“The line between good and evil runs through the landscape of every human heart.” —Joanna Macy
The Devil’s Advocate
Stunned, you watch biology, democracy, the rule of law dissolve, a cacophony of ripples on a boundless shore.
In dismay you demand, ”Who are the evil geniuses who claim to rule humanity?”
Pitiful earthling, you dare to speak to me of evil? When everything is nuance, shade, attribution.
You proclaim, self-righteous and presumptive: “We do not consent to inhumane, inhuman, antihuman. To transhuman, AI, virtual reality. To psychopath, eugenicist, technocrat elite. Warmonger, vax profiteer, genocide engineer…”
I remind you, humans are free to be fully informed, to the extent you wish. Meanwhile you consent by default.
Evildoers, you deign to diagnose, are damaged, disabled, impure, unclean. I say beware the universal snare, in making your case for evil, its definition and punishment.
What crimes would you so define, and what crimes hold exempt? If there is shadow in your own heart, your own nature, what’s that about? Would you never kill your own kind, if it comes to that?
Our theory is, the colony is too large: let’s manage the cutback, a preemptive cull, so we’re the ones who survive. We choose who goes and who stays, and under what conditions. We are not yet transhuman, but consider ourselves superhuman—above the rest. Not archaic royalty, silly; just managers.
We are the brains of the human operation; the executive branch, taking charge. Dare to call us inhuman? We are only the best and brightest of you. Without us, you are left with chaos, anarchy, and the struggle to attain, over millennia, what we have already achieved.
If our program does not inhere in human nature—mine and yours—then whose? You think we are reptile, vestigial dinosaur or old Mars probe? You think we came from Zeta Reticuli? Draco Arcanus, you name it. Why not the farthest reaches of your imagination—a great and powerful AI in the sky, hiding behind a curtain of old Microsoft flags stitched together in orbit around a simulacrum of Old Earth.
Your problem is you ask too many questions. You want to know why we made such a fuss about Q? There, I just did it too. Ah well, “To err is human.”
I speak for All-That-Is—and I decide if that includes evil, and how much, and even how it plays out. Which I refer you to the world as we speak.
Returning to “we”—the vernacular of royal authority—I represent the cohort of blueblood, born to rule. I know it sounds like a Springsteen tune, but hey, maybe he was one of us.
Bourbons, Napoleon; Romanovs, Bolsheviks; Patriots, Globalists. What’s the difference?
Who controls the pie. Ten apes and one watermelon, you get the picture. Who’s Alpha? Which boils down to, admit it, who’s your daddy.
Now I know what you’re gonna say (I’m omniscient, remember). You’ll go, “Just divide the booty into ten equal pieces.”
And if I say, well that sounds a lot like communism, you’ll rebut: “Okay, then let’s vote. Pure democracy.”
But really, same dif. Who decides to hold the vote, count and certify? If not secret ballot, then a show of hands for the winner-take-all ticket may reveal more than you think.
What if nine went that way, chasing the dream of winning the hunger game free-for-all? Then your commie would be counted out—leaving bigger shares for the eager majority.
In the end, I/we so-called evildoers are the fruiting bodies of your vaunted Tree of Liberty. Would your egalitarian “freedom” deny me my own rights by natural law to take what I can?
In the melee of the watermelon, there is an inevitable logic: the pecking order. What could be more natural, more earthen than that hard-wired code? Survival, as it is written, of the fittest.
You say that’s a Darwin myth; that we were virgin-born, free of the lustful, rank competition of the horn and fang; and besides, old Charlie gave to Planned Parenthood.
Truth be told, who wouldn’t, when you see the end in sight (“climate crisis,” anyone?) . Gotta cut back, face the cull one way or another.
We can do this nature’s way (good luck with that) or my way. What’ll it be?
Now you might say, apes don’t build pyramids. So, we give you, on demand: Zeta Reticuli.
Either way, it’s not about being a “bad child,” right, but our “bad behavior”? In that case, let the arguments resume over policy: the agenda, the motivation, the program.
Who are the programmers? you want to know. I’ll throw you the juiciest bone: try dialing “Microsoft CEO.” You say, “Gates of Hell”? I say, “Nothing human is alien to me.”
I ask you in the name of everything civilized, liberal, and woke: Is “other” automatically evil?
How xenophobic, tribal, archaic, discriminatory, colonial, hurtful… inhumane. We’re all part of the Web of Life, remember? All God’s chillen, kind of thing. Doo-wop we’re all in this together. We are family, praise god goddess angels and elves.
As for sharing and caring, love and light, empathy and compassion, I draw the line. That’s not my department. You’ll have to look on the fantasy shelf, ChickLit, New Age. Have fun with it, why not.
