World of Love Sess6 - Evil and the Ultimate Enemy

...we don't want to admit that we do not stand alone, that we always rely on something that transcends us, some system of ideas and powers in which we are embedded and which supports us. (Augustine, Kierkegaard, Scheler and Tillich) saw that man could strut and boast all he wanted, but that he really drew his "courage to be" from a god, a string of sexual conquests, a Big Brother, a flag, the proletariat and the fetish of money, and the size of his bank balance.
The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation, but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
... What exactly would it mean on this earth to be wholly unrepressed, to live in full bodily and psychic expansiveness? It can only mean to be reborn into madness. -Ernest Becker ¹

A new, more accurate perspective on evil should show how God's nonviolent and nonmanipulative love can overcome not only evil in individuals but also can eliminate the structural evil which is incarnate in history and in our societies today. In this session we attempt to understand the origin and nature of social evil and the way it interacts with evil in the individual.

The institutionalized forms of power in the external world are mirrored in the structure of the self-systems within individuals.

In religious imagery, the external "principalities and powers" are idols and within the personality are the mirror image demonic powers. These create and reinforce each other. The demonic sub-selves worship external idols and the social powers derive their power from these on-going worshipping congregations.

The way TV, movies, video games and comic books brainwash our children into worship of the “myth of redemptive violence” is a vivid example of this, as described by Walter Wink:

The psychodynamics of the television cartoon or comic book are marvelously simple: children identify with the good guy so that they can think of themselves as good. This enables them to project onto the bad guy their own repressed anger, violence, rebelliousness, or lust, and then vicariously enjoy their own evil by watching the bad guy initially prevail. (This segment of the show actually consumes all but the closing minutes, and thus allows ample time for indulging the dark side of the self.) When the good guy finally wins, the viewers are then able to reassert control over their own inner tendencies, repress them, and reestalibsh a sense of goodness. Salvation is guaranteed through identification with the hero. ²

This makes them worshippers of the society’s view of “redemption through violence,” and perpetuates the scapegoating syndrome from generation to generation:

Once children are indoctrinated into the expectations of a domination society, they may never outgrow the need to locate all evil outside themselves. Even as adults they tend to scapegoat others (the Commies, the Americans, the gays, the straights, the blacks, the whites) for all that is wrong in the world. ³

Demon and idol are not used here in a narrow religious sense. They express, rather, psychological relationships characterizing all people and all dimensions of our lives.

The three examples of irrational, genocidal evil cited above make it seem fantastically utopian to talk about higher values, or growing up into a transcendent existence characterized by ecstasy, intimacy, strength, excellence, love and creativity. Where does this monstrous evil come from?

The Origin of Evil

The late Ernest Becker, a professor of anthropology and psychology, has helped us understand the origins of evil, how it arises from a good impulse, the desire to escape the anxiety related to death and finitude. The attempt to escape is inevitable, he says, given our capacity for imaginatively entertaining infinity and eternity. Becker believed that the attempt to escape, since it is impossible, involves us in all kinds of neurotic manipulations which falsify reality.

In his 1973 work, The Denial of Death, Becker argued that it is the fear of death which underlies all evil, the harm that we do to each other, and the destructive, manipulative, suffocating and oppressing institutions we create.

Throughout this analysis of Becker's theories keep in mind we are not talking about simple fear of dying. We are talking about a deep level fear and loathing of death which sickens life itself, a fear and loathing of having everything we do rendered meaningless by having to die. Religious faith is for many a bulwark against this, but too often even for the faithful, underneath there exist on-going doubts which poison life irself.

And so many of us seek to escape this fear, loathing, and depression by not thinking about death at all. Our society insulates us from such depth of feeling and so also takes the edge off of joy and spontaneity.

In between those who consciously experience this cosmic fear and those who live behind walls to escape it, I'm sure there are some people who are basically so healthy because of how they've been raised that they are puzzled by this analysis.

We have inherited and we invent strategies, he believed, to give us an illusion of immortality created from feelings of transcendent meaning and significance which he often called "glory." The following is a summary of Becker's argument.

