World of Love Sess5 - Evil is Twisted Good

In rare cases it is a smooth, gradual, incremental transformation. In most cases stage transition comes with pain. It involves enduring the dissolution of your world. You must be able to endure the falling apart of that which holds together. ... In entering a new stage there is often the experience of a dark night of the soul. There is a time when God is the abyss, the void, or the enemy. The structure may be unconscious, but the experience of that transition is very much conscious and often painful. -James W. Fowler ²

... we also say that wholeness does not include evil, and that when wholeness is either established or destroyed, evil also ceases to be. -John A. Sanford ³

A faith which asserts we are moving toward an Omega Point of unification, complexity and creativity must above all else have a convincing understanding and interpretation of evil.

To start with, I join those from Augustine through Berdyaev and Barth who define evil as non-being. Evil is fragmented and soured good. It grows out of the sickening within those fragments inside us which sour because they can never be whole. Evil is parasitic on the structure of good in the human personality. It grows like mistletoe clings to a tree with no independent power of life of its own. It borrows from the true self within and transmutes what it borrows into poison.

This instability makes victory over evil sound easy. But it often appears that God and good are losing the war. There are shootings and muggings almost nightly where I am writing these words.

A 21st century faith has to account for the three thirteen year old boys who poured gasoline over a sleeping homeless man and set him afire.

It has to explain how God's love relates to the Argentine army officer who led a rightist death brigade. They broke down the door and abducted a friend of mine. For four days she was terrorized, tortured and raped. Her only crime was to be the friend of a young woman whose boyfriend was being sought for questioning. This torturer goes to Mass and considers himself a loving parent.

An adequate interpretation of evil must account somehow for the holocaust under Hitler.

Evil cannot be fully explained. There is always a margin of mystery. However, stage development and the functioning of the human brain bring us to the subject from a fresh angle and perhaps offer a more accurate diagnosis.

Our Inner Fragmentation

First, we must look at the way we are split up into pieces inside. Our operational ego or observer ego (whatever we call the "I" who reflects and decides) actually presides like some anxious parent a whole bundle of sub-selves and has to deal daily with a cacophony of conflicting voices. Paul complained bitterly that he did things he didn’t want to do and he hated them. Who is doing it, and who is hating it? Different self-systems.

Sociologists and psychologists sometimes refer to these inner forces as masks, roles, or persona, words which suggest perhaps more inner unity exists.

These terms also fail to express adequately the quasi-personal form these sub-self systems exhibit. Those persona which we live in for periods of time are powerful in part because they speak with the voices of persons from our past lives and these powerful voices tempt us to move into that persona and to live there permanently. They call on us to become that sub-self.

Robert J. Stoller describes these inner powers vividly:

Being a clinician, Freud could never shake off the problem of the multiple voices -- personages -- all present and speaking at different levels of consciousaness in the same person. And, of course, he did not want to. No practical analyst fails to sense those voices. ... when we dream at night, the people come out and play. Their names, however, are not the conscious, the pre-conscious, the unconscious; or the ego, the superego, the id; or the libido; or the death instinct, or the primary processes, or the secondary processes. Nor are they "agencies" and "processes," for those also do not decide, think, want, demand, say, feel or need. ...Yes, there are these inner creatures, their talk spun out, often several at the same instant and somehow managing not to know of or at least not to acknowledge one another's presence. They act as if they were separate fragments, "splinters of the mind," unaware of the tohers who are simultaneously playing out their own scenes. ⁴

Moving from sub-self to sub-self we are sometimes aware of a clicking in and out of quite different identities with their own values and desires. It is as though we had put on a helmet (Imagine one like Darth Vader's.), which filters out some memories and distorts others. Or, imagine that when the helmet is clicked into place certain tapes from out of the past begin to play, events and voices representing the needs, desires, and ends of a particular way of life, and that because of their emotional drive and selectivity these tapes filter out the values and voices of other internal persona.

I remember once seeing a sixty year old man throw a two year old's tantrum. He had slipped on his narrowest and most confining helmet.

The Self and Its Selves

One thing which helped put me on the track of the various self-systems was the remark of a wise therapist, “Behind every feeling, if you trace it back, lies a whole value system.” I immediately said to myself, “Eureka! And behind every value system is a whole embryonic personality, which as long as its voices have power in my life, is trying to push to the center of my being and take over.”