Now if you’ll excuse me, I’m late for a very important date. C’mon sonny, give me back the keys to my big black car.
Fireside Chat
The following dialogue is an outtake from my novel The Last Book, in which time-traveling confidence man Felix Krull interrogates his mentor, astral queen and first woman president Sophie Vaughan.
—What is the origin of what we call evil? Some say it was programmed into us, by an alien race; but even if that is the case, where did their evil originate?
—It is in the nature of duality. As beings born into individual form, we seek our own identity, survival, enmeshed within the material matrix.
—So duality itself, of earthly existence, is evil, or an illusion?
—It is not inherently evil or false; the error comes in accepting that state of limitation as the ultimate reality. “East is East and West is West, and never the twain shall meet.” “Men are from Mars and women are from Venus.” “You’re either with us, or you’re with the terrorists.” The evil resides in conscious refusal, or denial of another’s humanity, their right to live and exercise freedom, construing these as threats to one’s own preeminence. Thus, intent to do harm: preemptive or otherwise, self-serving. In short, duality isn’t an illusion, in itself; but believing it is the only truth, is false and destructive.
—Is evil behavior excused, then, if the motivation is unconscious rather than conscious?
—Why split hairs, when the stakes are so high? Who is doing the excusing, the judging or accepting? If I am in a position of power, to regulate, mandate and punish, I take this responsibility. It is the burden of living responsibly, proactively, in a dualistic matrix: not simply to sway like flotsam between the poles of definition and dissolution, but to act concretely for the common purpose. Someone has to do it, after all. So yes: ultimately evil is only a relativistic judgment call, as a prophet once warned: “Judge not, lest ye be judged.”
—Will there always be enemies, the need to submit or defend?
—If one is entrusted to protect the material and personal interests of a population in real terms, one must bow to the forces of this manifestation. The contending factions, the competition for limited resources, the dynamics of social status and ranking; the animal urge to consume, to hoard, to opportunely exploit; the duty to defend one’s one clan and turf. It is the natural play of forces in the maze of manifestation. The plot which must be enacted once we have chosen characters to embody. At the same time, we are not bound to blindly utter lines of an outdated play, or to take on roles we don’t embrace. There is room in the cast for everyone. Myself, I choose the high ground but still part of the territory. Seeking the good of all, though some will always be nudged aside in the necessary choices. But nudged, compassionately, not rudely or without care. In respect for the conditions in play, the exigencies of the moment, and future considerations. A tall order, which is why not everyone seeks such responsibility. I embrace it, dreaming still that someday we might all be better equipped to set aside personal and egoistic agendas in favor of common interests—yet with scope for our personal idiosyncrasies to express themselves, following only the precept “Do no harm.”
—Where does that leave the rest of us, the average citizen?
—Caught in the middle of these primal opposites—infinite, divine power and coiled, mortal limitation—human society divides itself into three distinct and unequal ranks. The first, the Upper Crust, is but a tiny minority of the whole edifice, but sits on top with unyielding determination. Its motto, born and enamored of such power, says, “Let’s do it, just because.” The Middleman, occupying the lesser ranks of privilege, enjoys what wages they can wrest from honest, if downpriced labor, then dutifully spends it back into the system, proudly proclaiming, “I’m buying, because I can.” The vast Underclass, on the bottom rank which occupies the greater mass of the entire pyramid, is left to lament, “I wish I could, but I can’t.” To endure within such a system, what is required is denial: “Ignorance is bliss.” The strategy can be largely unconscious (the poor worker happily accepts the distraction of bread and circus), or genuinely aspirational (the yoga yuppie zones out, preferring silence). The Middlemen muddle through, buying small distractions and pleasures, to ease the pain of incremental awareness. Ignorance hurts when it’s peeled away slowly, like one’s own skin. Better to welcome, I say, the searing surgery of reality come shining through like death through the iron door.
—Easy for you to say, avatar of the ages. But thanks for sharing. Now how about dinner?
Personal and Collective Shadow
If my personal unconscious is a hologram, a fractal of the whole, and we take evil as a given in this known reality, then it must show up on closer inspection of my own shadow. The personal and the collective bridge through the unconscious: my shadow represents the larger forces at play. So it appears in my own life from the moment of birth. Separated from Mother and confined to solitary, then cut in a gruesome ritual branding me the slave of the corporatocracy, so I’ll be sure to do their bidding in the crescendo of abuse expanding to cover the globe, with governmental and corporate collusion in lockstep to dominate, subsume, assimilate and decimate, vilify and marginalize, bribe and coerce, imprison and assassinate, torture and disappear, mind-control and program, target with surveillance and detention, censor and defame, crush as an example to the rest.
