Remember the Electric Light Orchestra? I couldn’t resist. But I really want to say something about an e”¦evil woman. Actually, not really. I just wanted an excuse to say e..evil woman. Okay, I’ve said it, again. Now I’ve got it out of my system. I’ll stop with that.
But I do want to talk about evil. Evil’s such a dicey word. Evil? What is evil? What really makes someone evil? Do evil people exist?
That is, can someone even be evil: Are people evil, or just their behaviors?
I remember a friend of mine, a close friend, years ago, once called me an “evil m*therf*cker,” and I laughed. Did I laugh because I’m evil, thereby validating his accusation? Or did I laugh because I was secure enough to know I’m not?
By the way, what prompted his accusation was a really cruel, funny practical joke I played on him. I’m afraid he found it much more cruel than funny, whereas I found it much funnier than cruel. (Maybe some other time I’ll describe the joke?)
Speaking of cruel, is there a relationship between evil and cruelty? Are they the same thing? When you’re being cruel, or committing a cruel act, are you being evil? Is the cruelty itself evil?
If you don’t have a headache by now, I do. But that’s okay”¦I’ll even make it worse by posing some more light questions, like: Are exploiters, by definition, evil? Is exploitation always evil? Or, must acts of exploitation reach a certain threshhold of heinousness to constitute evil?
And what about our favorite friends, the sociopaths? Are sociopaths, by definition, evil? Sometimes? Always?
And then, of course, the really ultimate question: Do you really think I’m going to answer these questions?
Do you really think I’m crazy, and grandiose, enough, to tackle these questions?
Maybe I am”¦but I can assure you, not adequately. Still, I will “man up” and offer some “takes” on these heady matters, if for no other purpose than to drum-up some good discussion!
I fully expect, incidentally, your feedback to change my mind on, and views of, these questions many times, exposing (you can be sure) the fickleness of my positions.
But, for the moment, here are my short answers:
I believe people can be evil, not just do evil; in other words, I believe some people are evil.
I believe that evil is always cruel, but that cruelty is not always evil.
I believe that evil is always exploitative, but that exploitation is not always evil.
I believe that evil is always destructive, but that destructiveness is not always evil.
Consistent with these views, I believe that some exploiters and, more specifically, some sociopaths—but not all—are evil.
Now, for my personal working definition of evil, in all its glaring limitations: Evil, as I see it, is the lust to express cruelty towards, and/or destructiveness of, others.
There it is. Note the boldfaced “lust to express;” I regard the “lust” as a central element of evil.
Let me dive right into an elaboration of some of my positions.
Evil is always cruel, but cruelty is not always evil. My view here is that evil, fortunately, is less commonplace than cruelty. Cruelty, however, is tragically commonplace.
Most of us are capable of cruelty, but most of us are not evil. This isn’t to diminish the impact of cruelty. In fact, because cruelty is so commonplace and destructive, it is arguably the worst part of human nature.
But not all cruelty is lust-driven. When cruelty is lust-driven, it is evil. When not, it is something less than evil—although I stress that even this debatable point doesn’t lessen cruelty’s impact one iota.
I think the same applies to “exploitation—”that is, exploitation is cruel, always, but not always evil. Valid or not, this assertion isn’t meant to minimize the potentially traumatic impact of exploitation.
Let me give a relatively benign example: A slick colleague convinces you to lend him $150 cash, promising to pay you back in a couple days. The next day, he’s gone. Has left the job. Quit. Never gave notice. The boss is bewildered, and you are too. You never hear from him again. You knew him well enough (so you thought) to lend him the money, but not, as it turns out, as well as you thought. The money probably bought his Amtrak ticket to Seattle.
You were fleeced. He knew he’d be gone, and he had no intention of honoring his debt. To him, you weren’t so much a nice guy whose generosity he appreciated, as much as, ultimately, a sucker. You were taken. He’s a sociopath.
But he needed the money, and put it to practical use. The problem is, he stole it from you. But he needed the money, and money is money, however he can get his hands on it. Not all sociopaths think like this, but some do.