If I feel angry or guilty, the therapist meant, someone or some group of people have in the past led me, directly or indirectly, to be guilty or angry at the point And I have, through imagination and reinforcing actions over the years, built those experiences at that age level into a fragment personality.

Because I also know and have been told that such negative emotions are immature and unhealthy, I never have lived in this partial self enough to bring it to the center more than a few moments at a time. But when I choose to put on this identity helmet and live in it, I am that person and feel guilty and angry the same way. Like Paul, I feel almost compelled by some alien force to do things which in my healthy inner core I know I shouldn't be doing.

The voices I now hear are burned into my neural pathways to be replayed over and over until they are filed away and no longer sought out. So long as I wear that helmet and play those tapes I am living the life others designed for me. And a very demonic life that is, full of guilt which can not possibility be resolved, not even if I give my body to be burned.

These sub-selves are seductive, not only because they involve voices of people we love and hate. They seduce us also because they offer ways to avoid or superficially resolve problems we don't want to face. For instance, I can wallow in this massive abstract guilt, suffering a manageable pain, over the ills of the whole world and so, feeling helpless, avoid the perhaps greater pain of grappling with any one problem or any one person. We cling to these demonic self-systems because they provide underground shelters from the complex business of living with life as it really is.

It appears that all of us have more than one self-system within us. They are built up to varying degrees of power.

Some are poorly formed and weak; others are so well-shaped as alternative persona that they haunt us constantly with tempting voices, teasing, cajoling, threatening, insinuating their arguments into our daydreams and our nightmares.

George Brown speaks of sub-selves in the terms of Gestalt psychology:

The total phenomenal self may be thought of as a kind of multi-dimensional mosaic that continually changes in characteristics and modifies its organization as sub-selves move into figure, into prominence and dominance, replacing other sub-selves, only to fade in turn into ground or background as each is itself replaced. ⁵

Ben Young says much the same thing in relation to different value systems:

We all have distinguishing sub-selves. Whether you use Freid, Jung, Berne, Assagioli, Shapiro, brain hemisphere functioning, moods, etc., as your distinguishing base, different sub-selves with different perceptions, awareness, assumptions, expectations, attitudes and energy flow can be experienced and determined to be congruent or non-congruent in saying, doing, being aspects. So in the traditional
way of looking at values, the question is whose values? What sub-self or selves? And without a "new" context and language system within which to discover the differences we leave gaps in our internally rationalized and coped with automatically and we leave different impressions with others than we intend, and defend those unintended impressions. We get identified with values, idealize them, and act as if those values we espouse are "us." We not only give mixed messages internally (and don't know it), but different situations will trigger internal dissonance. ⁶

To summarize, the hypotheses I'm suggesting are:

1. Sub-selves are fragment personalities. At least some of them are too strong, substantial, and quasi-personal to be thought of merely as masks or crystallized roles.

2. Among the self-systems is the one I call the god-self. This wholistic self-system, I postulate to be the ground of being or anchor which holds together all the fragments. This core self is qualitatively different from all the other self-systems. Without its wholistic gestalt, the other sub-selves would disintegrate.

At this point just note these as hypotheses and hold them at arms length until the discussion is further along.

Berdyaev

Shift for a moment to the philosophic key. Nicholas Berdyaev wrote:

Evil is above all a loss of integrity, a breaking away from the spiritual centre and the formation of autonomous parts which begin to have an independent existence. ⁷

Evil does not exist in the wholistic center of the person. It can only have power in the fragments of the self, which are organized around partial, immature, and illusory values.

The lie of evil is to lead us to believe that any of these sub-selves except the wholistic one we can offer life in fullness, being, glory, enduring meaning.

The fragment can dream of being whole, but cannot achieve it. And this dreaming of the fragment is what we properly call lust. The demonic self-systems are demonically hungry for full being they can never achieve. Their hunger is the source of their evil and the nature of that hunger defines each self-system's kind of destructiveness.

To put it in psychological terms, whenever I put on one of the fragment selves and live in its world, I must suffer the frustration of its immature and/or neurotic solutions to the challenges of life. At the same time I am subliminally aware of my wholistic center and so intuit that this fragment self lacks the necessary structure of being ever to sustain a fully loving and creative life in relationship to the real world around me.

It is in this sense that Augustine, Berdyaev, Karl Barth, and other major theologians, refer to evil as non-being.

