Saturday, September 14, 2019
When I watch shows with particularly evil or arrogant villains, my response to them is (as the writers have intended) “Kill them; they have no place in the world.” It would be useless, of course: New villains spring up all the time. Worse than useless, because you become like the worst in those you fight. The only practical plan I have ever read was Anselmo’s in For Whom the Bell Tolls: Make the miscreants work until they come to realize the error of their ways. This might or might not reform the villains, but at least it would not destroy those who confronted them.
The key here, as you well know, is that your emotional reaction to a thing may be as powerful as anything you do or say. It is your second- and third-tier reaction that counts, and this is one reason people of ill will do such damage: They rouse righteous indignation that outdoes them in turn.
By the end of a war, people are enthusiastically doing things that they would have been horrified to consider at the beginning. Saturation bombing, atomic bombs – concepts that make no distinction between combatant and civilian, concepts that would have been rightly considered to be war crimes before the war. By war’s end they are accepted as defensible and even reasonable.
One-eyed pursuit of a good tends to lead to means identical to those being countered.
Fight fire with fire, is the saying.
Yes. That works out better in forestry than in human relations, where it is merely arson, and at that, arson that incinerates friend and foe and self alike.
And why does it have to be this way? I don’t pretend that there was ever a paradise on Earth, but does it always have to be this stew of hatreds and fears and self-righteous seeking of vengeance? I understand that life in duality must include both ends of every stick. Somehow, though, that isn’t terribly comforting.
It will be less disturbing if you remember that 3D is a part of a greater life, and that every life has purpose. Evil is good balanced. We know you don’t like it, but it may become more understandable if you look at it as a question of extremes. The center is where a stick will balance, nowhere else.
You are saying too much goodness creates or constellates too much badness.
Well – almost. A black-and-white negative may be muted or vivid. It may consist of highly contrasted lights and darks, or tones that are much more in the center scale. It’s only an analogy, remember.
But this lifetime does not seem to have an excess of goodness. I see chiefly excess of violence.
Yes, that’s what you see. That’s what is pictured. There is no entertainment value in portraying goodness, except occasionally as a change of pace. You know how it is.
People want to feel alive, and if their ordinary lives offer too little, you will find young men running to get into a war, as in 1914, for the sake of smashing things – they having no idea why they feel that way, having no idea how intolerable their lives were that they are fleeing.
So why the impulse in the first place? And why are we led by sociopaths?
You aren’t led by sociopaths, you are led astray by them. Most of your leaders are themselves bewildered, short-sighted, inconstant, often well-meaning but without vision and under continuous pressure to go along.
But the question remains: Why? Why is 3D life made into such an endurance test? Couldn’t we modulate the evil that has to manifest?
You could, but it involves wholeness, in place of goodness, as you have been told. It involves bearing your own share of the world’s evil., and thereby helping to corral it, to curb it from wild manifestation.
Jesus said it is inevitable that evil comes into the world, but woe unto him by whom it comes.
Yes, but that refers to ushering it into the world, not holding a piece of it that already exists and has manifested.