I woke up this morning tired. The way I process the world is like I’m trying to get a firehose worth of water through a garden hose.
Why do the right thing? Why persist in principled stands, if they bring you mainly heartache and sorrow? I watch people in my minds getting movies like “Wolf Creek”, in which the sociopaths win, and the heroes lose. How do you acclimate yourself to seeking out fear and corresponding pain?
Do people not get tired? Do they not sometimes want to see the villain win, because on some level it justifies their own moral fatigue? Would it not be easier just to tell strategic lies, in the right places, to unsuspecting people, just to make your life easier? Wouldn’t it feel good sometimes to just express your pent up anger in some strategic cruelty? Just call it a prank. Or cheat on someone who loves you, and lie about it. Tell yourself it means nothing.
Is heartless cruelty not much easier than sensitive warmth and vulnerability? Is it not ridiculous to be soft, so soft, in a tough world?
I think these things to myself. I can understand why short-sighted people lose their moral compass. Most of them, to only a small degree. They lie a little, and lose a little. Increasingly, though, we do seem to be alienated from one another, on a deep level. Our shared myths–mainly movies, sports, and music–are increasingly superficial and crass. How do you connect on a deep emotional level, when you are incapable of feeling deep emotions? You don’t. You wander through the world with a vague sense of ennui and dissatisfaction, never sure why you are so restless, and why you feel the need to be mean sometimes, to express violence to the world. But you see others feel the same impulse, and feel reinforced in it.
What I do from time to time is imagine myself at a crossroads, a point of choice. Down one road, I follow the logical consequences of the decision to pursue amorality consciously. On the other, I see the path of what I term Goodness, which is a decision to do the work of improving the world and the lives of people in it, without more regard for personal comfort than needed to survive emotionally.
The first path leads, in the end, to the need for destruction. Sade, in “120 Days of Sodom”, pictured many hundreds of crimes he could commit. I do not recommend reading him, but if you do, he still has, as one reviewer put it, the “power to shock”. He is, in my view, the logical choice as the primary expositor of the doctrine of Evil. It can be more or less coherently expressed, and consists in a vicious rage against the world, all life in it, and against oneself. Nothing is spared.
I look at this path. If one could rule the world, it would end in wanting to destroy it, finally. And if one could destroy it, one would then want to destroy the universe, the possibility of life. There is no possibility of rest. The task can never be completed. “Beauty” must always arise in outer circumstances, those of pain and guilt: yes, guilt. I wonder if a true sociopath would be capable of proper evil as a doctrine. Can one choose evil, if one lacks a sense of compassion or guilt?
We all like to pretend that people are naturally nice. This has been the life experience of most of us in America, who have not fought in foreign wars, or been victimized by crime. Yet, the most superficial reading of history tells us this is not the case. People have ENJOYED fighting wars for most of history. The victors get the thrill of slaughtering their enemies, and the pleasures of stealing their stuff and despoiling their women. This is history.
Doctrines of love are rare enough. Even in Christianity one would have been hard pressed to find the spirit of Christ in the “universal” church for most of its history. Just 50 years ago men who should have known better were in effect aiding and abetting pedophiles.
We always have a choice between good and evil. We can choose evil. Clearing the path for this realization has seemingly been the task which modern philosophers have set for themselves. If common sense goodness is “bourgeois morality”, as the Leninists–the Nihilists–put it, then evil is the converse. And that is what they chose: pain without redemption; violence without cause or effect; and the effort to metastasize their monstrosities around the world.
In the end, though, I think we all crave light. On a dark rainy day, we can sit down with a glass of peppermint tea, and think of happy days, and listen to the birds. We can think with affection of others, and pet our dogs.
It’s funny, when I am visualizing evil, everything becomes hard and plastic. De Beauvoir herself pointed out that Sade’s writing was more like a pictorial tour of a wax museum. There was little movement, just static images. This is, I think, the inner world of evil: stasis. That person is trapped in a day that never, ever ends.
When I visualize Goodness, everything because light and airy, and pleasant. One can smell flower blossoms wafting on a restless breeze on a spring day, and basil cooking in the kitchen in a tomato sauce. I feel connection with others, the capacity for joy, and satisfaction: yes, satisfaction. Not sex, not clinginess, but self supporting, self sustaining satisfaction.
We can all do the right thing. We can all fight the fights we need to to survive emotionally. It is hard sometimes, very hard. But the consequences of failure are inner death.
And no matter how far anyone has walked down the path of unpleasantness, there is always time to come around. I really believe that is the nature of the universe.
Few thoughts for a Sunday. May you find yourself blessed.
I will add that writing this was therapeutic for me.