Illusions of Immortality

As both Pascal and Kierkegaard saw clearly, human beings are a mixture of angel and beast. We are the only animal which binds time, which has the wine of infinity in its veins, and yet at the same time knows death and annihilation await just down the road.

We experience, in our infancy the heady narcissism of being the center of the universe. This Garden of Eden haunts us throughout our lives. We feel the need to stand out, to be somebody, to know grandeur, heroism, transcendence. On the other hand, we experience our mortality, know that we must die. We drag death around with us daily in our bodies, the experience of excrement, bleeding, aches, and failing powers.

More importantly, we experience the power of other persons and institutions to smear our dreams, control us, reduce us to insignificance, destroy us at will.

In speaking of immortality, Becker is not talking about simple religious belief in life after death. This religious immortality head trip, throughout history, has shown little power to hold back the flood of gall which turns our endeavors bitter.

Becker builds on the work of psychoanalyst Otto Rank, "... in his insistence on the fundamental dynamic of the fear of life and death, and man's urge to transcend this fear in a culturally constituted heroism." ⁴

We are, Becker contends, afraid of life as well as death. For most of us life holds no heroism or excitement of growth and creativity because we are hiding behind neurotic defenses in order not to have to look death in the face. We find our immortality significance, rather, in the military triumphs of our countries, the glory of rulers. Or, we participate vicariously in the glory of movie stars and baseball players, as in the ancient world it was gladiators and chariot racers.

Becker believed that if we became suddenly free of all our illusions and neurotic defenses of this sort we would go mad. Our "character structure" is held in shape and in place by the scaffolding of these immortality and glory systems. Without them we would crumble psychologically.

Sickness from Death

The history of culture, for Becker, is essentially the story of our effort to erect impressive monuments to our importance and to locate some assurance of personal immortality.

It is not just that individuals are sick, living by illusions. Society is made up of institutions which were constructed to operate, in part, as substitutes for immortality, to confer grandeur and meaning where there are none. This neurotic drive to escape finitude undergirds with powerful irrational emotions all the evil we do.

In his last book, Escape from Evil, Becker carried his analysis back as an anthropologist to the beginnings of human culture and traces his thesis to the present. He describes the difference between his two books on this subject as follows:

In The Denial of Death, I argued that man's innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols. In this book I attempt to show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil. ... the two books should be read side by side. ⁵

"If man is as bad as he seems, then either we have to behaviorally coerce him into the good life, or else we have to abandon the hope of science of man entirely." ⁶

He continued to the end to search for a third alternative. He concluded that perhaps, as a long shot, human rationality would assert itself and help turn things for the better. Slight improvements, no utopia.

Evil in History

From the dawn of humanity, self-consciousness itself, Becker believed, nurtured the seeds of evil because awareness of self binds binds humanity to the awareness of the relentless turning of the wheel of time. Heightened self-awareness poignantly anticipates death. The resultant overwhelming anxiety gave rise to the felt need to transcend this inevitable fate through immortality or some substitute for it. This usually took the form both of faith in some supernatural power and at the same time the more tangible substitutes for life after death of our cultural glory structures.

An example is the power of a ruler or priest or that conferred by great wealth. These give the possessor a potent illusion of possessing a grandeur larger than mortal. History is really the story of the development of religion, state, military forces, family, and other structures into cultural substitutes for immortality. Every society is composed of cultural mechanisms, Becker says, to give everyone at least some participation in the illusion of victory over death through being a part of some grand destiny.

Evil then, arises from a good impulse, the attempt to conquer death by participation in a heroic self-image, of being somebody.

Destructiveness

Why do the cultural solutions to the dilemma of death seem to have led to such blood-shed and viciousness as human sacrifice, torture, executions, and wars? Why didn't this impulse lead instead to harmony and peace?

The destructiveness arises, Becker taught, from the need to experience prestige and power on the one hand, and the need, on the other, for expiation of guilt.

The need for power and prestige is obvious. The role of expiation for guilt requires some explanation. This is not the ordinary guilt we feel when we betray a friend. This is a more cosmic guilt, the kind arising from what the Greeks called hubris. It is the guilt which comes from trying to stick out above humanity's station, of challenging, by implication, the glory of the gods. It is the guilt arising from trying to exist and live heroically.

