OK well the title I gave this is called "Philosophy,
Psychoanalysis, and the Question of Evil".
Does evil exist, or is it a social invention?
Is evil an action, a disposition, a property,
a consequence, and/or a characteristic that
necessarily makes it what it is, essentially?
Does it hinge on creating pain for others-from
relatively benign modes of discomfort to harm
and gratuitous suffering?
Does malicious intent have to be involved;
or simply just intent, even if not malicious?
Surely pain can result without intent, so
what is the relationship between harm and
human motivation?
What if an event that brings about harm and
suffering was not due to a direct action,
but rather a failure to act, such as in a
weakness of will, the bystander effect, or
a miscarriage of moral courage?
Here we may describe evil as the abnegation
of responsibility, the failure to choose,
the denial of freedom.
But what happens if these failures are unconsciously
informed, even chosen, the product of an unconscious
will toward evil?
Or are these queries contingent upon value
judgments we ascribe to events and their causal
attributions?
Kant's treatise on evil does not attribute
evil to original sin, nor to a turning away
from God, nor does it conform to the Augustinian
denial of evil since it is nothing but the
privation of good, not even to human want
or desire, but rather is due to free choice.
Evil is the product of our determinate powers
of choice because, for Kant, we are radically
free to determine the grounds for the sake
of which to behave.
This places the onus of responsibility squarely
on the existential agent making such choices,
and not on natural inclination, impulse, or
desire, for as Kant tells us, "the source
of evil . . .can lie only in a rule made by
the will for the use of its freedom, that
is, in a maxim".
So even though we are born with innate needs,
desires, leanings, dispositions, and impulses,
man is the author of his nature due to acts
of freewill as choice that either conform
to or neglect the moral realm.
This so-called freedom of the moral will that
generates maxims upon which all human beings
supposedly construct for themselves, is a
purely determining, autonomous spontaneity
of choice and is therefore influenced by many
"incentives."
And for Kant, "the moral law, in the judgment
of reason, is on itself an incentive, and
whoever makes it his maxim is morally good",
whereas deviation from the moral injunction
makes one an "evil man."
Kant believes that such a disposition toward
choosing good or evil is a matter of free
choice, and as such, natural a priori predeterminations
are contradictory to the principles of choice
as one cannot freely choose what is given
or thrown.
But are dispositions always freely chosen?
Are not urges, impulses, inclinations, and
wants also mediated by other forces outside
of one's immediate agentic will, awareness,
and intent?
Propensities, he argues, are acquired, and
therefore not necessarily innate, although
they are naturally predisposed by virtue of
the fact that we crave and have penchants
and susceptibilities; but how can he justify
the claim that we are predisposed to be inclined
to freely choose any course of action unless
we are subjected to particularized experiences?
Moreover, if we are predisposed to be free
agents, are we not necessarily conditioned
on naturalized tendencies?
Our corporeality is a necessary condition
for actualizing free choice, although it is
far from a sufficient one.
If we are naturally predisposed to freely
choose, then are we not naturally predisposed
to choose evil, necessarily so?
Left to our own natural devises, would we
not likely choose what feels good in the moment
regardless of any moral maxims, much like
a child in the candy store?
Moral laws are not naturally given, for they
are acquired: morality is the education and
imposition of culture.
We can no more presuppose the moral law as
a transcendental good than we can of evil,
for every human activity is based in naturalized
psychology.
Kant behaves as though the so-called moral
imperative is a metaphysical given in the
universe much like the physical laws governing
our world and the cosmos, when it may be forcefully
argued that morality is a human phenomenon.
When Kant repeats his ethical mantra that
"there is no propensity to moral evil, for
such a propensity must spring from freedom.
. . in the moral capacity of the will", he
is presupposing a moral capacity to begin
with adapted as a rational decision to live
one's life according to moral maxims.
On the one hand Kant wants to champion a radical
freedom by virtue of our capacity to choose
evil, while on the other denying an inherent
necessity to such a choice that is by nature
a "natural predisposition".
In the end, for Kant, all choices derive from
maxims of the will.
What is "radical" for Kant is the deliberate
act of choosing evil in light of our conscious
awareness of the moral law, which is tantamount
to the free choice of violating our moral
duty, hence a corruption of the will in selecting
evil maxims; although we are naturally inclined
to do so, we are nonetheless responsible and
accountable for it, which is brought on by
ourselves.
