EH here. Go to source at the end of each part to hear the essay.
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Click here for Exit the Cuckoo's Nest's posting standards and aims.
Handfuls of Dust and Splinters of Bone
Note to readers: I wrote the bulk of this essay in 2010, and returned to it sporadically over the years since. I have spent the last week shaping it into publishable form, but I have scrupulously avoided updating it with examples from the Covid era. Why? Because I want to make it clear that despite the Orwellian dimensions of the Covid response, the phenomenon I describe far transcends that issue. “Evil” did not start in 2019.
Because this essay is around 12,000 words, I have divided it into six parts, which I will publish every two or three days. The first part has ideas I’ve written about a lot. Later sections where I go deep into Orwell’s thought will be new, especially regarding the revolutionary brotherhood. An unexpected light, a guiding light, is hidden in the depths of 1984.
Part 1: The Origin of “Evil”
Looking at the state of the planet today, it is hard to avoid the conclusion that evil is running the world. Everywhere, it seems, vast impersonal forces conspire to destroy all that is good and beautiful. Green spaces and living soil are paved over, made into parking lots and strip malls. Rain forests are cut down, fisheries exhausted, soil washed into the sea, wetlands drained, lakes polluted, the atmosphere poisoned, all to feed a money machine that serves no authentic human happiness. People disappear into secret prisons, walls and fences go up everywhere, indigenous tribes are forced off their land, coups depose leaders who would return power to the people. Wealth concentrates in fewer and fewer hands, whole nations and peoples devote their productive lives to debt service. Every night a billion people go to bed hungry. And all of this happens through the actions of human beings. We cannot blame any agency external to ourselves.
Some people believe that it is not “vast, impersonal forces” that conspire to destroy life and beauty, but rather conscious, deliberate forces: an Illuminati, a Satanic cabal. When monstrous things happen everywhere, it is natural to conclude that some monstrous force is behind it all, manipulating social institutions toward evil ends. Elsewhere I have written about the truth and shortcomings of conspiracy theories. Here I will say just this: conspiracy theories give mythic form to an authentic perception that the world is in the grip of something inimical to life.
By “mythic form” I do not mean myth in the sense of fantasy. Just because something is mythical doesn't mean it isn't also real. More than conventional science can acknowledge, reality is a social, cultural, and psychic construct. In any event, whether or not there is a conscious conspiracy of evil, certainly there is an unconscious one. How else the fiendish orchestration of the pillage of nature, culture, and spirit? Perhaps the myth of an evil Illuminati and the shadow realities that surround that myth are the psychic clothing we put upon something that is very real, though abstract: the force of evil in this world. Even if there is “in reality” no dark cabal, if the world operates as if there were, then what's the difference? Is it not then necessary to fight the forces of evil with the forces of good?
Actually, no. The whole model of good versus evil is a myth as well, a story that partakes of some of the deepest and most damaging ideologies of our civilization. I could tell you that there are no “forces of darkness” or “forces of light,” but that would be less true than this paradox: In the great cosmic battle between evil and good, evil’s most powerful weapon is the idea of a great cosmic battle between evil and good.
I am communicating with paradox to preempt any simplistic misinterpretation of what I mean to say. For instance, I’m not saying “Evil doesn’t exist.” What I am pointing to is that by using these terms, we miss something crucial to understanding them. In this essay, I will attempt to unlock this paradox using what is arguably the clearest, most direct literary study of evil ever conceived: George Orwell’s 1984.
The idea that the world is a battleground between two opposing forces, Good and Evil, draws from two historical taproots, one shallower and one deeper. The shallow one dates back only as far as agricultural civilization. The battle of good versus evil replaced earlier cosmologies in which various polar forces were essential parts of an overall perfection, an organic harmony. For pre-agricultural cosmologists, the notion that good will one day triumph over evil would be as absurd as to hope that day will triumph over night, or summer over winter, or preservation over decay. It would be as absurd as for you or I to hope that one day, protons will triumph over electrons.
Absurd though it may seem, civilization has enacted this ambition in ruinous ways. The apparent triumph of man over woman, of reason over feeling, of human over nature, of mind over matter, of quantity over quality, and of science over spirit has left a hollow husk of a world. None of the victors can truly be themselves without their counterpart; ultimately, the vilified and defeated other includes ourselves.