Before going on in the next session to talk of social evil, we must pin down several of the above points through illustrations: (l) how evil roots in the fragmentation of the whole; (2) how the fragment lacks the power to live a full life; (3) how, figuratively speaking, each fragment seeks to push to the center and take control; and (4) how victory by God is assured in part by the very nature of evil as rooted in the good center.

The Teen Struggle for Identity

Depending on their degree of self-esteem, teenagers are obliquely aware that there is almost literally nothing within them that is uniquely theirs. The raw materials they have for shaping a self, the skills, the patterns available, all were poured into them by others.

In this period, many are literally held into existence by those around them who persist in treating them as important and as if they already are unified persons. "If other people survived this age," I remember saying through gritting teeth, "I can too!"

At this time our insides are filled to the bursting point with conflicting pressures and advice.

Voices

Consider the voices that Bertie, one fifteen year old hears:

The voice of Mother inside says, "Don't be a failure like your Father. Get out and do something. Be a success!"

Father says, "Just try to get by. Avoid commitments and stay out of trouble. Working hard like I have just isn't worth it. Try to have some fun."

Aunt Hattie, who makes the most marvelous cookies, says, "You know, Bertie, the only thing that counts is serving God and humanity. Imitate great people, like Albert Schweitzer, who gave up fame and fortune to heal the Africans with his own hands."

And, there is Grandpa Sam, a tobacco-smelling horse of a man, delightful to sit on and walk with, whose booming confident voice allows no room for dissent, "The world is a jungle, Bertie, Look out for yourself first. No one else will."

Of course, the inner confusion is compounded by the fact that Aunt Hattie is a notorious shrew and gossip and Grandpa Sam is loved by everyone and seems always to have just given his last dollar to some beggar.

To complicate it further, these value systems find support within the various age levels, the Kohlberg stages, which remain within us not fully integrated. Besides Mother's voice urging and nagging within there is the voice of our own rebellious five year old arguing endlessly and ineffectively with her and feeling all the surges of unreasonable anger over those lost battles. The tapes play on and on. The five year old wages that battle daily but will never win it.

The boy who sat on Grandpa Sam's lap already believed in looking out for number one first and he always will. And he and Grandpa Sam are going to get a lot of reinforcement from betrayals, competition and viciousness the teenager is meeting in the world. Clustering together, these voices tend to become one voice, an embryo self which, if it gets to the center and controls, could feel quite at home in the Hitler Youth. Even if this self-system doesn't get control, it will remain a demonic presence so that at one moment the teenager is extolling the sacrifices of Albert Schweitzer and at the next loudly proclaiming that the world is no damn good and he will do as he damn well pleases.

This all means that it is rather foolish to tell a teenager, "Just be yourself!" He would love to, if he could only figure out which self to be, and how if he becomes any of the selves he knows he will be more than a carbon copy of someone else.

Each of us has a different set of voices. There are also the various age levels we've passed through not completely digested. Each of these age levels will have a different reaction to each voice, positively or negatively. There are fragmented memories of a good mother and a bad mother. There are rejected and repressed traits, some good and some bad.

Some of these forces, at any given time, will move in to support or oppose a given influence or decision, or cluster to strengthen or weaken the influence of a particular self-system.

Abstract ideas and ideals really have little power here to help us or hurt us except as they are incarnate within us in the gestalt of a self-system.

Internal Dialogues

In any given situation, then, we can count on getting a rash of conflicting advice and orders from inside ourselves.

Here is a woman who has been promoted to comptroller. The boss insists that she change some entries to cover up illegal political contributions. She consults her conscience in the far reaches of the night. Does her inner self speak with one voice? You're kidding!

Grandpa Sam: Sure, do it. Keep in good with the boss. Get promoted again.

Mother: Don't bring shame on the family! I could never hold my head up again.

Aunt Hattie: God will punish you if you do.

Nine year old: Do it. Who cares?

Daddy: I don't know, honey. It's risky. Maybe you should quietly look for another job.

Twelve year old: Let's go to the mall!

A few people, like Madam Curie or Lenin, seem to achieve an overwhelming unity out of their chaos without trying, through the power of an overriding purpose in life. So does the ruthless businessman who climbs steadily upward over the bodies of friends and competitors, or even the bachelor son who remains living with his mother all her life. But are they united? What other voices do they hear, creating anxiety and self-doubt, in the depths of the night?

Every evil message that is a twisted piece of the whole good.