Evil is radical in the sense that it "corrupts
the ground of all maxims", which is subjectively
chosen through perversity of the heart, human
frailty, impurity, and vulnerability to wickedness
and vice, for it ultimately "puts out of tune
the moral capacity to judge".
Yet, for Kant, the moral law is transcendentally
given, hence presupposed, as is the notion
that human beings freely choose their actions
through rational means.
Here Kant's theory of radical evil suffers
from a theoretical prejudice to begin with,
namely, the belief in sober rationalism, as
though people conduct their lives in deliberate
fashions that embrace ethical principles and
rules of behavior conforming to logical axioms
in choice and action.
This could not be farther from the truth of
our primordial natures, for moral deliberation
is a developmental triumph of the will mediated
by many psychological dynamics that ultimately
inform any rational comprehension of choice.
Kant ultimately makes evil a rational enterprise
of choosing to follow a maxim in discord with
duty and allegiance to the moral law, or what
duty demands, as if morality is a purely rational
decision.
Furthermore, ethical attunement is either
aligned or misaligned with some realm of moral
metaphysical realism, once again freely chosen
or ignored, rather than attributed to a moral
idealism invented by humanity.
Kant fails to reconcile the tension arc between
the faculty of desire and freewill and begs
the question of ethical duty by presupposing
a transcendental moral law, as though it is
preordained; not to mention that we choose
maxims to follow in rational ways rather than
as emotionally expedient, mediated events
under the press of a whole host of extraneous
factors and cultural environs.
For example, when he says that "the predisposition
to personality is the capacity for respect
for the moral law as in itself a sufficient
incentive of the will", he fails to understand
human nature as driven by other competing
dynamic processes and conflicts that condition
this will, especially those imposed by unconscious
currents and environmental determinants.
Here evil impositions can come from a multitude
of directions having very little to do with
freewill.
Evil begets evil whether chosen or not.
Is not the moral law an achievement of culture,
at once an invention and imposition of civilization?
Kant's view of good and evil as rational choice
succumbs to the prejudices of his day concerned
with upholding a Christian explanation of
man's aberrant behavior while salvaging a
theodicy that insulates God from allowing
evil.
In the end it is hardly a satisfactory account
of the irrational, emotional, libidinal, and
aggressive predilections that fester within
our human natures clamoring for release in
various forms, under various guises and valences,
and in various circumstances that stimulate
their appearance.
Contra Kant, moral law is not the provenance
of "divine command", but rather a human calling.
If evil is structurally constituted in all
human beings, then evil is normative.
It exists in all cultures, conditions our
social relations with others, and is carried
out in a variety of ways by people just like
you and me.
No one is immune from its signature or affliction.
This is part and parcel of our fermenting
pathos.
It is the new psychopathology of everyday
life.
Psychoanalysis has cogently shown, like the
Zimbardo and Milgram experiments, that human
nature is oriented toward hurting others,
including ourselves.
All human beings have sadistic wishes, impulses,
and aggressive tendencies-from jealousy, envy,
rivalry, hate, the diabolic, death wishes,
punishment fantasies, and the need to humiliate
and destroy-this is part of our unconscious
animal nature morphed by experiencing the
world; while personal and social defenses
keep us from consciously embracing our unconscious
destructive principles vying for pleasure,
greediness, decadence, excess, and egoistic
hedonism.
These empirical facts speak toward our unconscious
motivations that condition our waking conscious
choices.
Of course there are different instantiations
of evil as qualitative classifications of
the wrong offering gradations in concrete
appearance, but my point is that evil is ontologically
prepared as a primordial violence permeating
Being itself.
Asteroids collide, cosmic dust flickers, and
every astronomical event is a physical-energetic
negotiation: there is no ontic difference
in this basic proposition governing the universe
or human relations, for each is merely a modification
of the metaphysics of experience.
In most discourse on evil, no one talks about
unconscious intentionality, the evil within.
And it is only by accident, on the occasion
and condition of a non-conscious choice through
the proverbial slip or faulty achievement,
that evil is allowed expression.
Despite the fact that we are dominated by
reflective choice via the puissance of consciousness,
this does not eradicate the force and reverberation
of unconscious teleology.
