retain the beauty we have evolved, it is all for naught. There is no beauty in machines. They are not alive, and cannot be. Life is not a mechanical process: it is a spiritual process.
Clearly, you can mimic life, as you can mimic virtue, if I might complete my thought. Many dead people do all the things that truly virtuous people do–or at least pretend to–but they mean none of it. I was reading recently the story of a priest who seemingly–he was just convicted for it–raped and murdered a young and beautiful girl 50+ years ago, who made the mistake of being too Catholic.
Did him being a priest matter in the slightest? But the case is worse: seemingly, local church officials, and local Catholic law enforcement officials were worried that a scandal might hurt Kennedy’s election chances. So this priest was sent to the same places they sent known pedophiles, to lay low for a time, then be reassigned somewhere.
Is there anything sacred about such a process? Even if every sacrament, every Mass, was delivered correctly, is this something Jesus would recognize as his own? Is this something God would proclaim holy or good?
Virtue is nearly always hidden. It lies dormant in most. Yes, most people have been habituated to doing things in certain ways. Habit and courtesy intermingle, and we call the combination salutary when we recognize our particular habits in others.
But who are you is the deeper question. What do you mean in the recesses of your heart? Who would you be if you knew you could get away with anything? My own feeling is that perhaps a third of the people out there are quite capable of murder. There have been times I would have been quite capable of it. I have felt that feeling in myself. I still do, sometimes. It would not pang my conscience a bit to put a gun to George Soros head and pull the trigger repeatedly, just to be sure.
In the end, I was killed. I died. My parents watched the light fade from my eyes. I joined them in the darkness. And my entire life path has been spent seeking, and slowly finding, resurrection.
I am not there yet. I have many, many miles to go. I’m not even at the end of the beginning. I’m at the beginning. But learning to walk again is a prerequisite to one’s first step. And to do that, you have to get off the ground, and learn to stand upright. And you can only stand on your own two feet. You cannot stand on those of anyone else. Your path is your own. Only you can travel it. Only you can see it. Far too many people give their lives away, because they fear the freedom they have been given as a gift, and far too many people are all to happy to take that life, because it gives them, for a time, the ability to pretend that they, too, are not neglecting their own way, their own path, their own destiny.
Edit: I did find a few instances of Psychecide. My Greek is non-existent, so perhaps this is more faithful. Still, I will stick with my neologism.