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How Do We Deal With Evil?

Issues – … doing evil … accepting evil … destroying … ethics … war … killing … facing evil in oneself … facing evil in others …

Most people on this earth seem to be avoiding evil as best they can. Man’s capacity to do evil is in inverse proportion to his willingness to deal with evil and not avoid it.

Evil is the deliberate and conscious act of destroying others, property and the capacity for a better life for all people.

1. Thus the rich do evil by hoarding wealth and property, living in expensive houses with expensive cars and lifestyles.
2. Thus the powerful in and out of government do evil by exploiting the roots of power and the common people so they may win to themselves and their organizations immense wealth and capacity to control others.

Don’t just look to the lowly criminal, even the deadly ones who exploit and kill, for your best examples of evil.

Those of organized violence, such as the military’s of most nations, are doing evil all the time, defining their acts as good for their side while using their capacity to destroy enemies and societies who do not agree with them.

Closer at home are the dreamers dreaming their nightmares, dreaming dreams in which violence seems to threaten the dream egos of the dreamers so that we wake in fear and paralysis from such dreams.

So it is without doubt right for someone to ask me recently, but just how do you deal with evil?

Yes, how do you, do I, do all of us deal with our own evil, that visited upon us and that we visit onto others?

Here are some key points.

First, stop avoiding evil, denying it in yourself, in others, in the world, or hiding from it.

Next, stop identifying your ego with the good. You are a good person. You are the offended one. You are the one who is right in the argument. You are innocent. You have not done anything that bad to anyone else, even not yourself.

Instead, face evil in yourself, in others, in your life, in the world.

Don’t waste time believing that somehow certain military’s and countries are right as portrayed in the news.

Stick to the basic principle that humanity killing humanity simply is wrong no matter who or what is doing so.

How do we best deal with evil?

The first step is to see it as it is and accept it. Don’t hide from it. Don’t deny it in yourself or others. Don’t run from it.

Yesterday evening I saw an Anne Frank movie in which she and seven others hid out for over two years from the Dutch and the Germans with sympathetic Dutch hiding and feeding the group. Everyone did their tasks and still the local Dutch police came for them in hiding and took them away. Only the father, Otto Frank, survived the concentration camps. The other seven innocents, whose only distinction was being Jews, died before the war was completely over.

It’s so easy  to say the Germans took Anne Frank, her family and the others away, and to dwell on the few Dutch who helped these Jews survive. However, the reality of the experience shows that the Dutch police, which means government of the time, arrested them, rather than sought to protect these Jews who were Dutch citizens. Thus the truth is that the Dutch and the Germans together sent to concentration camps over 107,000 Jews from which only 5000 survived after the war.

While there was a Dutch resistance and good Dutch who hid Jews and did their best to protect them, don’t look to this small number of good Dutch as an example that the Dutch people as a whole were not collaborators with the Germans in eliminating the Jews.

I see this psychological guilt, and its denial, in the Dutch of today that have worked with me, and that I know personally.

This example shows not to avoid evil, for it makes you unreal. Instead of facing the evil you and your society do, you avoid, hide from evil, and identify with national football games and the Dutch resistance, as if all of Holland were fighting the evil Germans. They were not.

• Number one, you face the evil you do and is done to you as it is in real terms.

• Number two, you learn from the experience of evil. You stop projecting, as I have, the good onto people you befriend and befriend you, but also exploit you.
  
• You don’t believe what people say about themselves. You look to their behavior regarding you. You do what you can to stop being exploited by others, and to stop being innocent about some of the other human beings you know and interact with.

• Number three, you create with evil. Not only do you learn from evil, you create with it sometimes. Make sure your purpose is clear when you use evil to counter evil.

Evil And Relationships

One time during a ‘divorce’ my ex was ‘bad mouthing’ me to others, and this gossip was influencing people I needed to be positive and on my side. There was no way I could counter the ex directly, so I sent a message by a former mutual friend. I knew if I conveyed a picture of my ex that was true and negative to this mutual friend that she, the good gossip, would pass it on to my ex who truly was trying to revenge me.

The goal was clear. To try and stop the gossip and distorted images effectively.

