NB: The phrase above is the title of a paper by Professor Julia Annas, published in 2005. Reference details are available here: Wickedness as Psychological Breakdown; those interested may obtain the full text via institutional channels. I post it as the title for a few reflections on the tidal wave of revengeful mania sweeping through the world. My impulse is the excellent article by Mukul Kesavan on the psychological bi-polarity of American politics; wherein he shows his readers what should be obvious, with the phrase ‘America’s shapeshifting oneness.’ That ideological talk is sophistry is clear enough, what with the glaring deceit which is commonplace in political life. That is has become manic in recent times, reminiscent of the 1930’s is something alarming and we all need to take note of it.
The citations below; along with some posts on this blog are meant as a prompt for us to think with care about what is unfolding before us: genocide in Gaza/Palestine, combined with the news just in, of the avuncular Godfather Biden authorising the use of deadly American missiles by Ukraine against Russia. Both the USA and Britain still live in a dreamy haze of imperial domination of the globe. But the deadly arms industry makes money by the billions while the world’s most pressing ecological and social problems are left unaddressed. The young and the dispossessed will pay the price for all this nihilist destruction, not the moronic gerontocrats who control the rotting carcass of global institutions.
We should wake up and forge resistance movements across the globe without regard to nationalism or religion, relying solely on human solidarity, to stop the spread of this militarist poison which has now become an ‘Enemy System‘. DS
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It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth, impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor, blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.
Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character:
Joseph Heller, Catch-22, 1961
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The will cannot will backwards… That time does not run backward, that is his wrath; ‘that which was’ is the name of the stone he cannot move. And so he moves stones out of wrath and displeasure, and he wreaks revenge on whatever does not feel wrath and displeasure as he does. Thus the will, the liberator, took to hurting; and on all who can suffer he wreaks revenge for his inability to go backwards. This, indeed this alone, is what revenge is: the will’s ill will against time and its ‘it was.’“
Verily, a great folly dwells in our will; and it has become a curse for everything human that this folly has acquired spirit:
Nietzsche, in Thus Spake Zarathustra (1978); p 139-140
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Good is self-existent, evil is not. It is like a parasite living in and around good. It will die of itself when the support that good gives it is withdrawn. Mahatma Gandhi, Calcutta, September 1947
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The Gulag Archipelago: An Epic of True Evil
Psychologists of Evil: Nietzsche and Dostoevsky on the Darkness of the Soul
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Mobarak Haider on Pakistan’s polity: War is a tragedy but a society at war with itself and everything around, with no objective and no remorse is more than a tragedy; it is a total disaster.
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The late Munich comedian, Karl Vallentin–one of the greatest of the rare race of metaphysical clowns–once enacted the following scene: the curtain goes up and reveals darkness; and in this darkness is a solitary circle of light thrown by a street-lamp. Vallentin, with his long-drawn and deeply worried face, walks round and round this circle of light, desperately looking for something. ‘What have you lost?’ a policeman asks who has entered the scene. ‘The key to my house.’ Upon which the policeman joins him in his search; they find nothing; and after a while he inquires: ‘Are you sure you lost it here?’ ‘No,’ says Vallentin, and pointing to a dark corner of the stage: ‘Over there’. ‘Then why on earth are you looking for it here?’ ‘There is no light over there,’ says Vallentin.
History, maybe, is the circle of light. But the key we are looking for is likely to be in a place unillumined by the street-lamps.
Erich Heller: The disinherited mind: essays in modern German literature and thought (1952) p 154
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The Legitimization of Evil Will Remain with Israelis Long After the War in Gaza Ends
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Anthropologically, there is an immense difference between a society in which traditional criteria of good and evil remain valid, no matter how often they have been violated, and one in which these criteria have been abrogated and have fallen into oblivion:
Leszek Kolakowski; Modernity on endless trial, p 47
The criterion which makes the difference between a great man and a popular one consists in the great man’s searching for what is nobly human in the masses, to raise them by its means, whereas a merely popular man looks for what is low and brutal so as to raise himself
Rabbi J.S. Bloch on Karl Lueger; My Reminiscences, Vienna-Berlin 1923, p. 233. P 84, ZS
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Michael Brenner: Lowering the Throne of America’s Delusion
Udi Greenberg: Freud and the Miseries of Politics
Facing three global crises, the American empire may be nearing final collapse
Is America like the Soviet Union in 1990?
Joe Biden, the National Security State, and Arms Sales
Nouriel Roubini: The US is now the focus of global instability
Mukul Kesavan: Photobombing death and the banality of evil / Evil, framed. By SLAVENKA DRAKULIĆ
The invasion of Iraq was a turning point on to a path that led towards Ukraine
Formula Pinochet: Chilean Lessons for Russian Liberal Reformers during the Soviet Collapse
Unsolicited thoughts from an elder citizen
The Oceanic Circle: Talk on the occasion of Mahatma Gandhi’s 155th birthday
After the truth-shower 