This sociopath was thinking somewhat pragmatically; he needed the money and schemed to get it. But here’s the point: He didn’t lust for your suffering as much as he lusted for your money. Basically, he was greedy and sociopathically conniving, and so he took what he wanted, not per se to inflict pain or harm on you, but because he wanted it.
In this instance, he is exploitative, in my view, but not evil.
Is he cruel? Not in this example. I define cruel as having an intention to inflict harm or pain on someone. This could be mental, or physical pain. It is arguably cruel, for instance, to dismiss someone contemptuously, and yet it is not necessarily cruel, but is definitely exploitative, to con someone out of $150.
A former client of mine, around 1994, shot-up a bunch of kids at a swimming pool with a semi-automatic weapon. (For my own pathetic ego, I was grateful he waited until about two years after I last saw him.) He’d been dually diagnosed as a psychopath and paranoid schizophrenic. Was he evil? I don’t think so, although I appreciate that those kids, and their families, might have thought so.
In any case, I think he was more paranoid than evil, although he was certainly cruel. I also think that he believed that those kids were evil.
So, in this case, which is not hypothetical, I’d suggest that my ex-client was cruel, but not necessarily evil, or for that matter, even exploitative.
How about a Bernie Madoff? Is Bernie Madoff evil? I don’t think so. Yet he may very well be a sociopath and most certainly was heinously exploitative. Was he cruel? I don’t think so, again. I don’t think it was Madoff’s intention to inflict suffering on anyone. That wasn’t his primary motive to do what he did, despite the devastating impact of his greed and deception.
Regarding cruelty: for me, to be cruel implies, and requires, an intention to cruelty; it is a separate issue whether the consequences of your actions are experienced as cruel. I suspect that Madoff’s victims will describe him as cruel, if only for his indifference. However, I don’t see, from the little that is known about this case, that “cruelty” drove Madoff’s exploitation.
Now let’s tackle some big fish: How about Saddam Hussein and Adolph Hitler?
Hussein, in my view, was both cruel and exploitative, but I’m not sure I’d call him evil. Hussein’s lust was principally for power, less principally (one might argue) evil-driven. His cruelty was more a means to an end—the “end” being the consolidation and preservation of his power, by whatever ruthless means necessary. Was he a sociopath? Very possibly.
Hitler, I think, was cruel, exploitative, and evil. Hitler’s lust transcended his obsession with power; his was a lust to exterminate the Jews and other “non-desirables.” In other words, apart from his pathological lust for power, he also had a lust for cruelty and destruction. The latter meets the criteria of evil.
What do you think? Whatever it is, I’m betting it’ll change my mind?
(This article is copyrighted (c) 2009 by Steve Becker, LCSW.)
Evil.
If you use that word outside of a joke, people think you’re nuts.
I’m a doodler. I sit in meetings and listen intently to everyone, doodling my heart out, and taking a few notes. Sad to say, my notes don’t make much sense to anyone but me. Any how, about Evil. About three years ago I was sitting in on a meeting to discuss the academic future of a 17 year old boy. His mother was there, the counselors, his teachers and a group of administrators. This was the third meeting. The meetings all seemed to end unproductively. “Why?” I l wondered. I scanned their faces, looked at their posture, their gestures, anything that could give me a hint. “Why could no one agree? Why was there so much hostility? Why were the antagonists so firmly entrenched in their positions? Why did I suspect there was deception on all sides?” It was one of those rare instances in life when I contemplated the presence of evil. Not educating the boy was evil. Deliberately letting him slip through the cracks, until all statutes relieved the school of the duty to educate, was evil. My pencil followed my thoughts in the margin of my notebook. “Evil?” I wrote. I listened and I watched, trying to determine the locus. “Who?” I wondered. “Why?”