Thus I told our mutual friend a number of true and intimate things about the ex that would seem weird and offensive to people. Within a week I found out later our mutual friend had told my ex everything I said.

Up until that point I had refrained from discussing our intimate relationship before and the weird things about my ex. I considered that private, while at the same time she considered it revengeful to spread the word as to how terrible I was as a person.

Why should I play ‘the person of integrity’ any longer?

The message conveyed through the gossip of a former mutual friend that my ex’s worst side would be talked about also if she kept up her reviling stories worked I think to stop her continuing this revengeful behavior. I only gave a couple of true examples to our mutual gossip, implying that if the revenging storytelling continued from my ex more truth stories would be revealed to the gossip and thus to all the former mutual friends.

The Neutralizing Evil Method

1. I had used evil to neutralize evil, but I had done it consciously.
2. I had already consciously decided not to be revengeful towards my ex because I felt such was evil and I had principles against unconsciously doing evil, not only ethically, but psychologically. Why contaminate myself by being deliberately destructive as a revenge thing? What right had I?
   

If you revenge me I revenge you back, sort of thing.

I did not have to use this strategy any more. The hateful stories ended according to some feedback I got in private.

• Thus when we accept evil we use the principles: accept evil but create with it.

Evil And The Second World War

I can’t say as a philosopher that the Second World War was right ethically, but it happened. The German people became possessed with evil, even their Storm Troopers had the skull and crossbones on their military caps.

Thousands of Americans joined the war, including many Jews, to get rid of this generation of insane Germans who thought they had the right to kill civilians and soldiers of other countries and rob their conquered peoples blind. This was deliberate and conscious evil by a whole people visited onto others in the world.

So thousands of American lives were lost in Europe fighting Germans, killing Germans, and being killed in return. This was all evil, the killing of human lives on all sides. War is evil ethically. War is the deliberate decision to destroy people and property of other people you call an enemy.

Thousands of American Jews lost their lives fighting Germans who were killing six million Jews in the holocaust. These American Jews had to do evil to stop the evil Germans.

This is the choice to do evil for a more ultimate good. It is not Reinhold Neiber’s, the German theologian’s ‘you choose the lesser of two evils.”

There is no lesser of two evils. Evil is evil. It is not defined by lesser and greater. Killing human beings anywhere in the world is evil, is a crime against humanity. This is the clear logic of ethics pure and simple, and do you and I choose to deny it as such?

• Yes, when you have some power and commitment, choose to take a stand against deliberate evil visited on others by yourself and/or certain people you know.

You can’t end evil but we are only saying that evil is part of life. And that you can accept evil and deal with it, even create with it.

How To Handle A Revengeful Person

My ex? She revenged me terribly. Recently she wrote a ‘nice card’ all sentimental. I said to myself, I don’t have to deal with this, make her feel nice. She revenged me deliberately, even told me she was doing just this at one point.

I can’t stop her behavior. I don’t have that power. Nor do I have to respond and be nice, as if the evil delivered in the past is just in the past.

Once evil is delivered it is solid, it remains there.

I was not going to respond to this sentimental card, as if I had forgotten all about her deliberate evil. This freed me a bit more inside. I did not feel revengeful, the deliberate choice to hurt someone because they hurt you. I felt clear that you always accept the evil that people do, but that does not mean you agree that it was right for them to do such evil.

Forgiving Another Their Evil?

As part of this ethic we don’t go around forgiving others their evil against us. If anything, evil is real and we hold others responsible for the evil they do towards us and others.

• Hold people responsible for the evil that they do.

It is not ours to forgive. If you, if I, have done evil, far better that we take responsibility for that evil and its consequences. Far better we change ourselves as we can not to do the same evil again.

Don’t, like the military when it kills civilians, say ‘we are profoundly sorry.’ Say instead, ‘I will stop doing this destructive behavior to the best of my ability. It is not right to deliberately hurt and kill people so.’

I am not a good guy. As Jung said about himself to my analyst one year, ‘every year I get a little more evil,’ and Jung laughed. Jung did not explain himself. Each of us can find and deal with our own evil. This may make for a better humanity.

Regarding evil, I don’t know if I can laugh yet, but I’m trying …

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