Such guilt is the corollary of the cultural constructions which are designed to gather to themselves eternal and infinite meaning and power. The two go together like the two sides of a coin.

The expiation of this kind of guilt in history seems to have almost always involved the shedding of blood, especially that of the enemy in war.

The Mechanism of Scapegoating

Expiation of guilt is one reason why the victim must die in our place. There is another and perhaps more important reason.

Victims must die in order to certify that the immortality system is intact and potent, because if our national or religious immortality chariot isn't absolutely intact, then it might not carry us to glory. The heretic who questions the true faith and/or the faithful of a neighboring country with a different system must die to assure us that our way is truth, absolute truth, the real and powerful and saving truth which cradles and shelters us from the Void.

The frenzy of destruction and the rejoicing in blood and ritualized murder arise from the fact that few can admit that none of our immortality systems or our glory fixes works at all. They are elaborate deceptions, illusions, rituals with no power to save. No matter how much wealth the rich person accumulates, or how great the power wielded by the king, everyone knows that the relatives will be fighting over the spoils before the body gets cold. Everyone knows that no Reich lasts a thousand years and no family line is assured of perpetuation. Furthermore, insofar as I derive my glory from merging myself with another person or system, to that degree I am less than whole. Borrowed glory is not my glory.

But these are the only buffers people have to shield themselves from the terrible dark and cold of the Void. The frenzy arises from the constant undercurrent of realization that the immortality strategies are illusion. The fact that they cannot save must be denied, hidden, repressed.

Rather than to doubt the meaning-conferring system, the group simply presses all the more hysterically the “just war” against internal and external heresy. Far from being sorrowful, says Becker, these ritual murders become ecstatic rituals of expiation of guilt and celebration of our righteousness.

The institutions and rituals of society parallel the situation of the inner psyche. The greater the threat to the walls of the self or the system the more frenzied and irrational becomes the effort to shore them up and make them impregnable.

Deviants, Becker says, are "dying in our place." ⁷ They are at once scapegoats freeing us of our cosmic guilt for a passing moment at least, and at the same time the certification of the adequacy of our immortality systems and glory fixes, again for the moment. As the victims die, we find our lives perpetuated and enhanced by their death. The blazing bodies of heretics casts light, if briefly, against the inexorable darkness of infinity. But as with all narcotic fixes, the effects do not last.

The most vivid modern illustration is the Nazi Third Reich, with its elaborate funerals for dead heroes of the Fatherland, its genocide against the scapegoat Jews and others, and finally its suicidal, fanatic war against everyone outside the citadel of Aryan glory.

Hitler was not a throw-back to some ancient animosity. Quite the opposite. He was the madness and futility and frenzy of all our immortality/glory systems taken to their fulfillment and backed by modern technology.

The machinations of the political far right and the fundamentalist Christians in the United States are a less violent example of this kind of drive to control. Something more like Whittlers is mirrored in the genocide wars and executions by the Shiite fundamentalists in Iran.

Matthew Fox writes eloquently of the linkage among fundamentalism, fascism, sado-masochism and patriarchal authoritarianism:

An almost fashionable fascism arises wherever religion or society repress the mother principle in the name of patriarchy. Power struggles, not mutual love, support and solidarity, characterize such systems. This same kind of competition can be observed in fundamentalist church structures. The authoritarian character who thrives in such a system "is essentially sado-masochistic," according to psychiatrist Anthony Stevens, and is compelled to categorize others as either strong or weak. He worships the former and has contempt for the latter. ... Every sadist has a masochistic side: the bullying adult is trying to free himself from having been bullied as a child. Such a peson deeply enjoys submission to a leader, God, or fate. ⁷

And he goes on to write:

In a fascist society or religions two areas of the self are aborted or forbidden to develop naturally: sexuality and aggression. Persons are not educated to be true selves but to wear false personas modeled (on the demands of the parents.) ... The child thus instructed often channels these powers of sexuality and aggression into self-loathing and self-contempt. I call this the original sin mentality -- the notion that I came into the world despised, unwanted, ugly and powerless. It may be idsplaced onto a scapegoat, for example, racial minorities, women or homosexuals. It can be transformed into worship of the oppressor who is "always right." Finally, it can be eroticized in sado-masochistic fantasies and practices. This kind of energy pervades patriarchal institutions including the church.⁸

