The War Within - Between Good and Evil, Bheemeswara Challa [books for 7th graders txt] 📗

those who appear normal and lead seemingly
sane lives are also potentially capable of committing similar deeds, for we are all
made up of the same bundle of passions and react to provocations and temptations
essentially the same way. And whether it is a murderer or a mahatma, it all depends
on how one of our unique attributes, the capacity to judge, evaluate, or decide
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the right from the wrong, actually works. But, as history shows and modernity
brings into sharper focus, such a capacity often can go haywire, because it is easy
to find what’s wrong, harder to find what’s right, and often the choice is not
between right and wrong, but right from right and wrong from another wrong.
All of us struggle with the dilemma how to tell correctly when everything around
is so topsy-turvy and chaotic. And so corrupted is our consciousness that often,
through whatever process, what we are inclined to choose is the wrong one.
When that ‘wrong’ becomes a simple mistake or a horrible massacre is hard to
tell, because it all happens in the ‘world within’, out of sight and without our
‘personal’ participation. We are all equally as helpless about what is happening
inside us. And ‘what is happening inside’ is nothing but, and nothing short of,
what we call in the world outside ‘war’ between two sets of forces, one that comes
under the rubric of good and the other evil, a war between two of our own ‘selfs’,
better and bitter. When the forces of good were dominant in the previous ages or
yugas, men were righteous. We now live in an age and at a time when the moral
manifest of man is at its weakest and that translates into all the terrible things we
see in the world. Men of earlier times might have been generally more virtuous
and righteous than now, but evil was always waiting in the wings. That was the
reason why Saint Paul exhorted us41 to wear a ‘breastplate of righteousness’ in
fighting evil. Evil now is not only stronger but also hydra-headed and more
embedded in everyday life.
Evil is the way to grease greed and gratify consumerism, to appease hatred
and abet injustice. It is not merely the absence of good or the mere shadow of light
or darkness. And that was foretold in Hindu scriptures. It was written that in the
present Kali Yuga, the penetration and infiltration of evil into the human world
will be complete and unchallenged. That this would be a time when men would
need a reason to be good, and none to be bad. It was written that, in this age,
people will ‘tend to be greedy, ill-behaved and merciless, and fight one another
without good reason’.42 The scriptures like Srimad Bhagavatam and Mahabharata
even detail how individuals in various relationships behave in this age, and one
must add that they are eerily accurate. The Srimad Bhagavatam says that ‘wealth
alone will be considered the sign of a man’s good birth, proper behavior and
fine qualities’, and that a ‘person’s spiritual position will be ascertained merely
according to external symbols, and on that same basis people will change from
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one spiritual order to the next’.43 In fact, it is even said that since nothing is an
accident, only those with karma appropriate to a sinful life are born in these
ghastly times. These prophecies apply so aptly to current times that one is utterly
at a loss. Does it mean we are doomed people fated to live in evil?
One way we obfuscate evil, and give ourselves a moral cover for our bad
behavior, is by depicting evil as a monstrous act or a profound immorality, like
murder or rape or genocide or mass massacre. The forensic psychiatrist Michael
Welner, who studies depraved behavior, says, “Everyday evil encompasses a
myriad of everyday actions… the possibilities are literally limitless”. Limitless
because evil is now virtually indistinguishable from our behavior. It is not merely
a twisting or corruption of good. What Hannah Arendt called banality of evil
is more true than ever before. The fact is that evil has become banal, morality
is chiaroscuro. And it is not confined to the criminal realm, and it need not
even be illegal. Even more to the point, the very wellspring of the legal system
in a society, the State, is itself a major source of what Arendt called organized
evil. And it has been for a while. Tolstoy wrote, “The truth is that the state is a
conspiracy designed not only to exploit, but above all to corrupt its citizens”. And
so is the economic system in which we live and work and die—capitalism. Social
evils like extreme poverty, extreme inequality, and exploitation are the products
of capitalism, mainly though not exclusively. And technology is exacerbating ills
like inequality through, for example, genomic technologies by propagating the
idea that some lives or traits are not as desirable as others. The key is ‘access’,
equal access to power, privilege, opportunity, creative expression; this is what
capitalism denies and subverts. Indeed, its critics say that capitalism sacrifices
humanity’s well-being for private profit. Man has always been a ‘working animal’
and work has always been viewed as more than a means to make a living. It
is what connects you to society; it is what lets you express yourself; it is what
allows you to share your time and skills with others for a common purpose; it
is what remains after you are, in Kurt Vonnegut Jr.’s phrase, ‘stone-cold dead’
(Cat’s Cradle, 1963). But capitalism has made it a matter of life and death. In
fact, in Japanese there is even a word for ‘death from overwork’: karoshi. It covers
a range of ailments from heart failure to suicide, so long as the root of their
cause is in working too hard. It is all about ambition, grit, and hustle. “Work,
for its disciples never really stops and they don’t want it to stop because it is
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the source of their rapture”.44 The issue goes beyond finding a modus operandi
between work and vacation and even beyond the impact of the ‘Universal Basic
Income’. It relates to the issue of how to use ‘time’ as a resource for spiritual
growth and common good. It has become an immediate imperative, what with
artificial intelligence and automation threatening to throw millions out of work.