All that was required was that the parties agree on a reasonable plan. It didn’t have to be a perfect plan, just a cobbled together 80% solution would have been fine. They would not agree. I say “would not”, because the older I get the more reluctant I am to say “could not”. People use “could not” too much. It’s usually a lie. Where lies absolve people of personal responsibility, evil is generally present. The people in that room used “could not” and “can not” a lot. Never once were they being truthful. Where was the locus of the evil? In a person, the people or the situation? I dunno. There were a lot of lies though. Each of them were told in order to avoid taking responsibility.
My husband is a well educated, intelligent professional. He doesn’t ascribe to any superstitions. It surprised me greatly last week when he mourned his decision to avoid a particular person. “She doesn’t know she’s evil.” He stated flatly. There was no heat in his remark, and little grief. It was just an observation. She manipulated, she conned, she stole, she milked her mother dry financially and emotionally, she attacked, she belittled, she tore the family apart with her sly abuse, and she was always ready with an absolutely airtight, articulate justification for her behaviors and positions. She was 45. He’d long ago run out of excuses for her, and could no longer deny the problem.
In all her interactions with people, there were always rationales for why she “could not” or “should not” cooperate, respect boundaries, earn her way, do her part or treat others kindly. If she’d admitted, just to herself, that the truth was “will not” even once, she might not be evil.
So Dr. Peck called them “The People of the Lie”. I think he’s onto something here. Whether it’s group evil or individual evil, it’s the subtle lies that make people comfortable with doing the wrong thing. The lies are the spoonful of sugar that helps the poison go down.
Wonderful, thought provoking article.
I agree with most of it…however, *(you knew there would be THAT “however”) Saddam, I think IS EVIL. Yes, he was after power, control, etc. but he knowingly ordered the torture of his enemies. If he had ONLY ordered them killed, I might have gone along with your assertion that he was cruel but not necessarily EVIL.
His sons’ visciousness and cruelty, seeming to lust after hurting people, underscores to me the genetic link between the psychopathic father and his sons, as well as their sense of entitlement and lust for inflicting pain for joy.
As my analogy of Satan, as the first psychopath, in the garden of Eden showed, lying to bring down Eve for no real benefit of his own, but just to see her downfall, and to lust after her punishment, shows that EVIL is the enjoyment of the pain of another, even without “gain” on your own part.
I think “evil” is like “pornography”–we can’t define it necessarily, but we KNOW IT WHEN WE SEE IT. I also think that there are “levels” of the EFFECTS of evil but not to the evil itself. Is it more “evil” to kill six million people than to kill one? I don’t think so, but the “level” of the events caused by evil has just risen to the level that the evil person is capable of without being stopped.
I had a quarrel yesterday with a friend of long standing, and he broke a promise to me, and acted inappropriately when I confronted him about it….but was he “evil?” Of course not. It didn’t even FEEL like a quarrel with an EVIL PERSON, because even though he used some of the SAME “verbal defense mechanisims” (projection, blame placing, lack of acknowledgement of his breaking the promise, lack of remorse, justification, etc) that a psychopath (an evil person) would use, his intentions were not the same as the psychopath’s.
It was an unfortunate quarrel, and may have ended a relationship of several decades, but even the “feel” of the quarrel is not the same as one with a psychopath, because I don’t feel like I would have felt if I had been BETRAYED for “fun and games.” I was, and am, disappointed that my friend would break a promise to me. In no way do I feel BETRAYED or victimized, though. I simply set a boundary, which at this point he has responded to poorly, and when I set the boundary I was aware that the relationship might be at risk—it always is if you set a boundary and enforce it. I’m at a point now where I can take that risk.
Thanks, Steve, for bringing up this interesting question. I’ve thought about it a lot, since I’ve been on LoveFraud, because it’s a term that comes up here. So I’m going to throw in my two cents.
I was very impressed with Dante’s “Inferno,” in which the levels of hell were assigned to people who had lost sight of their relationship with God, because they’d become more involved in one of the seven deadly sins. That is, they’d made something more important than God. An early definition of addiction.