In psychoanalysis, which has discovered the
fact that universally, we not only have the
capacity to kill, we all have the wish to
commit murder.
In those who have developed sufficient superego
defenses of conscience and moral values, this
wish is bulwarked against a strong desire
for denial, repression, renunciation, and
undoing-even reaction formation, such as those
going into helping professions to reverse
or annul this unconscious artifact by making
reparation for our lingering guilt.
The violentization of human proclivity is
historically proven and biologically conditioned,
the backbone of civilization, one that is
far more civil today than in its arkhē.
But the way we come to apprehend our "nature"
is humanized, as mentioned earlier, by our
freedom to choose certain paths of thought
and action, even under the strain of a lack
of mentalization or affect regulation that
colors our penumbra of ethical choices.
In what Adam Morton refers to as the "barrier
theory of evil," he emphasizes that "the essence
of evil motivation is the failure to block
actions that ought not even to have been considered".
Here, he insists, most people filter out harmful
actions to others when considering the right
course of action, however, this does not displace
motivation itself.
Furthermore, it does not consider the fact
that many actions are motived and executed
by unconscious telic forces that scarcely
recognize the foreseeable results or outcomes
they may have on others, especially when such
prereflective enactments are carried out unconsciously.
This framework which to adjudicate evil also
presumes a Kantian bias that moral motivation
and behavior are rationally contemplated with
self-conscious foresight to consider the penalties
of our actions.
The notion of instituting barriers and refraining
from the wrongful breach of barriers once
put into place are important factors in understanding
patterns of motivation, yet motivation and
action are not always amenable to following
a learned strategy or habitual procedure as
rational deliberation of choice; rather people
simply act and deal with the consequences
later.
Here we may observe that consciousness is
often foreshadowed by overdetermined, psychodynamic
events that affect the conscious motivation
and action of the agent, even if under disinhibition
or self-deceptive currents.
This may explain, in part, why the far majority
of evil acts are committed by normal or average
people rather that criminals and violent sociopaths.
The failure to construct barriers affecting
our conscious choice of actions is only one
such component of evil, regardless if it is
unconsciously conceived or organized.
Therefore, the barrier theory of evil conforms
to a deeper structuralization process we may
refer to as the "defense theory of evil,"
which is subject to the free reigns of imagination
mediated by unconscious fantasy and compromise
formation.
As a semiotic, the word "evil" has become
too readily equated with moral outrage, which
always stands in relation to a value judgment.
And since a value judgment is a human phenomenon,
the criteria of determining a proper interpretation
of a concept of evil remains our task.
We have already determined that evil may be
ensconced in the realm of thought and not
merely action, and that violence is interred
in thought.
Thoughts can do violence to those who think
and harbor them, who suffer, let's say due
to unremitting hate, and they manifest in
the most normative of situations, such as
through symptoms, somatization, affect dysregulation,
sleep dysfunction, memory disturbance, and
so forth.
Here thought may be a form of self-evil, even
if it is self-instituting and involuntary,
hence the product of one's own self-victimization,
even if such original victimization was due
to the encroachment and internalization of
the Other.
Evil as Appearance
Rather than focus on the myriad forms of evil
that appear throughout humanity, and they
are innumerable, let us address evil as appearance
as such.
It was Hegel who famously argued that "essence
must appear", for appearance is the requisite
for anything to be made actual.
This simple yet sophisticated observation
is logically prepared: the coming into being
of any phenomenon is ontologically conditioned
on its essential a priori fulcrum.
Here we may summon the principle of sufficient
reason: every mental event must stand in relation
to its original form from which it is derived.
In other words, there must be an original
ground for every mental event that stands
in relation to every mental object.
For Hegel, "appearance is essence", for nothing
can exist unless it is real, hence has being
or presence.
Here evil appears as essence revealed through
its marbled modes of manifestation.
Hegel's doctrine of essence is conditioned
on the notion that whatever comes into being
is always mediated by its previous appearances.
Evil is mediated by prior shapes, the conduit
that allows psychic reality to appear as concrete
reality.
This includes human history, as well as any
contextualization of our thrownness, what
I have referred to as "archaic primacy".
This further means that evil has a prehistory
and a metaphysical structure: appearance emerges
from a primordial ontic ground.
