It increasingly seems to me that unresolved trauma is at the root of a two branch decision tree of good and evil. Those willing to learn to process it become good. Those who cannot process it, who have too much, or who run from it in fear, become bad people. They become, to be clear, dissociated people, cut off from the waters of a happy life, of the possibility of nurturing connection, of hope, of love.
I have defined evil as the internalized acceptance of self loathing, and I think that gets very close. It is embracing the horrors in your gut, and seeking them out, inflicting them on others. It is the embrace of the emotion of disgust. One sees this very clearly in Sade.
Human civilization, if we are to advance, must learn to first grant the ubiquity of unrecognized trauma (much of it, to be clear, unintentional, such as birth trauma. Much trauma also comes from the emotional unavailability of parents who are themselves traumatized, as in my case, who pass trauma on through a lack of love and nurturing.), and learn to deal with it en masse, and consciously.
I use the terms Good and Evil, but I am not a moralist per se. I believe judgement is sometimes necessary, but I would argue strongly in the abstract that our task is not to categorize people, but to help them, to understand them, to recognize that they are dealing with things we don’t understand, and that we all have breaking points. All of us. Subjected to the right sort of trauma, ALL OF US, without exception, will snap, will dissociate to the point of open psychosis. Many around us dissociate to the point of semi-psychosis. Most of us are a bit crazy. This is nothing new.
Ah, I’m rambling. Time to move on. Hopefully this is useful for something.