Likewise, having grown up Catholic, I had a vivid idea of the devil, as “someone” who showed up to offer us our fondest desires in exchange for our souls. Or just tempted us with things we weren’t supposed to do, according to the rather long and detailed list of Catholic proscriptions, and therefore seduced us into sin. Something we’d have to pay for later. Burning for a while in purgatory, if it was minor, or forever in hell, if it was a big deal.
Now, the devil for sure was the embodiment of “evil.” And hell was what happened as the result of evil, or maybe the temporary suffering of purgatory. As a kid, I was taught this stuff by rote, but when I grew up and started to study spiritual disciplines of all kinds, I made some effort to integrate these ideas into common threads.
And with evil, this is what I came up with. First, that evil is what separate us from our own spiritual centers, which in my personal Buddhist-ish cosmology, is the God-spark that we all have at our centers, the source of our life energy and the equivalent of the Catholic soul.
So for me, that’s a pretty broad range of stuff. All the internal drama that I discuss as post-traumatic emotions keep me from accessing my spiritual core. All the distracting desires for material possessions or power that may cause me to operate in ways that are not consistent with the “good” values that come from my spiritual core are evil, in that sense. And likewise, all the things from the outside world that cause me trauma or that persuade me that something is more important than the influence of my spiritual core are evil.
This is where it starts to apply to our situations here at LoveFraud. Because sociopaths do both. They traumatize us and therefore create a lot of emotional drama that distracts us from being the best we can be. And they also seduce us into beliefs and actions that, in my mind, are basically addictive responses to ease the pain of pre-existing old drama that keeps us from direct access to our spiritual core, and thus they layer the problems and challenges they create on ones that we were already dealing with. And magnify our challenges in terms of staying in touch with our best selves.
And so, for us, they are evil. Does this mean they are evil intrinsically? That is, could we judge them as evil, if their actions had nothing to do with us?
Well, “my” sociopath had an interesting take on this. Someone had once related him to the “terrible angels” described in Rilke’s poems in the “Duino Elegies.” And he thought that it matched his effect on people’s lives. People who got involved with him found him to be a huge force on their lives. A kind of massive psychic challenge to survive. In Rilke’s poems, he talks about the visitation of a terrible angel as something we may or may not survive, and if we survive we are changed. It is a visitation from something with power that is destructive or transformational. In an ironic take on that, my ex has a phrase in one of his online profiles about being more fun than a multi-car collision but easier to go to lunch with.
So where does this leave us in terms of whether he is evil or not? In his wake, he’s left breakdowns and shattered lives. But I am using the experience to transform myself (after nearly losing myself to suicide). If evil is about what it creates, what do we make of this?
I keep coming back to the personal. He was evil for some people. He was not evil for me. He forced me to do something I wouldn’t have done otherwise, but in retrospect I realize that it was what I wanted, not in the process but in the outcome. And I imagine him moving forward in the world and creating the same challenge for other people. I used to worry about them. I don’t anymore. People who get involved with him have their own reasons, as I did.
What he is, is a walking challenge to our belief structures. A seductive opportunity to get something we think we want, based on what we’ve been taught about love and the internal dramas we are trying to relieve, and then to learn what the cost of it is. Yes, we can have the perfect love if we are willing to be the perfect slave, to give ourselves away at every level to maintain the illusion of security or pay heavily for every shred of external validation we get. He is an extreme case in every way. Exactly what we want. At a cost that can literally come down to our lives. But in the end, this struggle is not between him and us, but between us and us. How much are we willing to pay for an illusion? How willing are we to make our happiness, our effectiveness in our lives, our connection with our true selves, all of it dependent on someone else’s rules and actions?
The primary relationship in my life, and I believe this is true for everyone, whether or not they acknowledge it, is with my spiritual core. I want that line open. I believe I’m dealing with something that is part of me, but that is also part of something larger than me. The better I can keep my conscious mind connected with that “source,” the better my relationship is with myself and everything else.
If he was evil, the thing that made me involve myself with him was the “evil” in me, unfinished business that was keeping me from being whole and open to my best self.
