Tony Veitch, the former New Zealand TV presenter, kicked his girlfriend in the back and put her in hospital. His assault was of course evil. But what created this evil?
Tony Veitch said that when he assaulted his girlfriend he was "in a dark place". Of course he was right. One person cannot do that to another (except in self defense) without being in a dark place, in their mind. So the real question is - where did that dark place come from?
Those dark places are something that none of us choose. They are a black inheritance handed down to some by a horribly unfair childhood.
When a child grows up treated with gross disrespect and outright abuse, they are traumatised. Trauma changes people, and permanently. True trauma is not actually painful. Because it's so painful that your brain hits the off-switch and blocks the signal - you feel nothing. But that same unfelt pain, now repressed, lives on like a demon within your unconscious and it reconstructs your psychological relationship to the world you live in. Think of the effect as like heavily tinted sunglasses permanently stuck to your face - you see everything differently.
My simple explanation:
http://andrewatkin.blogspot.co...
The truth is all of us have this kind of pain, especially from infancy (and even earlier) which is where we are most vulnerable to serious trauma. But some of us get so much of it that we end up permanently living in a dark place. A place where it makes sense to us that God should wish for people to burn in hell forever, and that the world is full of people who actually deserve it. A mind loaded with deep rage and hate will tend to see a world full of people deserving no respect.
The evil person does not truly feel evil. In some kind of perverse way they feel comfortable and justified in performing their evil acts. Their ultimate "fuck the world" attitude is where they are at, and with that attitude nothing is really evil - or should I say 'wrong'.
Now is this what we're dealing with, with ISIS and their cooperators? Of course it is. Indeed, the fact that they recruit through prisons should tell us where they're at, and that they know their own kind. Terrorists, like most prison inmates, are broken souls. And it takes a dark mind to accept a dark ideology.
I do not make these point to excuse evil people. Of course social cancer needs to be removed, and as quickly as possible. And the more evil a person is the more important it becomes to incentivise them to not act-out. But in respecting the mechanics of evil from more of a psychiatric position, we can know what the real problem is maybe before anything.
The only long-term security against evil, I believe, will be to focus on basic human rights, and especially the rights of children. As long as we continue to allow children to be born into hell, we will continue to manufacture demons.
The violent quran is a mad-man's fairytale that should horrify any self-respecting person, but the ultimate threat is not so much what it says in that book, but whether or not we're creating people of the type who would want to believe in it.