Fox helps us understand more clearly the links among different aspects of evil which continually confuse us. It shows us how self-hate becomes hatred of others and persecution of them. It shows why the macho man, who denies motherly compassion within, comes to divide the world into two categories: my kind and the kind it's OK to kill. It indicates how sexuality becomes linked with rage in the form of sado-masochism. And it shows how this all arises from the seeking of power of being by avenues other than compassionate agape.

Those who hurt and kill are most often people who were abused and neglected as children. This abuse results in feelings of worthlessness and powerlessness and extreme rage over past mistreatment. They live within the narrow boundaries of the self-systems which are still battling or cringing before abusive parents. These may be as narrow as stage 1 and 2, where there is only "me and my suffering and rage" rebounding back and forth off the walls.

These narrow boundaries are threatened over and over every day by exposure to people who live by more out-going values. To defend those walls requires lashing out again and again against others in rituals of demonic sacrifice which assure the abuser that his walls still hold against the invasion of a compassion which would demand giving up rage and revenge for forgiveness.

A perceptive expert on Islam has suggested that the fanatic extremism among fundamentalists of that faith arises from their perception that the modern societies are calling them out-moded, shoving them into a side eddy of history. This sense of insecurity fuels the kind of fanaticism which causes Khomeini to call for the death of the author of The Satanic Letters . More shocking is that so many believers to support that call to defend the honor and truth of Allah. Roger Rosenblatt writes:

Zealotry is essentially a wild act of self-protection. It is born out of doubt and fear, and it rises acutely when people feel they have lost control of their moral environment.⁹

Translate that into Kohlberg language: The narrower and more exclusive the boundaries of the self or culture, the more fanatic will be the energy expended in protecting those boundaries.

As persons advance up the Kohlberg stages, we shall see, they become progressively liberated from the more fanatic and compulsive idolatries, but remain under the control of the more subtle ones. Not until stage 7 do they float completely free. That is, assuming that they advance in all four dimensions of agape and not just expansion.

In primitive societies, and up until the Enlightenment, Becker thought, the immortality systems were largely a matter of ritual and religion. The scale was smaller, the confrontations often more gentle. Competition often took place through ritual conflicts, like potlatches or games between moieties. Intertribal wars were ritualized to minimize the loss of life and great attention was given to saving the faces of the losers, recognizing that they would be just over the hill for a long time to come.

By the time of the Pharaohs, increased population, the scale of administrative problems, threats of invasion, and the maturation of the god-systems, took all the fun out of the immortality games. They became deadly serious. If the Pharaoh needed a tomb to guarantee his survival and comfort in the next world, thousands must die to produce it. To mobilize the nations for big enough glory wars, the national and religious immortality system had to be cranked up to an oppressive peak. There were both psychological and economic reasons for the increasing piles of bodies the glory juggernauts left crushed on the plains of history.

Leaders and Followers

One of the earliest consequences of immortality seeking was inequality. Becker analyzes in depth how money and other symbolic forms of wealth became a piled up surplus demanded by the internal glory dynamics and the social expressions of it. The amassing of wealth and the focusing of power and glory on a few leaders led to a division in society. At the top were a few who represented and embodied glory for everyone else. This was especially the role of the king. All others experienced immortality vicariously through the king and his priests.

This does not ignore the place of religions and the gods, but puts them in proper perspective. Religion has from the beginning been imprisoned in the glory systems and the gods were cut to fit their needs. Exceptions are mainly at the beginnings of the great religions: the Hebrew prophets, individual figures like Socrates, Buddha, Jesus, and the early Christian church before Constantine chained it to the chariots of the Roman Empire.

In Summary

Driven by a depth fear of death and by narcissistic expansiveness, we tend to exhibit a need for self-esteem, once more basic needs are supplied. But this is not the watery self-esteem of Fromm and Maslow. This kind of esteem is cosmic; it has to be huge enough to hold back the ultimate Dark. It is a kind of self-esteem which can only be satisfied by a heroic self-image.