In the Phenomenology, Hegel tells us:
The inner world, or supersensible beyond,
has, however, come into being: it comes from
the world of appearance which has mediated
it; in other words, appearance is its essence
and, in fact, its filling.
The supersensible is the sensuous and the
perceived posited as it is in truth; but the
truth of the sensuous and the perceived is
to be appearance.
The supersensible is therefore appearance
qua appearance.
This "inner world" is none other than a psychic
one, an unconscious presencing that has been
made objectively real-the instantiation of
the evil within.
Essence appears and appearance fills its essence;
more specifically, appearance fills with essence.
The "truth" is "posited" in itself as a supersensible
beyond, but it may never be beyond appearance,
for truth is equated with appearance as such.
In Hegel's words, "Essence therefore is not
behind or beyond appearance, but since the
essence is what exists, existence is appearance".
In other words, by extrapolation, evil is
"really actual," or it would not appear.
This makes evil an ontological presence within
humanity.
But the ontology of evil is not a static or
hypostasized thing; rather it is a process
of emergence that is always transforming,
leaving debris in its path.
In fact, Hegel warns us that evil is not fixed
nor simply contained in an absolute unity
with the good, but rather it "wants to be
on its own account" as "semblance of inward
negativity", one that is exteriorized.
The negativity within must manifest, it must
materialize in order for evil to be actual.
Its reality is to be found in its appearances,
but it lies deeply hidden within its interior,
an interior that conditions all appearance,
evil or otherwise.
Hegel argues that evil is to be equated with
"cognition" itself due to a "schism," split,
or "universal separation" from the "immediate
knowledge" or unity with the good, a cleavage
introduced through the act of thinking and
self-reflection, a turning away from the simple
unity of "innocence in the moral sphere".
Here he evokes the Mosaic myth of the Fall.
Man is sinful by nature, and here we need
no sophisticated theory to argue that humankind
transgresses on itself and within itself,
that it surpasses limit and restraint, and
by definition, this is the same function ascribed
to thinking itself.
Thinking violates innocence; it breaches simplicity
and breaks up unities through instituting
negation, difference, and self-reflection
as internal relation.
As Hegel puts it, "It is thinking that both
inflicts the wound and heals it again".
In the Garden lies the tree of life and the
tree of knowledge, the cognition of good and
evil; and herein stands our "entry into the
antithesis," the forbidden, the realm of the
not.
Cognition wants to surpass itself, to explore
new territory, to enact its desire, the desire
to know, and to transgress its curtailment
of knowledge.
This is the saga of the human spirit (Geist)
as mind discontent with its immediacy, the
fate of desire enslaved as self-relation wanting
to satiate the lack.
What Hegel concludes is nothing other than
profound: mankind by nature is evil, not because
we are born of original sin, but because we
think.
It is only on the condition that we are autonomous
subjects that make us evil, for this is the
price of freedom, one that "wills in his particularity
without reference to the universal," that
is, without considering others.
This is why Hegel concludes that "evil" is
individual "subjectivity."
In other words, our subjective experiences
and actions are the locus of ignobility, which
stand in opposition to an objective corollary
holding itself up to be a universal ideal,
namely, humanity's symbolic godhead.
The Greeks defined truth through a privative
expression, through the via negativa, a negation
or reversal of the closed, the unseen.
Evil is disclosed through its openings, or
more precisely, through its openness into
the light of being.
Evil as appearance is everywhere, even if
hidden, concealed, or non-manifest, dwelling
below in the cellar of non-appearance, waiting
to be born, unveiled, released.
Evil's disclosedness or unconcealment reveals
a particular truth about the inherent nature
of our pathos, one that feels compelled to
no longer remain hidden.
This holding fuels a festering that cannot
be contained, as it is destined to make itself
known, to show itself, to shine.
The shining of evil is the face of man, the
image of a fallen ideal, the petty iteration
of subjectivity, the human mirror of self-negativity.
The Ethics of Evil
We live in a sick society, one chosen yet
unconsciously determined.
Here evil is the natural consequence of the
cost of freedom.
We kill people for this cost, for the privilege,
politics, and principle of freedom, itself
a lamentable and ethically dubious dilemma.