Concepts of good and evil arose with agriculture, when humans began to expunge the weeds and the wolves, and to spread domesticity across the land. No longer were we part of the wild; separate from us, the wild became first a concept and then an enemy. Evil became associated with chaos, good with order. Accordingly, the idea of progress arose as well. It was the destiny of humankind to become lords and masters of nature, to subdue its cruelty with kindness, its chaos with predictability and security. In the last few centuries we have dreamed of completing this conquest: leaving nature behind altogether to ascend into space; transferring consciousness into a silicon matrix; subduing the cellular processes of death to live forever.
The second, deeper taproot of the division of the world into good and evil is the social dynamics of belonging and exclusion. Those who belong, whom society accepts and validates as full human beings and full members of society, are good. Those who fail to qualify, whether or not through any fault of their own, are evil. To quality, one must abide by the customs, respect the taboos, wear the garb, profess the opinions, and display the regalia that everyone accepts as correct. Certain taboos and morals are nearly universal across human societies (murder, close-family incest), but most are specific to a given culture.
One sign of the inextricable association of good and evil with belonging and exclusion is that any external enemy, whether a hostile tribe, a force of nature, a virus, or a foreign power, will always mirror an internal enemy: the traitor, the heretic, the fifth columnist, the sympathizer, the unpatriotic, and so on. In other words, the external enemy offers a way to divide one’s own society up into the good people and the bad people.
These two taproots draw from the same poisonous aquifer. We might call it “othering.”
Today we are in the midst of a deep transformation in human consciousness as we realize that this program of control, this campaign of conquest, has reached a limit. Despite a millenia-long war against it, evil still seems to crop up everywhere, irrepressible, in ever-mutating forms. The perfection of control is as distant as ever, despite technology that reaches to the genetic, molecular, and even subatomic level. Insecurity, illness, injustice, violence, and death are no less a part of life than they were ten thousand years ago. A million conveniences—heating and air conditioning, machines to do our labor, food at the touch of a button—promise limitless comfort, yet physical and psychological torment invade our safe spaces nonetheless. We have nearly won, it seems, the war against nature, only to find ourselves on the losing side.
The division of the world into good and evil has an interior dimension as well, in which the war against nature manifests as a war against the self. Reason or spirit opposes the “baser instincts”, the remnants of our animality, our wildness. The good person is one who successfully resists selfish desires, holding him or herself to an ethical or moral code, exercising self-control, exercising “party discipline.” Any lapse in this regime of control we see as a failure of character, passing judgment upon ourselves and others, casting them into the category of evil.
Whether in its interior or exterior manifestation, the War against Evil has left ruin in its wake. Human beings have committed unspeakable acts against other people, the planet, and themselves in the name of fighting evil. What politician, what dictator, hasn't considered himself to be on the side of good?
What side, for that matter, are you on? If there is indeed a cosmic battle between good and evil, and the time has come to register your support, which side are you on? The side of the shadow government, the reptilian aliens, the military-industrial plotters, the cabal of bankers despoiling the planet? Or are you on the side of the angels and the archangels, the ascended masters, the beings of light? You don't have to be a New Ager for me to pose this question to you. I could equally ask if you are on the side of the moral, or the immoral; the ethical or the unethical; the people who get it or those who don't; the side of justice or the side of white supremacy; the side of science or the side of superstition; the side of facts and reason, or the side of ignorance; the side of the believer or the side of the infidel; the side of freedom or the side of those who hate freedom. All of these are code-words for the same psycho-social split: good or evil, us or them.
The category of evil provides targets against whom we feel at liberty to direct our hate and rage. This hate and rage comes from a very real source, for indeed the system we live in is monstrous. Our hearts tell us that a more beautiful world is possible, and occasionally we experience a glimpse of it. Imagine, after a lifetime of Doritos, you eat a tortilla in a Mexican village made from freshly ground corn, and its deliciousness is beyond anything you ever knew existed. Have you ever had such an experience? That is the difference between the world we are used to, and the world that can be. It is quite natural to respond to its loss with rage. But because we don't really know what we have lost, nor can identify who or what has taken it, we turn to any substitute available. We do not understand how or why we find ourselves in a lesser world, but “evil” absolves us from understanding, for it is an elemental characteristic, a final explanation. “Hitler was just evil. Some people are just evil.” No explanation beyond that is necessary, or even possible, and no response is valid except to destroy the evil thing.
And then there is the uncomfortable suspicion, “Maybe I am just evil too.” Have you ever had that suspicion? Religious mystics are quite familiar with it. In Christianity it informs the Calvinistic doctrine of the Total Depravity of Man, a teaching that, once you immerse yourself in it, is quite compelling, quite inescapable. In Buddhism the same doctrine takes the shape of the humiliating realization of how much of one's life came from ego—even and especially one's attempts to transcend ego!
