Evil is a most timely topic to bring to the fore. Scott Peck proposed introducing Evil as a diagnosable condition. He, like Kernberg and Fromm, saw it as a composite of malignant narcissism and additional traits including sadism, moral inversion, and indifference to suffering. Paul Levy re-introduced the Native American conceptualization of Wetiko, the nature of evil being a psychic virus that afflicts not just individuals but societies as a collective psychosis. Its remedy: heightened awareness, sacred activism, and authentic interpersonal re-connection. When studying the various thought leaders' observations and key attributes, one could imagine a pooled symptom checklist of their core and common elements. Creating such would help us name the attributes using a common vocabulary, and we'd be more grounded in highlighting these behaviors in the current authoritarian insurgency.
I am listening to a CBC journalist who did a deep dive into Musk - elon’s mom was born in my home town in Saskatchewan Canada ! And his Grandfather was a politician here ! And he thought the Great Depression was planned by the Communists
He wrote a book about it and only by following Jesus will man escape evil.
I agree with you on this Jim. The Golden Rule is applicable outside of religious connotations - in a civic realm.
What we are seeing is absolutely evil. I tend to agree with Madelyn Taylor - the initial Soul wounds that let in the evil to these actors was in childhood - perhaps even in the womb. That's how the evil got in - they have Soul Rabies and continue to bite others to infect them as well.
Morality is an internal North Star - you KNOW right and KNOW wrong - your body tells you what it is and your heart tells you what it is. Those are true and honest brokers.
IMPO, (I can't prove this but my Cassandra-senses tell me it's correct) Elon is Lebensborn and probably Trump and Thiel and the Harlan Crowe and the Koch Brothers et al were raised with the same idea of racial purity.
I think what we're really looking at are multi-generational Nazi dynasties. Which means you don't need a vast right-wing conspiracy when you have a tribal effort.
I suggest two authors:
1. If you want o get a grip on how this evil is trying to play out - James Lee Burke. He's a novelist. His style is Southern Noir. His novels are a vehicle for having conversations about the way Good and Evil play out in the mortal world through human beings, and the timelessness and repeating cycles of that. Think Sartre, Hemingway, and Thomas Hardy. His characters often say that there are individuals who did not descend from the same family tree as the rest of humanity.
He's been talking about the rise of fascism and evil for the last 50 years. He writes from the moral perspective of an American social-justice Catholic but in a very pagan sensibility of that. He's also a professor of Literature. He wraps a crime novel around Medieval tales of chivalry and Bible tales of good and evil, which he openly says he's done. Moreover - he's probably one of the best American novelists of our time. I urge everyone to read his novels. The Dave Robicheaux series is excellent and in his later years he began the Holland series - Texas lawmen at the turn of the 20th century. All of his novels are based on his own family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lee_Burke
2. Philip Kerr who wrote the Bernie Gunther series of historical detective thrillers. His protagonist is a cop in Berlin as fascism rises. When I first read them the impression I got was that it was part apologia, and part an attempt to understand how a man - and thus a whole society - who thought he stood for good, ended up serving evil. There are no good guys here. But it's an important blueprint of how individuals fall to this evil. Here's an interview with him.
Kathleen, I appreciate your mentioning me but I'd like everyone to know that I don't believe "evil gets in," nor that people who lack a conscience because of chronic failures of empathy in the parents of their childhood have "soul rabies" that infects other people. Kathleen's explanation makes sense to Kathleen but it is different from mine.
Jim, Captain G.M. Gilbert said, after observing the Nuremberg defendants after WWII, "Evil is the absence of empathy." He was witnessing
men who had been damaged in the earliest years of life by chronic failures of empathy committed by stern and punitive caregivers. In tyrannical families they couldn't develop the capacity to care about others. People like this live forever in a solipsistic inner world where other people are experienced as "things," treated like Martin Buber's "it" rather than as fellow human beings or "thou," as others on this thread have commented.
We categorize the Hitlers of the world as sociopaths or psychopaths because they can't connect emotionally with other people, have no capacity to empathize with others, and have no conscience regarding their impact on other people. (More thoroughly described on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist) Those characterological traits permit them to commit heinous acts of sadistic cruelty that the rest of us call "evil."
