And I felt just a small fraction of a whiff of self esteem moments later. This is new to me. And then it hit me: you have to have an adult ego–or at least AN ego of some sort–in order to collect and enjoy your own acts of merit and goodness and all the things that lead in normal people to self respect.
My ego was obliterated. As I think I have shared, when I was perhaps 7 I had a dream of being put in giant mortar and pulped with a giant pestle. There was nothing but bloody ooze everywhere. I still remember all these years later the sensation looking at that pulp gave me. That is the part I will share (if I haven’t already shared all of it).
And then a further thought hit me: this is the problem with people who choose a path of evil: they have no way of getting positive reinforcement for doing the things goodness, or empathy, or society would dictate. Most people who save a puppy will feel good. But people who lack an ego lack anything to lay that self respect on, so they can nurture it and value it. A feeling comes and goes, leaving nothing. It is almost like an on-going, rolling affective amnesia.
And I saw, or thought I saw, that many people–let’s use Sade as an example–may in fact early in their lives try to do good. They may try to understand these emotions other people seem to feel, but which are foreign to them. But as hard as they try to follow societies dictates, as hard as they try to be good people by the standards of the people they esteem worthy of emulation: nothing. They get nothing, and it is enormously frustrating. This should be obvious, but in my view this would be the result of trauma, and as I think I’ve discovered/shown/argued I hope effectively, large traumas can come from small things, particularly when we are very young. I think many things that could be traumas are prevented or healed by otherwise persisting parental love and connection, but not all, even sometimes with good parents.
Returning to my main point, Goodness comes to seem an illusion, or even an evil spell, cast to torment them. It pushes them away, like someone who pledged their loyalty to them and then betrayed them. None of the best feelings are open to them. Honest, earned, self respect is impossible for them, since self respect implies a self.
And so they set in motion lives of sensation that IS real. Sex is clearly real. The feeling of power is clearly real. The pain of others–and of ones self–is clearly real. Thus, emotionlessness becomes sensationalism in a formal sense. They live for momentary, evanescent clues which remind them that existence may be possible, but not for them.
There is something quite deep here. As I have said, I have evil in me, too, although I think this can be said of everyone. Where I differ from many is that I have distilled it, and captured it, so I can examine it, learn from it, study it, use it to create one day an antidote or even preventive.
The mythology of Harry Potter no doubt came from somewhere deep in Joanne Rowling. This whole embedding of Voldemort in Harry Potter as a means of helping him DEFEAT him is quite apposite here, as is the splitting of self involved in evil and as symbolized by the Horcruxes. Voldemort had no self. He did not the first time Dumbledore met him, and all he did with his Horcruxes is formalize a preexisting reality.
On to my next activity. Let’s just say I plan to sleep well (and legally: pot is not and never will be my thing, at least until I can get those pills legally. I hear good things about those pills and sleep).