I typed out some things from a book at the weekend that I thought were relevant to evil, making people objects, making them the 'enemy' and so on. For anyone's interest here.
D Rowe, ‘Friends and enemies’ page 336:
“Your enemy must see and acknowledge you. To be held in the gaze of your enemy might put you in danger, but such a gaze can be comforting because it assures you that you exist and are important. Many people, when offered the choice between living comfortably and safely in a society where nobody even acknowledges your existence, much less talks to you, and living in a society where people acknowledge you but only to persecute you, choose the latter…..
….being unacknowledged creates the threat of annihilation. The comfort of paranoia is that someone, somewhere is thinking of you. Unfortunately, the sad truth is that other people think of us only occasionally, if at all. Our favourite topic in our thinking is ourselves and our concerns. Those people who pride themselves on their concern for others are likely to be busy observing themselves being concerned about others rather than giving their full attention to the objects of their concern.”
On trolls. Page 327. “Then there was the deep division that racism created. Pat spoke of how, centuries ago, when people in northern Europe began living in villages, they had to find ways of getting along with one another. So they invented trolls and other dark little people to be the repositories of their fears. The trolls represent those parts of our meaning structure which, if we subjected them to scrutiny, would challenge the validity of other parts of our meaning structure. The Aboriginal people, said Pat, were the trolls of white Australians….”
Page 340 on paranoia: “The enemy, so central to the theory, is no ordinary enemy…..
he is a perfect model of malice…he is a free, active, demonic agent….He wills, indeed he manufactures, the mechanism of history himself, or deflects the normal course of history in an evil way….the paranoid’s interpretation of history is in this sense distinctly personal: decisive events are not taken as part of the stream of history, but as the consequence of someone’s will…..very often the enemy is held to possess some special source of power: he controls the press; he directs the public mind through ‘managed news’….
Such a comprehensive theory with such an enemy at its centre removes all ambiguity and uncertainty from the paranoid person’s view of the world. Moreover, it absolves the person of any responsibility for what happens in the world. The enemy is always to blame…..”
Page 343 on absolutism: “Whenever I spend time with someone who adheres absolutely to some absolute belief, even if that person is not threatening me, I begin to feel oppressed and want to escape…my friend Sandra…said: ‘People with absolute beliefs are like death. They’re anti-life.’
Life is about change. People who hold absolute beliefs and want everyone to conform to those beliefs are against change. They do not even allow for the possibility of change. Therefore they have to force other people to be what they want them to be. Force always involves some degree of cruelty.”
I post these because they meant a lot to me, reading them. Portia, identifying myself
