The Face of Evil

[kokopelle]

I finally found a book-on-tape by Dean Koontz that I couldn't listen to. Normally I REALLY like his unabridged material. It is witty and creepy at the same time. Well, the book Intensity was just plain creepy. It is about the interplay between the heroine Chyna Shepherd and the serial killer Edgler Foreman Vess. Vess embraces intense situations and only at these times does he feel truly alive. Additionally, he believes is invincible from powers gained in killing his victims. Vess kills for the sheer 'intensity' of it. He believes that life is all about accruing sensation, and that he must live with intensity in order to discover new sensations.

ACK!!! I had to pull out of this whirlwind of egoic destructive satisfaction. It reminded me very much of Scott Peck's writings. Scott Peck is the author of "People of the Lie". I've found this book to be a fascinating examination of evil and its causes. From the wikipedia website:

Evil is described by Peck as "militant ignorance". In this it is close to the original Judeo-Christian concept of "sin" as a consistent process that leads to failure to reach one's true goals.

An evil person:

• Projects his or her evils and sins onto others and tries to remove them from others
• Maintains a high level of respectability and lies incessantly in order to do so
• Is consistent in his or her sins. Evil persons are characterized not so much by the magnitude of their sins, but by their consistency
• Is unable to think from other people's viewpoints.

Most evil people realize the evil deep within themselves but are unable to tolerate the pain of introspectionor admit to themselves that they are evil. Thus, they constantly runaway from their evil by putting themselves in a position of moral superiority and putting the locus of evil on others. Evil is an extreme form of what Scott Peck, in The Road Less Traveled, calls a character disorder.

To me, this is the kind of evil that animals and nature as a whole cannot reproduce. It takes a thinking entity to cultivate, maintain and project evil unto others. Something to consider. I plan to write more about the connection between intensity, selfishness, and those actions that are considered evil by a majority.

Comments

2 additional kinds of evil

[chimerae.livejournal.com]

I experience three very different varieties of evil.

1.) The version closest to what M. Scott Peck talks about involves easing pain and distress by deliberately displacing it into the world around, then gathering up more pain so that it can be diplaced. I perceive this as an addiction cycle. There's more of this done unconsciously than I think Peck credits. Usually this slips into #2 very quickly and a homeostatic balance is formed with the evil in the culture. In the rare cases where that does not happen, these sorts of individuals and groups are very dangerous. I would be delighted to be wrong, but have come to believe that they can only be effectively confronted by people who have slipped past the edge into it themselves and somehow been drawn back into the Light.

2.) A social contract where every bad thing is accrued in a designated pool and that pool rises up and kicks back. Some terrorism falls under this category, but most is a ways off from the event horizon on that slippery slope. The point is that both sides are participatory and both or either can stop

3.) My experience of the worst form of evil is the kind that falls under "everybody does it" The difference between animal ignorance and the existance of evil is the funny little line where people recognize that innocence is linked to ignorance and arrange to manufacture intentional ignorance as a strategy to distill the benefits of evil while maintaining the presumed permissiveness of innocence. Except the very act of making that choice, however unconsciously, is evil. The funny thing about evil is that when we cross the line, the line is crossed. Morality is not a size queen. Integrity would appear to be an event horizon.

And THAT, in application, dances past the edge of grandiosity and perhaps paranoia. (See point #2 for the cultural institution of dispensensations)

I did not vote for George W. Bush, but as I drive and participate in the economy and own stock, I'm particapatory and responsible for every action taken in the name of the American people. I am personally responsible for Guantanamo, child sweat shop labor, genocide in Darfur and the whole bit -- just only minimally capable of effective action. Out of a selfish desire for as much of my own integrity as I can manage, I do what I can, even if it's simply to pray.

And even that is a window into the 3rd evil -- to obsessively focus on this tiny thing mostly outside my reach is to turn away from responsibilities I CAN act on.

Because that's how evil works.
Sometimes I wonder if I'll eventually find out I just misunderstood. Evil is astonishingly inclusive, I think as an element of the built in narcisism.

It's actually really kind of cool if you understand how evil works because the fix is so simple. The ubiquitous nature of the latter two, means it's very easy to confront, address, and deal effectively with evil just in the small moments of passing through an everyday life.

It just doesn't make for a very good spine tingling novel.

Also, animals are totally prone to the latter two, but lacking the technology of culture, it's never that far to the extreme. Animals get dead or they dead up their targets. Game Over!