The question that faces us today, as we begin to succumb to exhaustion in the War against Nature, the War against the Self, and what Steiner called the War of Each against All, is how to create the more beautiful world our hearts tell us is possible. How, when we face a monstrous Machine, can we create its opposite, when to fight that Machine brings into the world only more fighting? We are tired of fighting. After five thousand years of crusading for good, we have around us a ruin, cheap and ugly, bloated excess alongside crying destitution, dying languages, dying cultures, dying forests, dying seas, dwindling insects, fish, and amphibians, radioactive waste, PCBs in every living cell, concrete scabs spreading across the soft earth. No normal person wants such a world. Thus we call it abnormal, incomprehensible, abominable, and grope for that final explanation for all that is wrong: evil.
Source: Charles Eisenstein
~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Handfuls of Dust and Splinters of Bone, Part 2
Part 2: The Nature of Power
In grappling with the question of evil over the years, I turned to perhaps its most lucid literary distillation: George Orwell's 1984. I read it not so much to find the answer, but to find the purest statement of the problem. For it provides no answer: The rebellion of Winston and his lover Julia against the Party—an all-encompassing, all-powerful, totalizing evil—is, after all, a failed rebellion. Orwell depicts it not only as a failed rebellion but as a doomed rebellion, an impossible rebellion. No hope leaks from this book’s watertight exposition of despair.
 LISTEN NOW · 12:15 |
Nineteen Eighty-four carries an extraordinary emotional impact. It comes in part from its high literary quality, from its unsettling opening line (“It was a bright cold day in April, and the clocks were striking thirteen”) to its devastating final sentence (“He loved Big Brother.”) Orwell is a consummate stylist. As if looking through a spotless windowpane, when I read 1984 I forget that I’m reading. I am in its world.
Normally people take 1984 as prophetic political warning, but it also works as a psychological allegory. On the one hand, the Party is the fictional embodiment of that impersonal collocation of forces, institutions, and ideologies that holds the world in thrall. Orwell gives form to what in the real world has no form: the evil cabal, a conspiracy so subtle that even the highest elites are its puppets. (Another paradox – a conspiracy with no conspirators; puppets with no puppet-masters.) On the other hand, the Party is an interior presence in the psyche. I can feel it even now. The Thought Police have me under surveillance, monitoring my every move, judging, punishing, controlling, holding me to a merciless standard of orthodoxy.
Big Brother is the ever-watchful internal authority that surveys every thought, word, and deed. We crave his approval. Adulation of Big Brother corresponds to the gratifying feeling of being a good boy. He is the personification of Good. "Big Brother is watching," say the slogans in 1984. Big Brother, the internalized eye of civilization, is watching you, the human being, all the time. Through his agents the Thought Police, he constantly monitors everything you think, say, and do.
Though internalized, the watchful eye is of course not only internal. The increasingly omnipresent eye of Big Tech surveillance is but the most obviously Orwellian expression of it. Big Brother is also an emergent social phenomenon. The social pressure that maintains norms, which in a healthy society embody compassion and responsibility for life, is crucial for the administration of totalitarianism. People become agents of the state, reporting on each other, censoring themselves, and by their obedience creating an appearance of universal loyalty even if, privately, they may wish to rebel.
To be good is to be accepted in the in-group; it is to conform to the group’s norms and maintain its harmony. Big Brother, then, is what good becomes with the capture and totalization of society’s normative impulse. In other words, Orwell is showing us that the ultimate icon of Good is actually the ultimate fabrication of Evil. Internally, this refers to the internal judge, rewarding and punishing, controlling and improving, motivating through psychological threats and rewards, all in the name of our own good.
To better understand the process by which good becomes evil, consider for a moment the two goals of the Party. There is the public goal, and the real goal. They will be familiar to many who seek social change or any other idealized good: They are (1) the greater good, and (2) power. That each of these goals is inimical to the other is not readily apparent. On the face of it, power is fine if it is used for the good of others, right? Censorship if fine if we only censor hate speech and misinformation. Military power is fine if it is used to protect the innocent. Bombing is fine if it is a “humanitarian bombing.” Concentration camps are fine if they protect society from degenerate elements. Torture is fine if it uncovers terrorists or witches who would cause greater harm… Uh oh.