Of course, a lot the voices speak is not evil in itself. They sometimes push limited goods, a change in the hierarchy of our goods, and so on. They are evil when they urge us to take a twisted partial good and try to make it the whole, a substitute for real wholeness. The Bible calls this idolatry, worshipping powers which, in the end offer deeply satisfying existence filled with love, creativity and enduring meaning.

The drive for power and control is a distortion, out of loneliness and insecurity, of the need to be free, strong and autonomous, not to have to lean on anybody or anything.

The need to submerge oneself in others or in causes (to "be a part" as Paul Tillich put it) is a way of escape from the anxiety and loneliness of freedom. It is a twisting of the healthy need to give and receive love.

The need to be free of entanglements and commitments is an exaggerated expression of the legitimate need to be a unique person and to be really in control of one's destiny. This may be expressed, as here, in running away rather than seeking to control others.

The same is true of the effort to please Mother or Aunt Hattie or Grandpa Sam, to fulfill another's vision of what we should be rather than our own. This is a another form of submerging or giving the self away.

Calling these inner value clusters demonic self-systems or sub-selves does not mean that they always give bad advice or their temptations are always toward evil. They often counsel good or represent struggles among the relatively good choices. The word demonic means that their voices are heard as a threat or a seduction. They come to us as a threat to the unity we seek and to the existence of other self-systems within which contain comfortable or exciting parts of ourselves we are not really willing to give up. Every voice is heard as a demonic voice so long as it is not at the center and does not have the power to actually unify us within.

The god-self is the one which can hear the good in every partial and distorted message

Mother says, "You've got to succeed and be the success I wasn't or you've failed me." The god-self can filter out the selfishness and hear mother saying instead, "Achievement and mastery and work are a part of being healthy and feeling worth something."

The underlying love and concern of all of the main actors can be translated and understood as necessary parts of the wholistic self.

No good word or good experience is ever lost. It goes to the center and strengthens the god-self. When the god-self moves to the center and takes over, the best of the memories of Mother, Father, Aunt Hattie and Grandpa Sam are preserved.

At this point we become able to say, "I hated Mother at that time, but now I can see that she was trying her best to love me, and what she was really saying from the depths of her own god-self was, "Be a success because that will be a fulfilling life and I want only the best for you."

The god-self is the inner power that turns all the cacophony of warring voices into a harmonious chorus. As the author of Hebrews speaks of a great "cloud of witnesses" from all of history, so are all our forerunners to become within us a chorus singing a tremendous harmonious hymn to agape.

As we look later at Kohlberg's stages in more detail we see how in our god-self all our child stages are still with us adding to our creativity and enjoyment of life. Here our masculine and feminine sides unite. All of Jung's archetypes come out of the shadow, join hands and circle dance. What we saw but darkly, as in a distorted mirror, we now see face to face.

My grandmother would take me on her lap and hug me tight and rock for a long long time. She would talk about how she loved me, and how wonderful it was to have a grandson like me. She called these her “petting parties.”

Since then, it has been impossible for me to take seriously any view of the world in which there is no such thing as genuine love, the notion that society is a jungle made up only of selfish people. It has also been difficult for me to believe that this world in which there is real love could have emerged without the initiative and suffering of a Divine Lover.

Her words and caresses went straight to the core of my being and clustered there together with all the other caresses and words and acts of caring and trust and support. These became the core of my god-self. These cemented its universal gestalt into place establishing a center of gravity of health and good which would hold firm even though it was betrayed and hammered by subsequent words and deeds of betrayal.

Now, we must examine another dimension of evil: death. The futile attempt to escape from death and finitude empowers all evil. In addition, we must show how our frantic and irrational lust for immortality substitutes and glory fixes explains the relationship of society and social systems to the perpetuation of evil both in society and individuals.

Questions for Thought

1. Consider and discuss: What does it mean to say evil is twisted or partial good? Look at your own life and dredge up some examples.

Contact the author: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. The Self in Pilgrimage, page 6
2. Jim Fowler and Sam Keen, Life Maps, Conversations on the Journey of Faith, edited by Jerome Berryman, Winston Press and Word Books, Word, Incorporated, Waco, TX, 1978
3. Evil, The Shadow Side of Reality, page 152
4. Sexual Excitement, Dynamics of Erotic Life, Pantheon Books, 1979, pages 186-7
5. "The Creative Sub-Self," Ways of Growth, Herbert A. Otto and John Mann, editors, Pocket Books, New York, 1971, pages 158-9
6. Unpublished correspondence
7. Divine and the Human, page 107

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