In traditional societies, mothers are the ones who convinced their children that the universe was smaller, closer, and more comprehensible than it is. Even the Catholic vision is vastly more comfortable than our present vision. It has a place in hell for the truly irredeemable, but a place for second chances for everyone else. And the universe looked to the Earth, not vice versa.
I have been feeling this coldness of complete exposure. It is very unpleasant. Maddening, if I were someone who fell apart easily.
And I have been feeling the evil which underlies most human culture. I have been feeling the evil in me which was latent when I started writing about goodness.
It is a fear, a powerful fear, an exigent fear, a primordial fear. It is the caged animal, the raging beast, the cheater, liar and thief. Only perfectly nurtured people lack this, and I don’t think those are more than, perhaps, 20% of the population. Everyone else carries forward, because they must, something from which evil can spring.
And I feel how human culture exists to provide rationalizations for these feelings, to put a positive spin on them, to make of conformity a virtue, because it papers over the evil within.
Is it not ODD, when you think about it, that in our popular culture tolerance is granted supreme value, that all the good people of our world spend all their time practicing “compassion”, as they see it, and yet that our media is filled with the most horrific violence? Shows about serial killers and the details and even reenactments or portrayals of their crimes? The knife they used, the sort of wound they inflicted, how they tortured their prisoner.
At a deep psychological level, of course, this all makes perfect sense. No one can be friend to the world, not really. We are not wired like that biologically, evolutionarily. How do you do it? You make it an abstract value to cover up the real anger and malice you feel in your being, and which lacks an outlet for expression.
Oh, my world and work involves countless deaths When I don’t drink, I feel like I am dying every night, multiple times. I wake up screaming. When I do drink, of course, that too is a death of sorts. I have seen much too much death, much too much dying.
But I am making slow, painstaking, ridiculously hard progress. This is the truth. And one day, I will get past the storm, and will see something much better. And it may be soon. One can hope. As always, though, I place my ultimate faith in persistence, and nothing else.
Might I coin the term Homo Persistens (or whatever the Latin is for persistence/perseverence)? We are that animal which keeps (and kept) going.