Military intelligence has studied and strategized
about the best way to kill people, to deracinate,
to dismember their spirits, to rob them of
soul, to crush entire peoples of their dignity
to the degree that warfare and state murder
have become both a technological and mechanized
industry.
A weapon is an instrument designed to kill-from
the steel and bronze age to a drone.
The atomic bomb was invented for one thing:
human extermination.
The technology of evil is witnessed everyday
on our television sets, from Wall Street to
mass scale corporate corruption, to internet
fraud, and cyber bullying, all abetted by
advances in computer science.
The use of global information exchange, digital
communication, social media, robotics, nanotechnology,
and the engineering of terror has become its
own science.
From WikiLeaks, Edward Snowden, to the Arab
Spring and Charlie Hebdo, no nation is immune
from its own homegrown transgressions.
Sometimes the craft or art of techne enlists
a certain psychological intelligence condoned
through state torture, such as inducing learned
helplessness through waterboarding and "rectal
rehydration" at Guantanamo, to rape warfare
used in the ethnic cleaning campaigns perpetrated
in Bosnia, Croatia, Kosovo, and Rwanda.
The ethics of evil is the distortion of an
inverse relation, namely, the justification
of self-righteousness while perpetrating evil
under the guise of moral superiority.
When ethical arguments are employed to justify
evil acts, we reason in a hegemonic circle
of self-interest that betrays a philosophy
of right, even if such actions are deemed
necessary in order to combat an identifiable
threat.
Ethical rationale can be exercised by any
individual, group, or nation state to legitimate
its activities and foreign policies affecting
other lives regardless of the legitimacy of
one's belief system, veracity of events, or
the flimsiness of moral reasoning employed.
Under the rubric of national security and
the crusade against terror, people simply
"disappeared" into CIA custody, were detained
against their wills without criminal charges
laid, and systemically subjected to the use
of "enhanced interrogation techniques," a
euphemism for torture, in the hopes that reliable
intelligence could be procured despite the
legal and ethical prohibitions against torture
instituted since the Geneva Conventions' forbiddance
of it even during times of war.
Not only is this a good example of moral hypocrisy
under the justification of state ethics, as
are drone attacks, military commissions, and
mass electronic surveillance by a superpower
that bases its global political platform on
democracy, freedom, and human rights, it furthermore
underscores the universality of national self-interest
at the expense of democracy itself.
When nation is against nation, narcissistic
national identity forms a firm antithesis
against the other that becomes legalized within
state foreign policy or totalitarian rule,
even if duped or deluded.
Under the Bush Administration following 9/11,
the United States manufactured a war on terror
because it needed to have enemies to pillory
as revenge for its castrated ego.
Here the Other becomes alien, a xenophobic
object prone to hurt us.
And after they found Saddam Hussein tucked
away down a spider hole, there were no weapons
of mass destruction to be found.
But he served a utilitarian public purpose:
he was the symbolic Bad Man who was put to
death under state execution, itself a practice
deemed evil despite enjoying a cathartic welcome
by the West.
We may readily observe the paranoid position
at work on a global scale: otherness is the
enemy.
This primal fear is even further spread within
our own nations and communities, where private
lives are under state surveillance, neighbors
spy upon neighbors, race riots are on the
rise, and home invasions are the norm.
Under Big Brother, anyone could disappear.
And with global economic unrest due to the
fuel crisis, Russia's infringement on the
Ukraine to seemingly attempt to recover its
lost Soviet Union has generated a new paranoia
where citizens can't speak freely due to fear
of police arrest or public assassination.
Paradoxically, after the country had lost
almost half of its value and people couldn't
afford a mortgage payment, the nation's approval
ratings for Vladimir Putin skyrocketed.
Whereas in the United States, the disgruntled
public craves a swing of the pendulum toward
any politician selling hope for a recovering
economy, Russia can't get enough of its leader
while blaming the greedy West for its own
financial malaise.
When the class genocide in Rwanda occurred,
initiated by rival ethnic tensions between
the Hutus and Tutsis, where mass mayhem organized
by Hutu paramilitary personnel and locals
having much to gain from the systematic extermination
of the Tutsis, the world remained curiously
passive and silent.
Even after reports of entire villages and
individual family members killing their own
kind with machetes and the crudest of utensils
were known to be factual, the West looked
on as a detached spectator unwilling to do
anything until it was too late.
