On my blog of 16th June, I mentioned three articles which I read. I introduced one of them. For various reasons connected with the intervening events including work and various other social engagements, I didn't have time to deal with the last of the three. It is now weekend. It's as good a time as any for me to resume where I left off.
In The Basic Dynamic of Human Evil, Ernest Becker, who survived the Nazi concentration camp and then went on to become a psychologist, compared the works of three psychologists: Otto Rank, Wilhem Reich and Carl Jung who all dissented from Freud in one way or another.
To Rank, man has a will to prosper and aslo to achieve some kind of immortality. But he also knows that he is mortal, something connected to the animal side of his existence. So he tries his best to deny what he fears most, a nameless and faceless death. But he does not do so outwardly and explicitly. His fears are buried deep through repression which for the time being, gives to everyday life a certain "tranquil façade". Only occasionally does his desperation show through. But even then, not in the life of every person either. According to Becker, some men "live in a dimension of carefreeness, trust, hope and joy which gives them a buoyancy behind that which repression alone could give. This is achieved by the symbolic engineering of culture which serves as an antidote to terror by giving them a new and durable life beyond that of the body.
Wilhem Reich shares the same view. In his book, The Mass Psychology of Fascism, he explained why men tried to be other than he is ie. to deny his animal nature. This to Becker is the cause of all psychic illness. Fascism promises to engineer the world so that it may raise man above his natural destiny. To him, this "unleased on mankind regular and massive miseries that primitive societies encountered only occasionally and usually on a small scale"'. To Reich, the theory of the German superman "has its origins in man's effort to dissociate himself from the animal." Hitler portrayed the Jews as lying in wait in the dark alley ready to infect young German virgins with syphilis! The Jews were made the scapegoat for all German ills. He says, "Natural science is constantly drilling into man's consciousness that fundamentally, he is a worm in the universe. The political plague-monger is constantly harping upon the fact that man is not an animal, but a 'zoon politicon' ie. a non-animal, un upholder of values, a 'moral being'. How much mischief has been perpetuated by the Platonic philosophy of the state!...Man does not want to be reminded of the fact that he is fundamentally a sexual animal. He does not want to be an animal." Many psychologists however think that this denial is grounded in the psyche from earliest childhood. They talk about "good obejcts" and "bad objects", about paranoid stages of development, of denials, split-off segments of the psyche which includes a death enclave.
But to Becker, Jung sums it up best by talking about man's shadow in the human psyche. To him. "the shadow is another way of referring to the individual's sense of creature inferiority: the shadow is the other side, the expression of our own imperfection, our earthiness, the negative incompatible with the absolute values ie. the horror of passing life and the knowledge of death! Man wants to get away from this inferiority, to "jump over his own shadow'"! How? By looking for everyting "dark, inferior, and culpable" in the others!
To Becker, man is not comfortable with guilt: it chokes him. Erich Neumann sums it up nicely: "The guilt feeling is attributable ...to the apperception of the shadow...This guilt-feeling based on the existence of the shadow is discharged from the system in the same way both by the individual and the collective--by the ...projection of the shadow..which is in conflict with the acknowledged values [the cultural façade over animality] cannot be accepted as a negative part of one's own psychic and is therefore projected--that is, transferred to the outside world and experienced as an outside object. It is combatted, punished, and exterminated as 'the alien out there' instead of being dealt with as one's own inner problem." This is the basis of "scapegoating". It is the "split off sense of inferiority and animality" which is projected onto the scapegoat and then destroyed symbolically with him. No wonder that Jung concludes, "the principal and indeed the only thing which is wrong with the world is man"'!
Scapegoating is universal: Jesus, Jews, the Arabs, the immigrants, the blacks, those who rely on public assistance, the old, the weak, the uneducated, the anti-revotuionaries, the reactionaries, the enemy of the people, the terrrorists, the black sheep of the family etc. Do we not see our own shadows in all societies in all historical periods?
This time you want to talk about the shadowy evil of mankind, or in other words, the opposite side of kindness and love. Only when a person lost his/her sense or rational balance between good and evil, than evil will appear while good diminishes. Another case is that the FEAR of evil. Does fear has something to do with the GUILTY conscious? Even a person has never done anything evil, sometimes he suffers from the fear of DEATH or PUNISHMENT. For example, one always think about lust and rape, but he/she has never committed a single crime in real life, however, he/she always has nightmares of PUNISHMENT for the crimes that he/she has committed only in THOUGHTS/DREAMS!!!
回覆刪除[版主回覆06/27/2010 01:47:00]Lust is a natural biological instinct. It is neither good nor bad in itself. It really depends on the exact manner we satisfy this urge for lust which biologically is just a need for procreation. In modern society, sexual intercourse is no longer regarded as necessarily or exclusively done for the purpose of pro-creation. It may be engaged in itself as an expression of human affection by one person to another. The prohibition of sex, the mortification of sex, the taboo against sex is something peculiarly Christian. So is the guilt associated with it. It was Jesus who asserted that not only must we not commit adultery, we should not even "think" about it. Whilst we can see that being tempted in our thought to commit adultery is something which may sometimes actually lead to the commission of the "sin" of adultery, to punish something for merely thinking about it does seem to me to be a bit excessive. In modern civilized society, mere thought not accompanied by action is not treated as a "crime'. The "nightmare" of punishment is entirely the result of socialization and the internalization of the very monkish Christian values. Under modern moral theory, mere thought is not and should not be regarded as sufficient to merit punishment, let alone as preached by Christian dogma, to merit eternal punishment in hell. The civil authorities do not recognize either God nor the concept of heaven or hell. There is no such thing as "sin" only "crimes" and "civil wrongs".
In fact, what is regarded as "evil" are states of a man's psyche which he does not wish to see or to accept: all the traits or facts he regard as "bad", including the fact that he is an animal, his anger, envy, aggression and in particular the fact that man will die.etc. Such "evils" are then "projected" on the others: the outsiders, the strangers, the enemy etc. But man is neither exclusively good nor evil: some parts of him are good, and some not so good. Man's guilt arises from his perception of his morally "undesirable" or "unacceptable" traits, judged from the viewpoint of his own society. But the ultimate "punishment" is Death. Death is always seen as a threat: it threatens to turn to nothing all man's proud achievements and his glory and all the people and things he loves and cherishes etc That's why death inspires fear: man fears losing something he regards as good, his life.
回覆刪除