And there is evil out there. This is the part it has taken me thus far in my life to wrap my brain and emotions around. It can’t be willed out of existence. Quite often in this world the bad guys and gals win.
Do you REALLY think human nature has changed since the Nazis made soap out of the fat of slaughtered Jews? Since Mao reduced nearly a billion people to starvation and cannibalism?
No, it hasn’t, and the latest aggression by evil, in my view, is being undertaken under the banners of compassion and justice and progress, as indeed it was by the Communists and Nazis both (if we remove compassion from the lexicon of the Nazis, who were not hypocritical enough to claim they were trying to save anybody but the people they liked).
But I have, all my life, somehow personalized all this, like it is my fault and my responsibility. This is a feature of my particular childhood, and my particular sensibilities.
No: you need to get by with cunning, strength, stealth, and skill. Most days, for most people, the need for these things is not obvious. This is how we have become so decadent that we BELIEVE what the horrible people in our media are telling us. The truth is not hidden. It is not hard to find, or so I believe, in my conceit that I know–or rightly guess–at least a substantial portion of it.
The immediate task of all of us is to save ourselves, and those around us we care about. If everyone did this, the world would immediately be a better place.
But without losing sight of my idealism–and I am no doubt naive in many ways, my often expressed cynicism notwithstanding–I need to do a better job of mending my own fences, and taking care of myself.
Boundaries, boundaries: this is something which finally seems to be arriving, after much work. I have never really had them. My parents took them from me. I have always been wide open to the world. I am good at looking and acting fierce, and in a pinch I suppose I could BE fierce, but my actual nature is gentle and overly trusting. I hated killing bugs when I was little. I literally didn’t want to hurt flies, from the earliest age. I have learned to fight it because that nature has been abused more times than I can count. And of course, too, when you mistrust people, that can itself be the beginning of a bad relationship. It’s a vicious cycle.
Always in life appropriateness is the aim. As Aristotle said–and this would apply to any emotion, including fear–anyone can be angry, but being angry at the right things, at the right time, to the right extent: that is the domain of the superior human being.
Put another way, all emotions have their place. We need all of them, including hatred, greed, lust, and even sloth. But to the right extent, at the right time, and in response to the right stimuli: that is the task. All of these really only become vices in excess, and excess is precisely what is being avoided.