Trump and Musk are both severely damaged in this regard and are therefore dangerous and unfit to make decisions that affect other people. Both men have turned their deficiencies into idealized virtues because abject callousness continues to get them what they think they want. However, no amount of power or money will ever be enough because it was tenderness and compassion that they needed as small boys...nothing ever makes up for that.
This is exactly why they must be driven out of office. THANK YOU for this post!
This is spot on. The emotional neglect and abuse they were inflicted with, opened wounds in their psyches, and in their Souls - and that's what let the evil in.
Kathleen, if you could see what happens to infants and small children who cannot elicit kindness and tenderness from their caregivers because their caregivers don’t have it to give, you’d realize how they’ve been the helpless victims of “evil” themselves.
They’ve been totally dependent on humans who have no capacity to empathize with them. Babies in these families absolutely crumble internally, their little hearts are broken and eventually the suffering is unendurable. They harden over in emotional self-defense, become apathetic, withdrawn, unresponsive, or on the other hand, become enraged and determined to avenge themselves in whatever way they can.
Trump became an incorrigible child, then when he was 13 he began collecting large knives to make himself feel powerful, if only in his fantasies. When his father discovered this cache of weapons he was kicked out of the house and sent to a military-type school. When he lost the 2020 election he was also “kicked out of the house” and took revenge by fomenting a violent insurrection where Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, (mom and dad) almost got killed.
Hurt people, hurt people…that’s why they shouldn’t be given political power.
Thank you. Because I too am an agnostic -- albeit with aesthetic leanings toward Gaian paganism -- I long avoided the use of the noun "evil" in my descriptions of the Trumpite/Christonazi ethos. But finally it came to me we must rescue the word from its Judaeo-Christian imprisonment and reclaim its generic meaning as relentless toxicity to life itself, a poisonousness that exists in both relative and absolute forms. The latter -- Absolute Evil -- is the essence of the infinite moral imbecility we encounter in the likes of Ted Bundy and his political counterparts, among whom were Caligula, Elizabeth Bathory and of course the Elon/Trump messiah Hitler, with his gleefully sadistic cabal of U.S. disciples now fiercely competing for comparable recognition. Also, where my agnosticism formerly denied me the use of "diabolical" to describe our evil adversaries' cunning -- I'd formerly use "Machiavellian" as the appropriate adjective -- I have set aside that hesitation too. Though I most assuredly do not believe in the Devil, I can find no better term than "diabolical" to describe the apocalyptic skill of those whose embrace of Absolute Evil jeopardizes not just our own species' longevity, but wantonly threatens the survival of our planetary motherland as the abode of any form of life at all.
The best definition of evil I've come across is that it consists of treating a person as an "it" rather than as a "thou," dehumanizing other human beings out of either hatred, sadism, or indifference. That's what's happening now.
I watched Chuck Schumer interviewed about his collaboration with the GOP, and although I could tell that he sincerely believed what he was doing was for the best, I wanted to reach into the TV, grab him by the collar, shake him, and ask him, "Remember the Judenrat in the Warsaw Ghetto? The Jewish collaborators who helped the Nazis because they were sure that if they didn't, the Nazis would behave even more barbarically?"
My wife and I are also descended from refugees who came to America early in the 20th century, and my grandfather was a war crimes investigator for the U.S. Army in Europe in World War II. We've both studied history for decades and are angry and scared at the "It can't happen here" complacency, even now, of so many. Oh, yes it can.
I served on active duty as a Marine for twenty years to protect our Constitution against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." It's in more danger right now than at any time since the Civil War, maybe even since the War of 1812, and those "enemies foreign and domestic" have begun to blur together so much that it's hard to tell who is which.
Evil resides everywhere. In everything. In everyone.
It’s our ability to discern, learn, engage, decide, develop skills to recognize fact from fiction, right from wrong, and sometimes going with your gut and the internet has, vastly, destroyed those abilities.
Before that evil, a person would ask, find, read by finding, via the Dewey Decimal System, created in 1873, in a library, and feel they had accomplished “thought” through thinking rather than the “thoughtlessness” which is undeniably in these people. It is undeniably in a lot of people.
Religious affiliation , atheists, agnostics must go it alone on faith. Faith in what may or may not be. Faith is like hope. Neither are a plan.