Evil springs from the same roots that make us human and generate the heights of good and love and creativity within us.

Seemingly mad leaders like Hitler and Saddam Hussein do not come to power and stay in power by accident. The masses of people living at Kohlberg's stages one through four, who feel condemned to die in littleness and insignificance after lives of boredom and pain, rise up in time of crisis and put such leaders into power and follow them. They want to believe in the glory of the system. They want to writhe ecstatically in the streets, participating in the god-state which confers long-range meaning and short-term excitement on their tawdry lives. They want to dance in the torch-light parades which hold back, though momentarily, the final darkness. They want to kill and to even to die to relieve the boredom, the guilt, and the agonizing sense of meaninglessness.

The simple optimism of the Enlightenment was misplaced, Becker thought. The sickness of humanity is more deeply rooted. It lurks in the depths of the psyche and the complexity of social institutions. Education by itself is no solution because the problem is not just ignorance. Child-rearing is important, but within the larger environment of deception and violence this art becomes more difficult every year.

In such a world, no child can grow up unscathed. The teenagers who burned an man to death had not rationalized their act as well as did Hitler or the Argentine army officer. The adults wrapped their sadism artistically in a crimson tissue of rationalization centuries old. The children merely believed that the only meaning and glory they could expect to have in their blighted and boring lives is to strut such heroic achievements before their peers in a sub-culture where that is the only immortality substitute they have. Anonymity amidst desperate loneliness is psychologically intolerable. So the worshipping community of their blighted sub-culture offers blood sacrifices to assure the worshippers that they are somebody. The vaster murders of state and rulers continually legitimate these small demonic congregations. All are a part of what Walter Wink calls the Domination Society.

There are those who dispute some of the details of Becker's analysis. But the main point and devastating impact will stand.

The conquest of the fear of death, which can cut the ground out from under evil, is discussed in Session 10. Before we get to that, we must consider further Becker's immortality substitutes in relation to the god-self and Kohlberg's stages.

Evil and Ego Development Stages

Kohlberg's stages involve expansion of the boundaries of the self followed by a pause to assimilate and readjust balance, and then further expansion.

To get another view of this process, let's look at the work of Harvard educational psychologist, Robert Kegan, author of The Evolving Self: Problem and Process in Human Development. ¹⁰ Kegan uses a different paradigm which is complementary to Kohlberg's stages. He also builds on the work of Piaget.

Kegan says more about the origin of evil within and how it can be prevented than Kohberg does.

Kegan sees ego development to also be a matter of stages, but with a slightly different root metaphor. It is important to remember that he is talking about total ego development and not just moral development.

I suggest that human development involves a succession of renegotiated balances or "biologics," which come to organize the experience of the individual in qualitatively different ways. In this sense evolutionary activity is intrinsically cognitive, but it is no less affective: we are this activity and we experience it. ... I am suggesting that the source of our emotions is the phenomenological experience of evolving -- of defending, surrendering and constructing a center. ¹¹

He points to the separation anxiety suffered by an infant between nine and twenty-one months. This he sees to be the reorganization of the infant ego to incorporate the fact of a separate existence from the mother. The child's anxiety at first attending school is paralleled to the college freshman's sometimes suicidal depression relating to feelings of being cut off and abandoned. Crises such as death and separation are far more damaging, he says, if they hit when the person is in the unbalanced state of transition from one ego state to another. At these points we are particularly vulnerable. Mid-life crisis is another example.

The idea of evolutionary truce or evolutionary balance is a root metaphor as is thinking of stages as circles that abruptly expand and then expand again. These are complementary images, each highlighting one aspect of a complex reality.

Kegan speaks of five stages. He puts them in the form of an upward spiral, because the dynamics of the transitions at stages one, three and five are similar. Each of these crises reflects feelings, to some degree, of being cut off and abandoned. The crises at stages two and four, on the other hand, are characterized by anxieties relating more to being submerged in some greater whole. These anxieties express the extremes at the polarity of individuation/autonomy and participation/belonging.