The tendency to do evil in the name of good hints at a problem. The evil that appears to us so insane, the hunger for power that seems so monstrous and which invites the elemental label “evil” to begin with, is actually very rational. It is the inevitable conclusion of the crusade for good and against evil. Good, as an absolute concept, justifies any measure to achieve it. Evil, as an absolute concept, justifies any measure to destroy it. If you are on the side of Good, then the more power you have, the better. Power therefore becomes an end in itself. To see where this comes from and where it leads, and to illuminate an alternative to fighting evil, let us consider what Orwell had to say about power.
What is power? Winston's interrogator O'Brien answers that question with another: "How does one man assert his power over another, Winston?" Winston replies, "By making him suffer." Later, O'Brien elaborates, offering, in this famous passage, an extraordinarily pure statement of evil:
Progress in our world will be progress toward more pain.... We will cut the links between child and parent, and between man and man, and between man and woman.... There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the Party. There will be no love, except the love of Big Brother. There will be no laughter, except the laugh of triumph over a defeated enemy. There will be no art, no literature, no science.... There will be no distinction between beauty and ugliness. There will be no curiosity, no enjoyment of the process of life.... You are beginning, I can see, to realize what that world will be like. But in the end you will do more than understand it. You will accept it, welcome it, become part of it.
What usually escapes commentators is that the source of this seemingly mad vision is purely rational. It is not a senseless evil. The logic is that power must have no limit when it is in the hands of us. And recall the deep taproot of the concepts of good and evil: Us is good. Them is evil. Therefore, we must, regrettably, turn even art, even sex, even science toward the ends of power. As Mussolini put it, “Everything in the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.”
Power is the power to make another suffer. This is an unavoidable corollary to the story-of-self that underlies our civilization: the discrete and separate self in an objective universe. In that universe, for that self, more for me is less for you, by definition. By that axiom, to serve the common good it is necessary to suppress the individual, for the individual is a maximizer of self-interest at the likely expense of everyone else. For the common good, the individual must suffer. Therefore, the power to make someone suffer is also the power to do good. What we call evil rests upon the deep axiom I mentioned before: the Total Depravity of Man, the lordship of the ego.
Let me state the logic in another way. In a world of competing separate selves seeking to maximize rational self-interest, some authority is needed to suppress this interest-seeking for the sake of the common good. The discipline it imposes, whether “party discipline” as in the former communist countries, or religious or ethical discipline, or the discipline of the marketplace in capitalism, is from the individual's point of view a kind of suffering. People must be made to do what they don't want to do, and to refrain from doing what they do want to do. Internalized, it is a war against the self, a fight against desire or pleasure, a battle of biology against will.
 |
The goal of the internalized Party is therefore the same as that of the external: to make you suffer. Paradoxically, the justification for this goal is your own well-being. We suffer for our own good, just as the Party makes people suffer for the greater good. At least, that is the initial motive or the initial justification. At the beginning, self-control or self-discipline is a means to an end; for example, to lose weight or to finish a book by the deadline or to accomplish a political revolution. Eventually, though, because our deep ideologies have made it into a universal means, the agenda of power takes on a life of its own, and power becomes an end. Self-control becomes the ultimate personal virtue, just as party loyalty becomes the ultimate political virtue, and the shared ideal that inspired the party to begin with takes second place. Eventually, it becomes lip service, a set of empty slogans, and then withers away entirely.
This is how good, decent citizens can carry out evil activities as members of corrupt organizations. Again, the “good” are the ones who belong, who are loyal to the group, who abide by its norms and taboos. There will be no loyalty, except loyalty to the Party. Organizations value and reward team players. That is why, for example, journalists who participated in the Iraqi weapons of mass destruction hoax were promoted while those who called it out were fired, or at least took an an aura of disrepute. One would think it would be the other way around. But those who went along with the delusion were team players.
Today around the world, authorities impose repressive, thoroughly anti-democratic measures in order to protect democracy. One can almost read the thoughts of the architects of the surveillance state: “These tools would be dangerous if they fell into the wrong hands, but luckily it is we, the moral, the educated, the scientific, the rational, who are in charge.”As long as they believe that, there is no limit to how far down the Orwellian path they can travel.
Orwell explains that the goal of power is power: "Power is God," says O'Brien. Past totalitarians were hypocrites, he says, too weak to face this truth. So they persuaded themselves that they were only seizing power temporarily, “until such a time as all men were free and equal,” while in reality they wanted power for its own sake. The inner circle of the Party, he says, has dispensed with this illusion. They are fully conscious of wanting power for power's sake, and mean by this the power to inflict unlimited suffering on others. Yet thanks to doublethink, they are able to do this while sincerely believing that they work for the greater good.
Source: Charles Eisenstein
No comments:
Post a Comment