17: The
Necessity of Evil
How could there be so much evil in the
world?
Knowing humanity, I wonder why there is
not more of it.
Woody Allen, Hannah and Her Sisters
“He
should kill off that whole family,” I said, under
my breath as I found myself cheering for the psycho that had put Jane Seymour
and her teenage daughter and son at risk in a downtown mall during a citywide blackout;
but Penny frowned upon my outburst.
“Undo
that,” she said, in her serious tone of voice.
“I
can’t help myself. They deserve to die for their stupidity,” I replied,
surprising myself; but she insisted, and for decency’s sake I had to take back
my outburst.
But
taking it back didn’t change the way I felt about the movie. It was called Blackout, starring Jane Seymour, and not
more than ten minutes into the movie and I began to seethe at Seymour’s
character and family behavior; but Penny wanted to watch it, and I endured.
On
the whole, I like Jane Seymour, despite a certain je ne sais quoi about her that annoys me (the curve in her smile); but that says more about
me than her. The “mote” in my own eye, and all of that. Nonetheless, she
starred in two other TV movies inspired by real life stories that stretched the
viewer’s mind, and I loved both Yesterday’s
Children (about reincarnation) and Heart
of a Stranger (about a personality change after a heart transplant); that’s
why I thought Blackout would be worth
watching. How wrong I was. Until my epiphany, that is.
“That’s why!” I
exclaimed, as it came to me why I was cheering for the psycho to kill off the
innocent but obtuse family. “Evil is
necessary to wake people up!”
“What
does that mean?” Penny asked, dumbfounded by my new outburst.
“Stupidity
is not a gift of God, sweetheart. That family brought it on themselves for their
insufferable middle class conceit. I hate to say it, Penny; but evil comes to
save us from ourselves. That’s the law of life.”
“I
don’t understand,” she said; and I knew I’d have to work that out in a
spiritual musing to expand upon my insight, because the positive side of evil
was far too precious not to bring into the open. So I went on the Internet and read some
reviews on Blackout, and I was happy
to see that I was not alone in my feelings for Seymour and her family. Like
myself, other viewers found themselves cheering for the psycho killer; and that
confirmed it. So I gave it to my Muse to work out the moral nuances of today’s
spiritual musing…
As I
was walking up the stairs with my first cup of coffee to work on my musing this
morning, the Jungian concept of enantiodromia
popped into my mind; and I knew instantly where my creative unconscious wanted
me to go, and I dreaded the thought.
The
pre-Socratic philosopher Heraclitus used
enantiodromia to designate the play of opposites in the course of time—
“the view that everything that exists turns into its opposite,” said Carl Jung,
who drew upon Heraclitus’ philosophy for his psychology of individuation; and
regardless how hard we try to resist the forces of evil, the most that we can
do to mitigate them is to resolve the play of opposites in our own life. And that’s
what Jane Seymour and her family lacked in Blackout—the
moral awareness of their own evil.
Of
course, I’m talking about evil here in the Jungian sense of our shadow self; the dark, repressed side of
our own personality. As the mystic poet Rumi expressed the evil side of our
personality, “If thou hast not seen the devil, look at thine own self.” But
this is something that writers have known for a long time; to wit, Robert Louis
Stevenson’s novel The Strange Case of Dr.
Jekyll and Mr. Hyde; or one of my favorite artistic revelations of the evil
side of man’s nature, Oscar Wilde’s novel The
Picture of Dorian Grey.
“Our shadow incites us to act out in ways we
never imagined we could and to waste our vital energy on bad habits and
repetitive behaviors,” writes Debbie Ford in The Shadow Effect. “Our shadow
keeps us from full self-expression, from speaking our truth, and from living
the authentic life. It is only by embracing our duality that we free ourselves
of the behavior that can potentially bring us down. If we don’t acknowledge all
of who we are, we are guaranteed to be blindsided by the shadow effect.”
But
as Jung realized, it takes great moral courage to see our own shadow; which I can vouchsafe after
years of “working” on myself with the morally awakening secret way inherent to all spiritual paths, and life itself actually
because when all is said and done life is
the way to a full and complete life through karmic reconciliation; that’s why
we attract evil into our lives, like Jane Seymour and her family did in Blackout.
The
only thing that salvaged this insufferably boring movie was the spontaneous
insight that evil comes into our life to save us from ourselves; but this
demands a fuller explanation, one which I’m hesitant to provide. So, once again
into the breach…
No
one can live the secret way of life and not become aware that karma is
the inherently self-correcting law of life, which sheds a whole new light on
evil; but it wasn’t until I wrote The Lion that Swallowed Hemingway that
I came to see that evil was necessary for the natural process of individuation,
because Hemingway could not have become the great writer that he did had he not
been driven by the dark side of his larger than life personality. In short,
Hemingway mined the dross of his monstrous shadow and turned it into literary
gold.
But the
sad thing about being driven by the shadow
side of our personality is that it can lead to tragic consequences, as it did
to Hemingway; his dark shadow pulled
him into such heavy bouts of “black-ass” depression and paranoia that it finally
drove him to take his own life with his favorite shotgun. But that’s only
because Hemingway couldn’t confront his own shadow
and resolve the conflict in his tortured soul; hence the great stories that he
wrote on the angst of the human condition like “The Snows of Kilimanjaro,” “A
Clean Well-Lighted Place,” and The Old
Man and the Sea that garnered him the Nobel Prize for Literature.
In
itself, our shadow is not evil as
such; it is simply that part of our personality that we relegate to our
unconscious because we don’t want to deal with it consciously—like the big lie that
we told to save face at the Christmas party; or the stupid faux pas that we made on our first date after our divorce that
sabotaged a possible romance. Our shadow is merely an unconscious ego-matrix
of all the unresolved energy of our conscious personality; and the more we grow
in our shadow self, the more
likely we are to suffer the shadow effect.
That’s
what happened in Blackout when
Seymour’s family shadow pulled that
psycho killer into their life to shock them out of their stupefying moral complacency.
I cheered for the psycho killer because I saw the good side of the evil that he
was perpetrating on Seymour and her family; but it doesn’t really matter how
much I dress this up, I don’t think I’ll ever make the point that my spiritual
musing aspires to. As Gurdjieff, whose teaching awakened me to the inherently
self-transcending power of the secret way
of life, used to say, “There is only self-initiation into the mysteries of
life,” and I’m afraid that this just happens to be one of those paradoxical
mysteries; and there’s really not much more I can say.
♥
