The Denial of Evil
Living in blissful ignorance
Evil is real. As real as you are.
There is currently a New Age tendency to deny the reality and power of evil. They are what you might call a “flight into the light” mode. It is to deny the evil we all possess and repress it and only see the blissful light that we are.
The tendency to deny evil is very tempting because it requires so little in the way of either self-reflection or action. It is the denial of our own destructive nature. It’s to live wearing the false veil of a saint. It is to repress and eliminate the latter part of the saying: “we all are both saints and sinners”.
Who has not, when standing with someone by an abyss or high up on a tower, had a sudden impulse to push the other over? And how is it that we hurt those we love although we know that remorse will follow?
— Robert Moore
The denial and its consequences
This “flight into the light” mode enables us to continually deny the seriousness of the situation, and how we as individuals participate in our own destruction, and the destruction of our communities and planet. We can see the consequences of such denials all around us, manifesting at an exponential rate, and it will continue to do so unless we acknowledge the existence of the evil in all of us and face it with courage.
We must also avoid the popular tendency to find another human being to act as a scapegoat for our evil acts. Someone who can carry our shadow projections and when they are imprisoned, tortured, burned, bombed, and so forth, can be used as ritual sacrificial victims to give us clean passage to heaven. So that we can be seen as a “saint” and hide the shame of being a “sinner”.
We are trying to find a Christ to carry our sins so that we don’t have to. So that we can be allowed a safe passage to heaven when we sacrifice him.
Sexism has been one of the successful strategies for finding a scapegoat. Both men and women project their shadows and evils, of which they are ashamed of, onto the opposite sex. They both blame each other for the destruction and the evil that is so prominent in our world today.
Both genders and persons of all classes, races, religions, and sexual preferences participate in the experience of evil, and all are responsible for its perpetuation no matter what you may tell yourself to feel good.
we prefer to deny evil rather than to face it, because we see little possibility of overcoming it.
— Robert Moore
Nature and dynamics of evil
In his book “Facing the Dragon Confronting Personal and Spiritual Grandiosity”, Robert Moore gives us a list of assumptions that the ancient wisdom traditions held about the nature and dynamics of evil.
- Evil is a reality with an agency of its own.
- The presence of evil can be felt in the denial of the individual and society as a whole. We deny the existence of evil and escape into a fantasy of being innocent which Paul Tillich called “dreaming innocence.”
- The chief tactic of evil is to lie. It presents the human individual and the community with a false, deceptive representation of an “all good” reality.
- Evil disguises in the form of innocent, good, or at least justified, and have a seductive attractiveness.
- Being near this evil enchantment causes you to lose your powers of discernment and vigilance, and your spiritual and moral light grows dim. Its influence is contagious. Tribal peoples around the world recognized this danger and built elaborate systems of taboo and ritual “insulation” against it.
- An evil presence can get inside your community, family, home, and body, and even into your psyche before you realize the danger exists. It is already “in the house” by the time you realize you have a problem.
- Once inside, evil begins to erode the foundations of personal and social life by presenting itself as the true center of life. It functions as a “black hole,” a powerful vortex that, in effect, attacks Being itself.
- Evil multiplies itself on your energy, your lifeblood, your creativity. It co-opts your good and often magnificent energies and potentials, and makes them serve hatred, sadism, oppression, and the destruction of health and life. It recruits and diverts the energies of life and creativity into the service of death. It captures your love and turns it into lust. It captures your legitimate assertiveness and turns it into sadism. It captures your knowledge and uses it for deception, greed, and antisocial manipulation. It captures your desire to nurture and turns it into domination and oppression.
The presence of evil is not simply an idea or an absence of good. It is an active, aggressive, anti-life, destructive force that attacks the health and vitality of everyone around it.
The way
So what can we do? How do we face evil?
Well, the first step would be to acknowledge it. To see evil as it is. To know that we all have an angel looking out for us, but we also have our own personal demons assigned to us.
After this realization, we are ready to confront evil. When we come face to face with evil, we enter the territory of spiritual warfare. With courage and light on our side, we face the evil head-on. This is what life is, a constant struggle between good and evil. Our whole being is nothing but a fight against the dark forces within ourselves.
Evil can never be completely annihilated, but we can strive to bring a balance in our psyche and the world outside by consciously recognizing and dealing with it rather than unconsciously following its commands.
To conclude this, I will quote Robert Moore:
To the extent that you refuse to acknowledge the enemy within you, then emotionally you must project it somewhere else. In Jungian terms, you refuse to admit, “Yes, I have a shadow, and it is part of my problem, and it is part of your problem, and I am trying to deal with it the best I can.” One of the borderline dynamics that results is that you have to expel your badness onto someone else. You can do a whole psychology of religious tribalism by looking at people who deny the badness within themselves and try to put it all out there on other people. That is one of the key dynamics in how the archetype of spiritual warfare operates.
It is not enough, however, to say like some Jungians that the evil is all inside, and any trouble I have with you is just because I have it in my shadow. “If I could just integrate my shadow then I would see you for the wonderful, complete, perfect person that you are.” That is not true either. Such a position taken to extreme would suggest that if the Jews had just integrated their shadows in the late thirties, then Adolf Hitler would have seemed like a nice fellow. That can’t be right. No matter how much the people in the ghettoes integrated their Jewish shadows, Hitler was still an objective reality out there in the real world trying to kill them. Remember the old joke, “Just because you are paranoid does not mean they are not out to get you.” That is true in psychology as well.