From such abuse and separation I attempt to substitute external fulfillment; but it proves shallow, insufficient, addictive, isolating. Twenty years of TV and schooling, followed by a plethora of devices to distract and occupy. Right in front of our noses, behind the screens of our VR eyes, a barrage of manufactured news and synthetic events, the roman circus gone digital, in the vainglorious days of dying empire.
My separation anxiety, fear of abandonment, is translated to self-blame, unwarranted guilt, as the evil runs rampant in the world. Disempowered from day one, I learn dissociation, retreat, self-censure. Filled with that primal emptiness and longing, trained into a system of reinforcing endless desire, for the sake of an endless growth of an economy endlessly trashing Earth’s limited resources and genociding any appearance of competition or noncooperation, I find refuge in work, entertainment, art, and the endless pursuit of excellence, even perfection… always having to get more, to keep filling up at the endorphin pump. Chasing after the grail of self-fulfillment, while others languish, struggle, die.
The evil afoot in the world is a collective archetype with teeth because it inhabits the same world we all walk, in our shadows. The collective fear creates and feeds off our individual fears; they are of a piece. The desire for power manifests on the large stage when we cannot manage the territory of our own emotional lands and waters. The evil in the world is the shadow play of our own histories of abuse, our own egos wounded and bodies burned with pain, our need to feel meaningful and magnificent… when ultimately we are cast as victim for the victor’s quest at our expense.
Where does evil originate, then? The endless cycle of abuse certainly begins somewhere. Is it inherent in our lineage from Nature, the apes? If so, how to we reconcile “evil” with our ideals of natural law? Does it come from outside—the Anunnaki, the Archons, the Reptilians, the Greys—hijacking the human genome and breeding us into civilization on their terms only, planetary domination? But “outside” our solar system is still “inside” the natural universe. So is “natural law” meaningful only in terms the power elite might best appreciate—“Anything goes”?
The logic only takes us so far, and we’re back to “outside is inside.” The collective shadow is our own individual shadow. Does that mean we are born sinners, as the Church programmed so many to believe? I think this is just an excuse for the horrors of the world: blame it on “human nature.” That is a myth perpetrated by the masters of evil themselves, to make us all take the blame for their misdeeds. As always we are “collateral damage”: whether from drone strike or village massacre, staged “terrorist” attack or trillion-dollar bailout for the predator banks.
We are not evil inside, but we are flawed in our capacity to be at our best at all times. Being unconscious is not evil. Evil by my definition means doing conscious harm. But then squashing a mosquito, or eating a hamburger, or buying gas for the car, becomes evil once I know the harm these actions do. Is evil better confined to mass murder, or premeditated murder, or warfare, or torture, or financial exploitation, or slavery, or rape, or any kind of injustice once pointed out, but then committed solely for selfish ends? Or for false gods, or mistaken beliefs, even if one is convinced they are on the side of Good, by some faulty psychological mechanism or ratcheting effect from previous evil abuse done to one as a child? Or is it simply a product of clever manipulation of programming, fake science, selective education and sheer repetition of propaganda… all of which in their turn could fill out the expanding definition.
Is complicity in a crime a crime? Is apathy in the face of atrocity as bad as the atrocity itself? Nuremburg would suggest so. Am I tainted by the original sins of my ancestors, caught by spider webs of lineage from bomber pilot sire through various slaveowners and colonial aristocrats… to what dark origin?
We carry the darkness still, even as it comes to light piece by piece. Just as, in the world, the so-called forces of evil are acting their part within a collective uplifting of the human enterprise. Perhaps evil is nothing more than a form of karma, an accumulated legacy of past misdeeds, leaving residue that is toxic for some time yet to come, until it is all played out.
While infinitely diminishing, is one remaining iota enough to spoil the whole pot?
The task is to retrace the path of abuse, bringing it to light in collective consciousness. Evil enforces the same disempowerment that perpetuates it, seeding each person with the shadow of denial and dissociation. The archetypes paint well the heroic quest: Slay the inner dragon to claim the sovereign realm again.
We take heed of Krishna and Gandalf, Gandhi and Robert F. Kennedy Jr., Martin Luther King, Jr., Tolstoy and Thoreau, Dorothy Day and Peace Pilgrim, the many resolute ones who showed the way. To stand for the good in humanity, whatever the rest may hold. With fearless, immovable determination, to honor and fight for the heart of our life: for beauty and truth, love and joy, and the freedom that does no harm.
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image credits:
(feature) rulers: reddit
vaxx: David Dees
Palestine: Philip Giraldi
Last Book: Nowick Gray
spider: Louise Bourgeois
shadow: Nowick Gray
Gandhi: imgflip.com
heartwood: Asnake Gbermeskele
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This article first appeared in The New Agora.
