In Nazi Germany-as Alice Miller showed in For Your Own Good""the broken regime of ethnic annihilation built upon the psychic brokenness created by generations of child-rearing practices that legitimated the systematic brutal treatment of children. What was driven underground in the child emerged with a fury against "inferior peoples" to be destroyed in the name of the noble Fatherland.
In each case, the pattern of brokenness gets spread from the culture to the individual and then back again. The harsh culture, making war against the natural needs and will of the growing human, spreads its pattern of division by preventing the human creature from reconciling -or even acknowledging""the elements within it.
At its core, the lie of false righteousness is a lie to oneself""a basic split between a person's real inner experience, which is rejected for being intolerably painful, and the false representation of that experience, which is fabricated as an escape from that pain.
And such a broken psyche -- with its conscious identification with a harsh morality and its estrangement from the natural creature --needs to find "enemies" against whom to enact its inner conflicts and divisions.
It has been said, "by their fruits shall ye know them." Thus the nature of a ruling spirit shows itself by the pattern it imprints upon its domain. This is why that systematic fomenting of division and conflict -within America and between America and the world""is so clear an indication of the nature of the spirit that has lately been ruling this country. That spirit that tears things apart is an evil spirit.
The opportunism of 'evil forces'
What's new in America is not the existence of these destructive patterns and forces but rather their ascendancy to such dominance.
America has long contained an empire-building impulse, but until now it has largely been balanced by ideals about a just order that should displace the rule of "might makes right." In earlier times, the American nation employed a destructive combination of arrogance and hypocrisy to dispossess the natives of this continent of their lands. But only now has that unwholesome posture become the essence of the face presented to the world at large.
American capitalism has long had an element of systemic insatiability, but till now that voraciousness has been held in check, at least to a meaningful degree, by ideas about responsibility to the greater good. We've long known, for example -from the stories of the tobacco and asbestos industries""that America's corporate systems are prone to succumb to the temptation to put profits ahead of caring for life. But it is only now that -to the alarm of much of the rest of the world""the deadly pattern of those industries has become enshrined as national policy: in the present White House, we now know, the scientific reports regarding potentially catastrophic climate change was being denied and distorted to keep public concern from interfering with corporate America's immediate profits.
In a morally healthy society, the darker elements are kept subordinate to the dictates of good order. They are held in check by those frameworks that a culture has developed at all levels -in the psyche, in the realms of cultural expression, in the domain of governance-- to nurture and protect good order. But when these frameworks break down, as they have in America in our times, the dark forces -the old patterns of brokenness-- that lurk in a society will arise opportunistically to tear things apart.
After decades of an imaginative life -in television and movies, for example""that continually rehearses Americans in the indulgence of their lower selves, fewer people can recognize the good, and fewer still are devoted to it. Amoral desire gains in force, and counterfeit goodness more readily passes as the real thing.
After well over a decade of a talk radio culture that teaches people to indulge their self-serving beliefs, the gratifications of wishful thinking erode the structures of integrity in the pursuit of truth. Without that ethic of intellectual responsibility that requires that we bow to the truth, it becomes far easier for deceptions to win out in the corrupted "marketplace of ideas."
The deep insight of the Western religious tradition
The nature of evil as I believe I've glimpsed it, then, goes beyond its being destructive of the good. It is also central to evil that -unlike the destructiveness of a tsunami""it works through the realm of human choice. And it is its use of the wounding and twisting of the human spirit that gives evil its morally dark and cruel aspect.
But it is also its operating on a scale far vaster than the individual human will, and its opportunism in spreading its patterns of brokenness, that give the impression of a vast spirit at work in the world, expanding its empire wherever there is an opening.
(The force of goodness works similarly in many ways. But not in all ways, for the process of building wholeness has inherent differences from the process of tearing it apart.)
In each case, the pattern of brokenness gets spread from the culture to the individual and then back again. The harsh culture, making war against the natural needs and will of the growing human, spreads its pattern of division by preventing the human creature from reconciling -or even acknowledging""the elements within it.
At its core, the lie of false righteousness is a lie to oneself""a basic split between a person's real inner experience, which is rejected for being intolerably painful, and the false representation of that experience, which is fabricated as an escape from that pain.
And such a broken psyche -- with its conscious identification with a harsh morality and its estrangement from the natural creature --needs to find "enemies" against whom to enact its inner conflicts and divisions.
The opportunism of 'evil forces'
What's new in America is not the existence of these destructive patterns and forces but rather their ascendancy to such dominance.
America has long contained an empire-building impulse, but until now it has largely been balanced by ideals about a just order that should displace the rule of "might makes right." In earlier times, the American nation employed a destructive combination of arrogance and hypocrisy to dispossess the natives of this continent of their lands. But only now has that unwholesome posture become the essence of the face presented to the world at large.
American capitalism has long had an element of systemic insatiability, but till now that voraciousness has been held in check, at least to a meaningful degree, by ideas about responsibility to the greater good. We've long known, for example -from the stories of the tobacco and asbestos industries""that America's corporate systems are prone to succumb to the temptation to put profits ahead of caring for life. But it is only now that -to the alarm of much of the rest of the world""the deadly pattern of those industries has become enshrined as national policy: in the present White House, we now know, the scientific reports regarding potentially catastrophic climate change was being denied and distorted to keep public concern from interfering with corporate America's immediate profits.
In a morally healthy society, the darker elements are kept subordinate to the dictates of good order. They are held in check by those frameworks that a culture has developed at all levels -in the psyche, in the realms of cultural expression, in the domain of governance-- to nurture and protect good order. But when these frameworks break down, as they have in America in our times, the dark forces -the old patterns of brokenness-- that lurk in a society will arise opportunistically to tear things apart.
After decades of an imaginative life -in television and movies, for example""that continually rehearses Americans in the indulgence of their lower selves, fewer people can recognize the good, and fewer still are devoted to it. Amoral desire gains in force, and counterfeit goodness more readily passes as the real thing.
After well over a decade of a talk radio culture that teaches people to indulge their self-serving beliefs, the gratifications of wishful thinking erode the structures of integrity in the pursuit of truth. Without that ethic of intellectual responsibility that requires that we bow to the truth, it becomes far easier for deceptions to win out in the corrupted "marketplace of ideas."
The deep insight of the Western religious tradition
The nature of evil as I believe I've glimpsed it, then, goes beyond its being destructive of the good. It is also central to evil that -unlike the destructiveness of a tsunami""it works through the realm of human choice. And it is its use of the wounding and twisting of the human spirit that gives evil its morally dark and cruel aspect.
But it is also its operating on a scale far vaster than the individual human will, and its opportunism in spreading its patterns of brokenness, that give the impression of a vast spirit at work in the world, expanding its empire wherever there is an opening.
(The force of goodness works similarly in many ways. But not in all ways, for the process of building wholeness has inherent differences from the process of tearing it apart.)
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