INTER INDIVIDUAL
(Stage 5)

INSTITUTIONAL
Stage 4)

INTERPERSONAL
(Stage 3)

IMPERIAL
(Stage 2)

IMPULSIVE
(Stage 1)

INCORPORATE
Stage 0)

Kegan comes closer than Kohlberg to dealing with evil. He says that the conditions for a successful transition from one evolutionary balance to another with a minimum of trauma, require that the environment (particularly the psychologically important people) perform three functions: (1) It must hold or cradle the person with sympathy and understanding of the pain, confusion and anger involved in feeling no longer a part of the old adjustment and yet not seeing yet where feet are to be set down on secure ground in the new. (2) It must let go of the person at the right time, not try to hold her back. (3) It must stay in place during the transition. The parents and others in the environment at each stage are to encourage more separation and independence and help to bridge the move to the new environment, interpreting what is happening. ¹²

Earlier, I stated that it seems to me that each of Kohlberg's stages looks like a different kind of personality from the preceding stage. Kegan speaks of a qualitative difference and of the transition as a sort of death. In the same analogy, we can speak of arrival at the next stage as a kind of resurrection.

The process reminds me of the mythical town council which voted that they must have a new courthouse, but that it had to be built on the same site, out of the materials of the old building, and that business must continue in the location during construction.

When we shrink back from change or have stressful passages between stages it strengthens the inner demonic self-systems and results in evil. Kegan writes of the need for our environment to cradle us, let us go, and also be an enduring bridge for us to the new. Our key lovers are always deficient in one or more of these three functions, so our passage is imperfect; the unresolved problems are carried forward.

This means that when we must jump to the next stage level, it is without the institutional and personal support we need. Instead of digesting and assimilating all the aspects of the new stage, we drag along with us powerful inner persona. These continue to push the fragmentary values and dreams of the previous stages. We are unwilling and unable to let them go, so we are fragmented. We repeatedly bring forward old recorded tapes of previous relationships, adjustments and values, including the neurotic defenses and immature reactions to events and people. These do not fit the gestalt of the new more expansive environment. They can exist only behind separating boundaries. They are continually at war with the more mature emerging self and with one another. These demonic self-systems are constantly reinforced and elaborated by the glory systems of society and by the inner voices of influential others from the past who worship at those shrines.

Some people draw back, as Samson suggests, and refuse to make the transition. Kohlberg found inmates in prisons who were still living within the tight boundaries of stages 1 and 2. Multitudes -- the majority of our society according to testing -- are seemingly stuck as stages 3 and 4 and not moving at all. Others have found a center of gravity in stage 5, and yet, under stress, are all to ready to play the old tapes and regress in their values to previous stages. Very few have reached stage 6, evidently, and we are not sure anyone is fully at stage 7, if such a stage can be defined.

We live in a society which stretches across all the stages. There are influences from stages 5 and 6, and even stage 7, around us. We can see stage 6 and 7 values in the Sermon on the Mount and the 13th chapter of I Corinthians, for instance, and see them acted out in deeds of persons who momentarily transcend their operational stage level.

Those who confine themselves within the narrower boundaries of the first four stages find themselves forced increasingly to deny the existence and validity of the higher stages. If one is stuck at stage 1 or 2 or 3, or even if those stages remain strongly influential among the fragments of the self, these influences are not merely benign immaturity. These narrow self-systems have to maintain strong walls against constant outside pressure. This leads to the twisting and souring which we call evil. This accounts for the destructiveness which accompanies the winding, lunging path of an adult trying to live by and justify a child's value system. The narrower the boundaries, the more strongly the walls must be built and the more vehemently they must be defended to hold out the anxiety of confronting change which appears to involve stepping into the dark well of death.

This is the main point of connection to Earnest Becker's analysis. To resist the external threat to our psychological integrity, we define those outside as the enemy. They become the heretics who must be resisted. We may then make of this external enemy a sacrificial scapegoat to expiate our own guilt. We project that guilt on the scapegoat and then eliminate it with the victim, though it always returns.

