Through that projection of evil -- indirectly the product of the war of all against all that has shaped civilized societies -- the war within the psyche fuels an intensification of the strife out in the world.
I asserted earlier that the overwhelming majority of people would choose a more whole world over a more broken one, i.e. one at peace rather than one at war, etc. But as we have just seen -- in this examination of three kinds of intra-psychic brokenness -- there are broken people who -- being at war with frightening dimensions of their own experience -- cannot be at peace and are driven in the direction of conflict.
(One need only look at the current occupant of the Oval Office. It would be an interesting history to trace back all those patterns of brokenness in the human world that went into the forming of the malignant narcissist, who continually foments strife and division -- now President of the United States: Trump's abusive father, for starters, and then all the factors that made the father as he was, involving family, cultures, nations, interweaving through centuries.)
Thus, through the shaping of civilized societies by the selection for the ways of power, brokenness in the overarching inter-societal system begets brokenness in the human psyche which, in turn, begets brokenness in the interactions among peoples.
Traumatic experience -- which occurs when people have experiences they do not have the resources to handle -- remains an unintegrated experience. That lack of integration implies a kind of brokenness in the person's psychological structure. And one form of that brokenness, as we have just been seeing, is the denial of the realities of our experience.
We have just discussed three such traumatic realities: the realities of our experience of ourselves as weak and uncertain in a dangerous world, and -- according to the judgments we have tainted with "evil," according to the judgments we have internalized. If those experiences are intense (painful and frightening) enough, people can deny them. But what is driven underground does not disappear.
Thus it has often been to defend those beliefs they inwardly (unconsciously) know to be false that people have been driven to make war, ready to kill and to die.
The denial of the realities of such painful experience thus lays down the template for the rule of the lie. Once we lose the integrity of dealing with reality, the embrace of all kinds of falsehood becomes possible. (With respect to how this connects with the treatment of blacks by whites in the South, and the treatment of Jews by Germans during the Nazi era, see pp. 110-111 of WHAT WE'RE UP AGAINST.) It is for good reason that the lie has a most central place in the traditional Christian understanding of Evil: Satan, the Evil One, is known as the Deceiver.
The lie is brokenness in the form of a misalignment with reality. It is one of the fruits of trauma, which -- being more than we can integrate -- breaks us. And trauma is the inevitable fruit of the social evolutionary process in which our species has been caught up.
The tragic hero of this drama -- the human creature -- stumbled innocently into this traumatic process, made inevitable by the disorder that human creativity inadvertently introduced into the systems of life on earth. But once broken by the inescapable trauma of the impossible situation into which this creature had ventured, our hero became capable of the monstrous brokenness that has marked so much of the history of civilization.
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