Lethargic in its enthusiasm to intervene,
after nearly a million dead, world superpowers
finally felt motivated to lift a finger to
stop the genocide at the U.N.'s beckoning.
The Dark Continent, I suggest, held little
value to democratic and developed countries
who had little to gain and many economic costs
to bear for intervening in a country that
is (symbolically) associated with poverty,
famine, AIDS, overpopulation, and disease,
hence the alien Other.
But when SARS, Swine-Flu (H1N1), and Ebola
can conjure up the paranoid position and threaten
a global epidemic, the world has become more
gracious and attuned to social realities that
affect us all.
The cold hard facts are that some peoples
and countries are valued over others based
upon their discernable worth; others on their
discernable threat.
Even humanitarian aid is never devoid of political
self-interest, especially if it means thwarting
global anxiety.
Is it evil not to think of other peoples,
cultures, and continents, to not consider
their needs and social challenges?
This would not only imply an admonition as
failure to acquire self-consciousness and
empathic attunement for the other, but rather
incites an intransigent condemnation for not
caring to do so in the first place.
Yet Levinasian ethics barely occur to the
masses engrossed in their everyday lives,
let alone being handed down a moral sentence
for not thinking about the plight of the disenfranchised
abstract sufferer residing somewhere in an
arbitrary land.
It is too much for the individual psyche to
bear, that's why it is turned over to the
collective social psyche to contemplate and
do something about.
Even in the most well-intentioned and conscientious
soul who envisions a better humanity and wishes
to serve altruistic causes, in the end we
do what we can, because that's all we can
do.
Is it evil that we don't do more, that we
cease to try because we value our own needs
over others?
Or do we merely accept our humanism that we
cannot live up to the demands of our own ideals
we place on ourselves?
Here I am reminded of Hegel's beautiful soul:
when we become aware of our imperfections
we bear an unhappy consciousness.
Here the self is divided: we can posit the
Ideal but simply can't actualize it.
Here moral lassitude becomes another banality.
Institutionalization
When we think about the institutionalization
of evil in recent times, from colonial imperialism,
totalitarianism, and fascism, we often think
of large scale suprastructures that superimpose
an oppressive bureaucratic machinery on its
citizenry; but we may observe how these unconscious
cultural fantasies operate as entrenched ideologies
unquestioned by the masses.
The caste system in India may be said to foster
a form of institutional racism where social
class is determined by blood, history, custom,
and skin color.
The upper class or Brahmans hold wealth, power,
status, and education, while the Untouchables
are held in contempt and allocated the most
unpleasant and revulsive of all vocations
in the most horrid of conditions such as sanitation,
domestic servitude, and back-breaking manual
labor.
Aryan descendants with lighter-skinned pigments
are more aesthetically valued while the more
darker-skinned Indians are viewed as ugly,
an attitudinal phenomenon we may also witness
in Africa.
There is an air of superiority by birth and
provenance and an aura of disdain, condemnation,
and vilification of the underclass, even though
the advantaged groups rely on their sweat
and subservience for their privileged lifestyles.
Hugh discrepancies between rich and poor determine
the social infrastructure, where the elite
govern the masses, political and social institutions
are rife with corruption and abuse of power,
and the citizenry have neither tangible access
to housing, education, or work.
The subcontinent is suffocating in pollution
and every major city is a conglomeration of
slums.
Poverty, death, disease, crime, infestation,
filth, lack of sewage, vagrants, panhandlers,
homelessness, frantic desperation, and abject
hopelessness abound, where the majority of
its billion people are illiterate, disenfranchised,
and penniless.
In fact, India has the highest illiteracy
rate in the world, followed by China and Sub-Saharan
Africa.
Abandoned children, the deformed and handicapped,
and destitute mothers roam the streets begging
for food with emaciated babies in their arms.
An endless swarm of hovering hands pounce
on tourists and locals alike hoping to get
a rupee or American dollar for free.
Fairy tale romances are non-existent for marriages
are arranged by patriarchy based on caste,
birth, and class as a union of families, not
love, where relationships are determined,
not freely chosen, lest one betrays the family,
established social order, and the entrenched
cultural tradition that sustains this institutional
practice.