Will man then become more spiritual or sensual or suicidal? How will more
time spent on inane entertainment and erotic titillation affect his mind? As has
been famously said, an idle mind indeed could be a devil’s workshop, and could
be catastrophic in societies with more guns than people. Albert Camus once
quipped that ‘idleness is fatal only to the mediocre’ (A Happy Death, 1972). But
then, what else are we, and even more would be, as we are feverishly working
towards making the machine synonymous with excellence, and we want nothing
but not doing anything in return. Indeed, so much is our ardor for the machine
that it covers up mediocrity, which itself is a spinoff of our excessive reliance on
the machine. The reality is that even more than what evil, both hot and cold,
can do, it is, in the words of David Wong, “warm, dense fog” or the “mass
of flavorless mediocrity”45 that is a greater threat to human survival. Being the
best of anything seems so pointless. Our lives and work are so intertwined that
striving for excellence might even inadvertently strengthen the ‘stupid boss’ or
the corrupt system.
To ensure that the forces of evil in the war within are subdued, we need to
bring about a fundamental change in the context of human life. In this context,
it is important to pay particular attention to a dimension of modern life that
occupies so much of our minds, and we take great pride about: love of loyalty
to one’s country, patriotism. This is necessary because it contributes in no small
measure to the dominance of evil in the world and that, in turn, strengthens the
forces of evil in the war within. We value patriotism very highly and consider it
almost a moral imperative. But many who run the State exploit that sentiment
for questionable purposes; there is talk of manufacturing a patriotic cyborg
superhuman, like the Six-Million-Dollar Man or the Bionic Woman. Way back in
1775, Samuel Johnson famously said, ‘patriotism is the last refuge of a scoundrel’.
We cannot talk for scoundrels, but even the sane and stable get their thrills in
defense of their country, right or wrong. For some time now, the decline and
impending demise of the nation-state has been speculated upon in the wake of
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globalization. Although the nation-state is not as sovereign as before, and its hold
over its subjects is not as strong, it is still the most powerful political institution
and the bedrock of global order and stability. It still evokes plenty of passions and
abundance of emotions, and impels us to do things beyond our better judgment.
It also comes in the way of cultivating a culture of planetary consciousness and
an enduring sense of global citizenship. The absence of such a ‘consciousness’
and ‘citizenship’ is a major reason for our inability to solve global problems like
climate change. When naturalist David Attenborough warns of climate-caused
collapse of civilization, our response is not to prevent such a ‘collapse’ but to strive
towards transforming humanity into what is called a ‘space-faring civilization’.
Right now, the plutocracies that run national governments are the stubborn
stumbling blocks; they believe that what is good for planetary health is downright
dangerous for their political health. They get away with it because their citizens
in their hearts believe that what their governments are doing is good for them
even if it is poisonous to the planet! It is generally accepted, even by enlightened
persons, that what a government considers to be the ‘national interest’ overrides
every moral principle, and that governments can lie, kill or torture their own
people and that is not evil, or, at the least that is a ‘necessary evil’. And that if we
are ‘law-abiding’, no evil can touch us nor can we be held morally accountable.
The unvarnished historical fact is that the worst horrors and atrocities were legal
and perpetrated by ‘patriotic’ people. And then again, the fact is that more than
genocides or mass massacres, small cruelties committed by common people—
who pride themselves as good and just, and benevolent—have done more than
most people realize to spread and enflame evil in human society. We must also
understand that we are the only species which exhibits not only malice but also
Schadenfreude, delight at other people’s misery. Researchers say that what appears
to be at the core of Schadenfreude is dehumanization, the process of perceiving
a person or social group as lacking the attributes that define what it means to be
human. The daily reality these days is that most of us experience evil in social and
subtle forms like intemperance, inequity, ill-treatment, ill-will, taking advantage,
trampling over others feelings, exploitation, and even, in the current milieu,
rabid individualism and lavish living. Interpersonal evil is still alive and kicking
but it is dwarfed by institutional evil. When such unsavory traits stay dominant
inside in the war within, however much we try, we do bad. We live with them;
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we experience them as villains or victims—often the line gets blurred—but do
not think we are evil. The way to alleviate evil is to do good proactively. The best
defense against both interpersonal and institutional evil is to embed compassion
into everyday living. The Dalai Lama says, “If we want to make others happy,
practice compassion. If you want to be happy, practice compassion”.
In Mahayana Buddhist traditions, compassion (karuna) is one of the
primary qualities that a practitioner should cultivate. This, along with wisdom, is
a necessary requirement for progressing along the Bodhisattva path. Compassion
does not shut its doors to any one, not even to a cold-blooded killer. Indeed he
needs it more because he has, in the language of the Bible, ‘sprinkled blood’.46
And we know we too need it as we too have in us what scientists call the ‘dark
core’, which is what impels men to do evil. And no one is immune or impervious.
History shows that some of our much-admired great thinkers, writers, leaders,
and role models have had skeletons in their closets, that they have been callous,
cunning, and cruel in their private lives. And exceptionally good men are also
susceptible to very ordinary weaknesses. That does not necessarily negate their
greatness or goodness; it only that they too were like any of us. It should make us
more hopeful about ourselves: we too can be one of