Malevolence

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Applications

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Necessity of Formulating An Explicit Philosophy of Good and Evil

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Maybe you’re vague and ill formed and ill defined because you were abused very badly when you were a child. Four years old, something like that. And maybe you were abused by a family member because that’s generally who does the abusing. And so that just makes it worse. And then what that means is that you’ve had an implicit encounter with malevolent evil, no, you’ve had a direct encounter with malevolent evil, but you have an implicit hypothesis of malevolent evil that’s plaguing you, it’s still there. It’s trapped in the memories right? It’s trapped in the representational structure and as an adult you’re now faced with the necessity of articulating that fully before you have any chance whatsoever of freeing yourself from it.

And so that’s no joke, lots of times people have to go into the past, that’s what the psychoanalysts do, and say ‘look, here’s something that came along that bloody well knocked me over’. ‘And it isn’t even that I repressed it’. Which I think was,… well we won’t talk about Freud’s errors because Freud was a genius so we’ll just leave him alone.

But sometimes it’s not repression. It’s just that terrible things happen to people at such a young age, that there isn’t a bloody change in hell that they can figure out why they happen or what to do with them or what they mean. And then you can carry that with you. And you carry it with you. It’s like your body encounters the world in stages and it happens very rapidly, well it can extend over years. But the initial stages happen very rapidly. So for example if you’re walking down the road and you hear a large noise, a loud noise behind you, you go like ‘this’. That’s a predator defence response by the way you crouch down. And that’s to stop something from jumping on your back and getting at your neck too easily. That’s like a few hundred milliseconds. It’s really fast or even faster than that and it better be because something like a snake can nail you just right now so you better be fast.

But it’s low resolution. It’s like ‘danger, snake’, something like that, or ‘danger, predatory cat’, it’s that fast. And then you can unravel that and categorize it, but that takes time. You do it with emotion and then you do it with cognition. You can do that with long term thinking you know, because maybe you’ve encountered someone specifically malevolent and predatory at work, that happens to people a lot, operating as a destructive bully and who seems to have no positive function, whatsoever and is only living that out. And then you don’t know what to do about it so you’re in prey mode. I don’t mean this :pray: kind of mode, although that would help too. But I mean you’re acting like a prey animal and then you have this terribly complex thing to decompose, which is 'what’s the hell up with this person, why are they making my life miserable? What is it about me that allows them to make my life miserable? That’s a nasty little road to walk down. And you’re stuck with having to decompose it.

Maybe you can’t. Maybe formulating an explicit philosophy of good and evil to deal with something malevolent in your environment actually just happens to be beyond you. And that could easily be. It’s certainly the case for people who are young. And it’s the case for plenty of adults as well. It’s no simple thing to manage.

It’s something too that often soldiers who have post traumatic stress disorder have to do. Because they’ve encountered terrible things. They’ve either done them or ran into them. And they need to update their moral model of the world or they end up in something closely approximating hell.  

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