I realize this may not be a popular perspective with everyone, especially those of us who feel victimized by outside forces. It would not have been popular with me through most of my life, because I felt victimized and warped by the damage of my history. Feeling victimized, I think, is a stage of healing. It’s an important stage, but ultimately it ends, when we realize that the “outside force” is not us, and that something happened to us, but it was not us. We are something else, something that experiences things and learns from our experiences, but our fundamental strength and goodness of character doesn’t change.
And then, we ultimately get past it. We let go of what we lost, and discover what is beyond it.
In letting go, we are ending a type of addiction, a requirement that life be what we want it to be or we will be miserable. We get out of Dante’s hell, and reconnect with a larger world of potentials. More options for joy, for action, for creating our lives and our impact on the world. “Evil” challenges us to do that. In offering us seduction, it is also threatening us with loss. The end of the story is always loss, and our struggle with it. But when we stop struggling and give up, we discover we have released an obstacle to our happiness and our full potential.
In the end, there are two responses that I see to evil. One is to get involved and learn what we can do without. The other is, when we get to it, laughter as we pass on it, saying this is not my drama, I’ve already done this one. And bizarre as that may seem to the people here who are still engaged in suffering through their recovery, it makes sense if you understand that the challenge is transformational, and that’s what we’re doing here.
And if all of that sounds irrelevant to things like Saddam, Hitler and Madoff, I would disagree. I think those people exist and acquire power over other people because those other people agree to give away their power in response to unprocessed traumas in their own psyches. I think that this is cultural as well as personal. And I think that part of what we are doing here — and this is not the only place that it’s happening — is creating a new generation of human beings who are taking back our power, clearing our own internal dramas and getting ready to exert a new kind influence on the world, based on the compassion we gain as whole human beings.
That, at least, is my belief and the dream that fuels my work.
STEVE – Im only on your opening paragraph…so no evil comment from me yet — but maybe forthcoming — I have to pick myself up off the floor – because i just LEARNED its E-EVIL WOMAN…. NOT MIDEVIL WOMAN!! Think I was 10 or 11 when it was released… and it was always MIDEVIL WOMAN to me!!!!!!!!!!ROTFLMAO —
I think here goog ol Catholic theology serves well..
Christian philosophy has, like the Hebrew, uniformly attributed moral and physical evil to the action of created free will. Man has himself brought about the evil from which he suffers by transgressing the law of God, on obedience to which his happiness depended. (Catholic New Advent Encyclopedia)
Good to see the origins of psychopathy discussed here.
I blog on evil because it so rarely addressed.
http://holywatersalt.blogspot.com/
I should add that laughter doesn’t mean that we don’t get involved at some level. In thinking about the Tibetan situation, I think this is an example of holding on to how we want it to come out. A direct confrontation with the Chinese is not going to accomplish anything. But the campaign to save Tibet has been characterized by this focus on how we want it to come out.
The best possible outcome is always a moving target. We can never rebuild the monasteries to be what they were. But we can save the cultural heritage embodied in the Tibetan Buddhist practice. When we decide what is important, what is valuable, and most of all how we want it to come out as best we can see it right now, we have the internal mindset and tools to attack the problem.
Which is what is happening today. Bad publicity. Political sanctions. Refuge for communities of Tibetans in other countries. Support of the continuance of these traditions in every way possible.
Is the Chinese intention “evil.” Who knows? Tibet is rich in natural resources, which is why China wants to incorporate it. From at least one perspective, the resources of Tibet provides China with an opportunity to improve the lives of an entire nation of people. A “greater good.” And from their philosophic perspective, the spiritual and social hierarchies of the Tibetan culture do not equate with the social and economic culture their communist theories promote (with no comment here on the actual fidelity of the Chinese government to those theories or their success in China or anywhere else).
But whether or not the Chinese intention is evil, the results are evil for the Tibetan culture. If we care about that, if we have compassion for the people who are being traumatized by change and feel that the change is wrong-headed, we judge this as evil for them and for us.