Thus it is that growth refused sours, and can turn into malignant evil. We now understand better the teenagers who burned the old derelict. We can see inside the motivation of the Argentine officer who tortured and raped to the glory of the anti-communist god. We understand better why Hitler turned on the Jews, and why Martin Luther King, Jr., who Kohlberg thought embodied stage 6 universal values, was killed, and the striving for glory of the nobody loner assassin.

On the other hand, growth accepted, leads through suffering to greater strength and freedom. As we will see in subsequent sessions, the person who moves from stage to stage and makes the transitions relatively successfully, gains experience in growth itself, learns techniques for incorporating nonbeing, and how to contain and even use anxiety creatively. We shall see how the only sure defense against the souring and sickening effects of the partial fragment stage remnants is (1) to be closely held in loving community because all growth is actually a gracious gift at the hands of others, if we trace it back far enough; and (2) to step forth daringly into the higher stages, with the best support we can get.

Fear of Life

There is another reason why our growth is irregular and dotted with hesitations, costly retreats, and painful detours. As Becker suggests, we are not only afraid of death, we are afraid of life. The new is terrifying precisely because it confronts us once again with death. We have to die to the old without any clear evidence that we will rise to the new.

The little death of such change triggers within us all the anxiety of the Void.

Paul Tillich's brilliant analysis of the fall into sin begins with the "dreaming innocence" of the primitive person or the child, trembling on the brink of actualization of a particular self-conscious, reflective self. The step of entering into experience and relationships involves tremendous risk. It is fraught with anxiety, both the fear of losing what one has and of dying in the transition. The agony of the little death and resurrection involved in the transition from any stage to the next can be enormously painful.

Tillich speaks of the expansion part of growth as taking in threatening nonbeing. To expand we have to incorporate reality which is threatening to our personality organization. Its effervescence strains our old wineskins.

Edward E. Samson speaks of this as entering into the realm of the transcendent. He describes the terror involved in the venture:

We are cast adrift: no sea, no raft, no shore, nothing but adroitness, loss, engulfment in limitless space. Agony floats, we sense it is we who experience this agony, yet find not referent for that we. The underpinnings which kept us in place and propped us up have been cut out; we fall, fall, fall, fall, fall until there is only a falling, not even a we to whom it is happening.
To be reborn we must first die. Liberation is a process of rebirth. Yet to die is so frightening and so fearful that the pull of looking beyond is forever met by the forces of keeping us well within the grasp of our ego's everyday perspective. It is this fear of death that keeps us from living fully.¹²

This fear of this seeming death causes us to draw back from entering upon a more expansive joyous life. It shapes the loom and provides the energy for the weaving of patterns of destructive evil within us. To this fountainhead we can trace the poisoning of society, the creation of institutions dedicated to providing dizzying glory fixes and seductive substitutes for immortality.

Evil is nonbeing; it is based on illusion; it is self-defeating and self-destructive. It is inevitably expressed in styles of life which lead to frustrating dead ends. Evil can eventually be eliminated because the true, wholistic self has the four-fold ontological structure and inner strength to overcome death.

In the end, the demonic self-systems are put to death by the ecstatic exhilaration of the unlimited perspective and the joy of creativeness in love, together with others, out of a plenitude of strength and resources.

The next session offers a picture of this highest, grandest, whole person.

Questions for Thought

1. If evil is nonbeing, how is it so strong in individuals and society?

2. Consider or discuss: How does evil in the individual influence evil in society, and vise versa?

Contact the author: vjross22@hotmail.com

1. The Denial of Death, The Free Press (MacMillan), 1973, pages 55-6,66
2. Engaging the Powers, Discernment and Resistance in a World of Domination, Fortress Press, Minneapolis, 1992, pages 18,9
3. ibid., page 22
4. Escape from Evil, The Free Press (Macmillan), NY, 1975, page xvii
5. ibid., page xvii
6. ibid, pages xvii-xviii
7. The Coming of the Cosmic Christ, op. cit., page 28
8. ibid., page 29
9. "Zealots with Fear in their Eyes," U. S. News and World Report , February 27, 1989, page 10
10. Harvard University Press, 1983
11. The Evolving Self, op. cit., pages 80, 81
12. Ego at the Threshold, pages 171, 172

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