It is no wonder why Buddhism branched off
from Hinduism and that Islam was successful
in converting much of the underclass, each
under the teachings that all men are equal
regardless of race, caste, or custom.
In other developing countries, such as in
the Middle East, where despots, dictators,
and autocrats rule their totalitarian regimes,
women and children are systematically oppressed,
often under the edicts of Islam.
Here we may observe a widespread institutional
practice in most Arab countries that grant
men both legislative and property rights over
their wives and children, where strict observance
to Muslim law is harshly imposed, including
denying women access and rights to education,
individual autonomy, and independent finances
in order to keep them enslaved, including
controlling their dress, physical mobility,
and behavioral practices, and granting them
virtually no criminal protection or civil
liberty rights under the law.
Women and children may be beaten or raped
against their will by men with practical immunity
from prosecution, and transgressions by females
may be subject to penalty by death.
Public stoning, immolations, and honor killings
(from Pakistan to Canada), where women turn
on other accused women, including mothers
and family members who are willing participants,
are salient phenomena fueled by culturally
engrained misogyny.
In vast parts of China and India, female (sex-selected)
infanticide is ubiquitous due to the cultural
devaluation of women.
Concentrated in northeast Africa, Yemen, Iraqi
Kurdistan, the Middle East, and portions of
Asia, female genital mutilation (circumcision)
is legally imposed against their will (usually
in childhood), often under horrendous unsanitary
conditions that permanently disfigure and
endanger the survival of its victims due to
lack of sterilization and post-medical complications,
all condoned under the dominion of male patriarchy.
These primitive practices are designed to
fortify a man's power and authority by turning
women into functional objects of domestication,
obedience, and sexuation where only a man
has the right to pleasure.
Furthermore, in many of these countries, as
throughout South and East Asia, children are
sold into slavery by parents to pay for family
debt or for profit, as are human organs offered
on the black market to help pay for passage
to another land.
Human trafficking and the child sex trade
industry have become an international pandemic,
often abetted by institutional corruption
and systemic pathology thriving on high profit
margins with no signs of a conscience.
Israeli legislative policy is designed to
promote and privilege an exclusive Jewish
state, actively recruits immigration from
European Jewry, hence lending asylum and giving
economic and material benefits (including
housing, transportation, and tax-shelters)
to Jews over non-Jewish Israeli's, imposes
higher costs of living and excise taxes on
domestic Palestinians and other Israeli Arabs
who refuse to live and work in the West Bank,
although entire generations had previously
owned property and ran family businesses throughout
the country before the declaration of Israel.
A democratic state that maintains class privilege
and financially rewards one ethnic group over
others who live and work in the same country,
own property, and are equally part of the
same society would be an unfathomable occurrence
in North America.
Israel is concerned with occupying rather
than compromising over disputed land, and
retaliates with military bombardments that
deliberately target civilian neighborhoods
where innocent lives are lost.
And with Palestinian resistance compelled
to fight and galvanize subversive insurgencies
and initiate clandestine missile fire, keeping
hate and resentment alive, Israeli citizens
break out the lawn chairs, crack a beer, and
watch the military pick off houses in Gaza.
Here each side points the finger while calling
the other "terrorist."
This is a good example of the paranoid-schizoid
position at play where radical splitting and
projective identification leads to reiterations
of violence as proportional exchange, like
a Ping-Pong ball traversing each side of the
net until one opponent slams a victory in
the current round.
But this is followed by endless rounds of
repetitions in fixed perpetuation of retaliatory
aggression to the point that systemic acrimony
toward the Other justifies state institutional
racism and military barrages.
It is understandable how Israel suffers from
dread due to centuries of European and Russian
anti-Semitism while living in the shadow of
the Holocaust, but with the messianic clash
of religions and fundamentalist supporters
of Islamic State (e.g., ISIS/ISIL) recently
killing Jews in Paris and Copenhagen, the
tinderbox could explode without warning, especially
if Iran continues with its nuclear development
program, a spark that could ignite a Third
World War.
So here we have it: no one is immune from
evil or innocent, for everyone by nature is
evil, it is merely a matter of degree and
how it is enacted.
Let us hope that our individual self-awareness
and social self-consciousness stop our charades
of denial, and that we start to begin by asking:
What are we going to do about it?