As always, this is about our beliefs, our values, and how they interact with the circumstances. I personally want the Tibetan spiritual culture and the social culture that goes with it to survive. The values of that culture are valuable to me, and I want them in my world. So I support work to influence the Chinese to stop meddling in their culture.
I also recognize that the Tibetan collaborators who have aligned themselves with the Chinese have their own issues. Are they sociopaths because they go against me, or against my objectives. It doesn’t matter. We are working toward different ends. They might as well be sociopaths. I could call them that. I could call them evil. They are, as far as their impact on how I want it to come out.
But this comes down to where we stand, what we want, our values, what we’re willing to take action on.
Calling people names — whether it’s evil or sociopath — is also part of the healing process. It’s when we’re in that stage where we’re saying this is not me, this is not about me, but something else, something outside of me. It’s an important part of become whole and empowered.
Eventually, the names don’t matter. What matters is what we believe in and what we do.
Steve – some definitions, and my own thoughts….
Evil is the forces/behaviors that are the opposite or enemy of good. Evil generally seeks own benefit at the expense of others and is based on general malevolence… any particular individual which may follow these forces or behaviors is evil in my book. Traits of evil .. cruelty, exploitative, intending to harm; malevolent; morally corrupt….
Evil is the actively and consciously denied right to appeal a decision on the part of another person that is unbearable for you as its victim.
Evil was never ever invented. It only spreads through contagion.
“Unappealability“ is a trait that can only be exhibited by persons who have suffered evil themselves and who consciously or subconsciously want to perpetuate it…
“Most of us are capable of cruelty, but most of us are not evil.” Steve…
My view is
Most of us are capable of evil, but most of choose not to exhibit any of the traits of Evil…..being cruel, exploitative, morally corrupt, destructiveness toward others….etc.
It doesnt matter the motive behind CHOOSING TO BE EVIL – OR what drove the choice… if it exploits someone in anyway – being evil is a choice – whether or not it knowingly or unknowingly causes harm to others through gain/pain/mental illness. Whether or not the person making the choice to be Evil…took the time to take note of the consequence – beyond the choice – is not relevent to me. Evil comes to be through the choice – choice to be cruel, destructive, exploitative, corrupt ,neglectful etc.
There is EVIL and all the traits…..
There is Good and all the traits…
There is Mental Illness and all the traits… etc…
REALLY WONDERFUL THOUGHT PROVOKING QUESTIONS…
Kathy,
You bring out a good point, which Dr. Viktor Frankl did in his book, “Man’s Search for Meaning” after his years-long stay in the Nazi prison camp, we CAN take something that is “evil” (by whatever name you want to call it) and FIND MEANING in it and use it to strengthen our souls, OR, we can become perpetual “victims” by feeling like we have been abused by some force outside our control (which actually may be true) but how we USE and PERCEIVE that event, rather than what the purpose of the event, or even how destructive it was/is, can still be a “benefit” to us in the long run, in our own spiritual growth.
I can’t always control what happens to me, but I CAN control my reaction to it, my thinking about the event, and how it effects my thinking, my meaning, my being. I think the most hurtful part of evil acts is when we perceive them as intentional from people we love/d and trust/ed. Random acts of evil (a mugging for example) that is not “personal” or from a “person we love” may break your bones and anger you, but not “devestate” you like being slapped by someone you love.
I think, like Dr. Frankl, finding MEANING out of the chaos and pain, is the core to recovery, and learning about ourselves, and using that painfully gotten knowledge to make us better individuals, more caring.
The greater (supposed) GOOD does not justify evil means. Evil negates the good.
I also think that we are not only capable of evil, but do it all the time, if we regard evil (as I do) as creating challenges for other people.
I eat meat. Due to the current system of providing meat, I don’t have to go through the process of killing the animal and it’s easy enough to forget about it. But I don’t assume the that animal volunteered to be my dinner. And I know that, by extension, I am its killer.