People must SEE what is in front of them and if faith backs it up, personally, fantastic!
If not, denial ain’t a river in Egypt!
Here’s to mad skills to figuring out how reverse mind wars work and get to work. ✌️
The concept of evil, I think, is a human construct - a word we use to define actions that we are at a loss to describe or to understand any other way- so we apply this garbage-pail term to them. For the Trumps and the Musks and the Hitlers and maybe even your boss or egads your spouse who has a Narcissistic personality disorder, evil is not so much the intent, but the final result of the rationale of a mind that is quite literally wired differently than ours. I’m talking deep neural grooves/pathways/templates that were laid down in the very early developmental stages of childhood. Very hard-wired. Everything they do or say is a defense mechanism to protect their terminally fragile ego. That fragility, coupled with their psychopathy, Machiavellianism (the so-called Dark Triad) puts us all at risk.
Correct, Lisa. What we call "evil" are the horrendous acts of cruelty that are enacted by people who themselves were massively traumatized by insensitive caregivers in the first three years of life, didn't develop the capacity to empathize, and have no conscience regarding the immense suffering they callously create.
Evil is a most timely topic to bring to the fore. Scott Peck proposed introducing Evil as a diagnosable condition. He, like Kernberg and Fromm, saw it as a composite of malignant narcissism and additional traits including sadism, moral inversion, and indifference to suffering. Paul Levy re-introduced the Native American conceptualization of Wetiko, the nature of evil being a psychic virus that afflicts not just individuals but societies as a collective psychosis. Its remedy: heightened awareness, sacred activism, and authentic interpersonal re-connection. When studying the various thought leaders' observations and key attributes, one could imagine a pooled symptom checklist of their core and common elements. Creating such would help us name the attributes using a common vocabulary, and we'd be more grounded in highlighting these behaviors in the current authoritarian insurgency.
This podcast discusses the aka white genocide concern in South Africa
https://www.cbc.ca/listen/cbc-podcasts/209-front-burner/episode/16130733-trump-apartheid-and-the-paypal-mafia?onboarding=false
Trump ; apartheid and the PayPal Mafia
Front Burner: Trump, apartheid and the PayPal mafia?
Another interesting cbc discussion
Here is the full article I think
https://www.cbc.ca/newsinteractives/features/joshua-haldeman-elon-musk-saskatchewan-tech-utopian-conspiracist
The journalist is Geoff Leo - he is very well known
This is very interesting Jim - short video
https://www.cbc.ca/player/play/video/9.6693894
I am listening to a CBC journalist who did a deep dive into Musk - elon’s mom was born in my home town in Saskatchewan Canada ! And his Grandfather was a politician here ! And he thought the Great Depression was planned by the Communists
He wrote a book about it and only by following Jesus will man escape evil.
I’ll try to send the link -
I agree with you on this Jim. The Golden Rule is applicable outside of religious connotations - in a civic realm.
What we are seeing is absolutely evil. I tend to agree with Madelyn Taylor - the initial Soul wounds that let in the evil to these actors was in childhood - perhaps even in the womb. That's how the evil got in - they have Soul Rabies and continue to bite others to infect them as well.
Morality is an internal North Star - you KNOW right and KNOW wrong - your body tells you what it is and your heart tells you what it is. Those are true and honest brokers.
IMPO, (I can't prove this but my Cassandra-senses tell me it's correct) Elon is Lebensborn and probably Trump and Thiel and the Harlan Crowe and the Koch Brothers et al were raised with the same idea of racial purity.
I think what we're really looking at are multi-generational Nazi dynasties. Which means you don't need a vast right-wing conspiracy when you have a tribal effort.
I suggest two authors:
1. If you want o get a grip on how this evil is trying to play out - James Lee Burke. He's a novelist. His style is Southern Noir. His novels are a vehicle for having conversations about the way Good and Evil play out in the mortal world through human beings, and the timelessness and repeating cycles of that. Think Sartre, Hemingway, and Thomas Hardy. His characters often say that there are individuals who did not descend from the same family tree as the rest of humanity.
