Another clue comes from how, in this interplay, these forces work through human beings-- as if the forces were the master and the people their instruments.
Some people reject the ideal of evil because they believe it takes what is happening inside human beings and projects it out onto some beyond us that works to drive human events in a twisted and destructive direction.
And accordingly, I have heard liberal and enlightened people say things like, "This supposed 'evil' is just a projection of what is really just inside us as human individuals."
Just as a hen has been described as an egg's way of creating another egg, so also can we human "individuals" be seen as our culture's way of perpetuating certain patterns. Through our socialization and our life-experiences generally our culture creates us -for better and for worse-- in its own image.
History isn't made just by people; it's also made by forces.
This is the vital dimension that wasn't captured by talking about the ruthlessness or amorality of individuals, and that led me to use the "e-word." I saw something about the way that those forces operate, about how patterns can lurk in the cultural interstices, awaiting the chance to impose themselves again.
When I saw, for example, how that manipulative genius, Karl Rove, effected his seduction of many traditionalist Americans, I recognized an old pattern""one used a century before to seduce poor whites in the Jim Crow South.
In the Jim Crow South, and now again in Karl Rove's America, the leaders inflame passions around peripheral issues to distract their supporters from what the leaders are really doing with their power. A century ago, the hot-button distraction was racial purity. Now, the leaders whip people up about issues of moral purity. In both cases, unjust leaders use deception to exacerbate divisions useful to magnifying their own power and wealth.
Dark patterns lurk in the system, like some dormant virus, ready to erupt when the culture's immune system weakens.
Good and evil as forces contending to spread their patterns
Wholeness begets wholeness; division begets division. The patterns compete in the human arena.
Wholeness within the human being consists of harmony among the elements of the psyche. The crucial challenge here is to reconcile the natural energies of the human creature with the need for order in the overarching human system. But when the surrounding order imposes too harsh and punitive a morality -when the culture wages war against the creature""such harmony becomes impossible.
Brokenness begets brokenness.
The broken regime of racial persecution in the American South-as Lillian Smith showed in her classic Killers of the Dream-- built upon the broken psyche of white Southerners brought up with harsh moral strictures that prevented the harmonious integration of natural sexual impulses. The forbidden impulses were then projected out to be rediscovered -and punished""in the darker race.
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