I win contracts against other providers of the same services. When I win, they lose. And what that means to them is significant. It could mean the difference between employment and being let go for someone who works for them. And all the drama in that person’s life that creates. I would say that I’m creating evil in this situation, and I do it despite my knowledge of what might happen. The business environment is competitive, and I live with the fact that there are losers for every winner.
I say no to all kinds of things that would significantly help other people. I manage my resources according to my own objectives and limitations. In some of these cases, those people invest a lot of time and energy, and sometimes money, in convincing me to say yes. So I am saying no, after they have reduced their resources to get me to say yes. I’ve cost them something, and for them that is an evil.
I could go on and on, but the net of all this is that every time we use our power to do one thing, we are probably also creating some kind of negative result somewhere else. If I get this book published, it will be at the cost of someone else’s book that was bumped off the publisher’s list this year. If I drive my car to the grocery store, I am taking that much weartime off the road. If I spray my roses, I am interrupting the life cycle of the Japanese beetles. If I choose to buy winter fruit from Chile, I am contributing to global warming.
I’ve recommended the book “Thick Face Black Heart” here before. It’s about ruthlessness, and the necessary valuations we make of the cost of getting what we want. Forward movement costs something. We are not expected by God or any other rule to stop acting in our lives. But it is a good thing to consider whether the costs are worth the outcome. Not just in practical terms, but in ethical ones.
This is one of the reasons we are so offended by sociopaths. Their outcomes are private, selfish, and their costs are not private. What they gain comes out of other lives. It is essentially a one-way transfer of resources that we would never agree to, if we understood that it was not a two-way thing. They are thieves in that sense. And their ruthless is the lowest kind, accepting cost on other people’s lives for a good that doesn’t go beyond their own selfish gain.
When we act, and consider the costs or “evil” associated with our actions, we make our own decisions about whether the cost is worth the gain. If we organize a grass roots action against a real estate development, we balance the gains offered by the development in jobs and housing against the preservation of a beautiful place. We decide that the beauty of our environment is more important, and we bear the burden of something lost by our actions to pursue an outcome that serves the “greater good.” We have to judge our own intentions and ethics in this, and decide whether our “ruthlessness” is justified.
This is the work of a consciously lived existence. There are no easy answers here. The more empowered we become to act, the more questions we face about what is the right thing to do. In my life, until now, the choices I’ve made have been to be a facilitator. I help people negotiate their competing wants, or I help individuals or companies to articulate their wants betters. Because I have been completely unable to come to decisions about actions for myself.
Since the sociopath, that has changed. Recovery has meant, for me, learning more about what I want. I’m clearer now about where I want to take action and why. I’m also clearer about my values and ethics, which makes it easier for me to decide what costs are worth the outcomes. As well as making me more resourceful about finding strategies with lower costs.
But it doesn’t change my knowledge that any action has its costs. And that the simplest elements of physical survival have their impact on the environment. Before the sociopath, I had this knowledge, but it was just another piece of the general overload I lived with, something I couldn’t afford to give attention to. Now I can. Now I can give attention to everything at least for a moment, while I decide where I want to exert effort and what creates the most good.
In practical terms, it’s probably not a lot different than what I was doing before. But inside me, it’s hugely different. Because I’m moving toward completion of things I think are important, instead of managing stress and being reactive to threats. Over time, this is recreating my life and changing what I leave behind me.
But from an outsider perspective, I may be looking more and more like a sociopath. Because I am more and more able to think, if not say, that your loss is unfortunate and I’m sorry you have to go through it, but not sorry enough that I’m going to change my direction or my actions. And I do care. I really do. But I’m taking responsibility for deciding what is important, or what is more important. When we say “yes I want that,” we also say no to something else.
This is not new. This is what we’ve been living with all our lives. But when we realize it, our triumphs acquire a different flavor. Everything is related. We are part of a great tapestry of cause and effect. For me, the larger the good I incorporate into own objectives, the more I feel like the costs are worth the gain.