He's been talking about the rise of fascism and evil for the last 50 years. He writes from the moral perspective of an American social-justice Catholic but in a very pagan sensibility of that. He's also a professor of Literature. He wraps a crime novel around Medieval tales of chivalry and Bible tales of good and evil, which he openly says he's done. Moreover - he's probably one of the best American novelists of our time. I urge everyone to read his novels. The Dave Robicheaux series is excellent and in his later years he began the Holland series - Texas lawmen at the turn of the 20th century. All of his novels are based on his own family. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/James_Lee_Burke
2. Philip Kerr who wrote the Bernie Gunther series of historical detective thrillers. His protagonist is a cop in Berlin as fascism rises. When I first read them the impression I got was that it was part apologia, and part an attempt to understand how a man - and thus a whole society - who thought he stood for good, ended up serving evil. There are no good guys here. But it's an important blueprint of how individuals fall to this evil. Here's an interview with him.
https://jsydneyjones.wordpress.com/2010/02/12/philp-kerrs-berlin/
Finally - I think Samwise Gamgee was right "There's good in this world Mr. Frodo - and it's worth fighting for."
Kathleen, I appreciate your mentioning me but I'd like everyone to know that I don't believe "evil gets in," nor that people who lack a conscience because of chronic failures of empathy in the parents of their childhood have "soul rabies" that infects other people. Kathleen's explanation makes sense to Kathleen but it is different from mine.
One of your finest articles, among many others, Jim. You find ways to 'say it all'. Great thanks.
I first heard of fascism age 7, back in 1982, when Argentina invaded the Falklands.
I said “mam what’s dictatorship mean?”
She said “you get a door knock in the middle of the night, and you’re never seen again.”
That’s all I needed to know. The rest was obvious.
So why is it so hard to get normies to understand fascism, authoritarian, autocrat, dictator?
The Bulwark did a focus group in November and found nobody knew what these words meant.
“Turn away from evil and do good; seek peace and pursue it.”
Psalm 34:14.
“Do not be overcome by evil, but overcome evil with good.”
Romans 12:21
Jim, you are not only warning us, you are also doing good and leading us by example to do the same.
Here’s another verse:
“Perfect love casts out fear.”
1 John 4:18
Thank you Jim for your courage, your inspiration to do good, and for your love for your country and your fellow human beings.
Jim, Captain G.M. Gilbert said, after observing the Nuremberg defendants after WWII, "Evil is the absence of empathy." He was witnessing
men who had been damaged in the earliest years of life by chronic failures of empathy committed by stern and punitive caregivers. In tyrannical families they couldn't develop the capacity to care about others. People like this live forever in a solipsistic inner world where other people are experienced as "things," treated like Martin Buber's "it" rather than as fellow human beings or "thou," as others on this thread have commented.
We categorize the Hitlers of the world as sociopaths or psychopaths because they can't connect emotionally with other people, have no capacity to empathize with others, and have no conscience regarding their impact on other people. (More thoroughly described on the Hare Psychopathy Checklist) Those characterological traits permit them to commit heinous acts of sadistic cruelty that the rest of us call "evil."
Trump and Musk are both severely damaged in this regard and are therefore dangerous and unfit to make decisions that affect other people. Both men have turned their deficiencies into idealized virtues because abject callousness continues to get them what they think they want. However, no amount of power or money will ever be enough because it was tenderness and compassion that they needed as small boys...nothing ever makes up for that.
This is exactly why they must be driven out of office. THANK YOU for this post!
This is spot on. The emotional neglect and abuse they were inflicted with, opened wounds in their psyches, and in their Souls - and that's what let the evil in.
They have Soul Rabies now.
Kathleen, if you could see what happens to infants and small children who cannot elicit kindness and tenderness from their caregivers because their caregivers don’t have it to give, you’d realize how they’ve been the helpless victims of “evil” themselves.
They’ve been totally dependent on humans who have no capacity to empathize with them. Babies in these families absolutely crumble internally, their little hearts are broken and eventually the suffering is unendurable. They harden over in emotional self-defense, become apathetic, withdrawn, unresponsive, or on the other hand, become enraged and determined to avenge themselves in whatever way they can.
Trump became an incorrigible child, then when he was 13 he began collecting large knives to make himself feel powerful, if only in his fantasies. When his father discovered this cache of weapons he was kicked out of the house and sent to a military-type school. When he lost the 2020 election he was also “kicked out of the house” and took revenge by fomenting a violent insurrection where Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi, (mom and dad) almost got killed.
Hurt people, hurt people…that’s why they shouldn’t be given political power.
Thank you. Because I too am an agnostic -- albeit with aesthetic leanings toward Gaian paganism -- I long avoided the use of the noun "evil" in my descriptions of the Trumpite/Christonazi ethos. But finally it came to me we must rescue the word from its Judaeo-Christian imprisonment and reclaim its generic meaning as relentless toxicity to life itself, a poisonousness that exists in both relative and absolute forms. The latter -- Absolute Evil -- is the essence of the infinite moral imbecility we encounter in the likes of Ted Bundy and his political counterparts, among whom were Caligula, Elizabeth Bathory and of course the Elon/Trump messiah Hitler, with his gleefully sadistic cabal of U.S. disciples now fiercely competing for comparable recognition. Also, where my agnosticism formerly denied me the use of "diabolical" to describe our evil adversaries' cunning -- I'd formerly use "Machiavellian" as the appropriate adjective -- I have set aside that hesitation too. Though I most assuredly do not believe in the Devil, I can find no better term than "diabolical" to describe the apocalyptic skill of those whose embrace of Absolute Evil jeopardizes not just our own species' longevity, but wantonly threatens the survival of our planetary motherland as the abode of any form of life at all.
Absolutely correct, Loren.
P.S. I'm a Gaian pagan as well! 💙🌏💙
The best definition of evil I've come across is that it consists of treating a person as an "it" rather than as a "thou," dehumanizing other human beings out of either hatred, sadism, or indifference. That's what's happening now.
I watched Chuck Schumer interviewed about his collaboration with the GOP, and although I could tell that he sincerely believed what he was doing was for the best, I wanted to reach into the TV, grab him by the collar, shake him, and ask him, "Remember the Judenrat in the Warsaw Ghetto? The Jewish collaborators who helped the Nazis because they were sure that if they didn't, the Nazis would behave even more barbarically?"
My wife and I are also descended from refugees who came to America early in the 20th century, and my grandfather was a war crimes investigator for the U.S. Army in Europe in World War II. We've both studied history for decades and are angry and scared at the "It can't happen here" complacency, even now, of so many. Oh, yes it can.
I served on active duty as a Marine for twenty years to protect our Constitution against "all enemies, foreign and domestic." It's in more danger right now than at any time since the Civil War, maybe even since the War of 1812, and those "enemies foreign and domestic" have begun to blur together so much that it's hard to tell who is which.
Awesome piece. As awesome as evil can be, right?
Evil resides everywhere. In everything. In everyone.
It’s our ability to discern, learn, engage, decide, develop skills to recognize fact from fiction, right from wrong, and sometimes going with your gut and the internet has, vastly, destroyed those abilities.
Before that evil, a person would ask, find, read by finding, via the Dewey Decimal System, created in 1873, in a library, and feel they had accomplished “thought” through thinking rather than the “thoughtlessness” which is undeniably in these people. It is undeniably in a lot of people.
Religious affiliation , atheists, agnostics must go it alone on faith. Faith in what may or may not be. Faith is like hope. Neither are a plan.
People must SEE what is in front of them and if faith backs it up, personally, fantastic!
If not, denial ain’t a river in Egypt!
Here’s to mad skills to figuring out how reverse mind wars work and get to work. ✌️
The concept of evil, I think, is a human construct - a word we use to define actions that we are at a loss to describe or to understand any other way- so we apply this garbage-pail term to them. For the Trumps and the Musks and the Hitlers and maybe even your boss or egads your spouse who has a Narcissistic personality disorder, evil is not so much the intent, but the final result of the rationale of a mind that is quite literally wired differently than ours. I’m talking deep neural grooves/pathways/templates that were laid down in the very early developmental stages of childhood. Very hard-wired. Everything they do or say is a defense mechanism to protect their terminally fragile ego. That fragility, coupled with their psychopathy, Machiavellianism (the so-called Dark Triad) puts us all at risk.
Correct, Lisa. What we call "evil" are the horrendous acts of cruelty that are enacted by people who themselves were massively traumatized by insensitive caregivers in the first three years of life, didn't develop the capacity to empathize, and have no conscience regarding the immense suffering they callously create.