Sanity Rising: Unnecessary Evil

'We cannot do evil to others without doing it to ourselves.'
-Joseph Desmahis

In East Africa a young man runs around the corner of a hut in his village. He quickly realizes his mistake as he sees more villagers ahead. He turns around just as others knock him to the ground.

The crowd grabs his arms and legs and carries him to a wooden platform. His screams are ignored and his struggling is useless.

Without ceremony, a fellow tribesman raises a machete and strikes a swift blow to the back of the young man's neck, severing the head from the body. The villagers squeal with glee.

Two other tribesmen proceed to butcher the man's body into smaller pieces. Several women pick up the body parts and place them in numerous baskets.

Later that afternoon, just before sunset, men of the tribe plant the assorted body parts in their various fields. Afterwards they return home, singing as they go. They're confident of a splendid crop next season.

(From Chapter Two)

'Faced with the choice between changing one's mind and proving that there is no need to do so, almost everyone gets busy on the proof.'
-John Kenneth Galbraith

Now that Evil has gone back into the shadows, let's continue the story about the tribesman who was beheaded at the start of Chapter I. Here's the rest of the story attributed, in part, to anthropologist Radcliff Brown's accounts.

Some missionaries to South Africa wanted to teach the natives better farming. To hurry the process they hit upon the idea of selecting one promising man from each village and teaching each one modern techniques. They would then be sent home to use the better methods. The idea was that the rest of the tribe would follow their example.

One of the young men went back to his tribe in East Africa and dutifully plowed his field instead of punching holes with a stick. He cultivated his crop and soon had a splendid showing, especially since it happened to be a dry year and no other field than his was able to yield a crop at all.

This fact naturally caused some uneasiness among the people. Now at such times it is usual for talk of witchcraft to be started in the community. Of course there had been uneasiness and murmurings from the first indications of the use of practices not sanctioned by the ancestral GODS.

So, without any ceremony or any considerable discussion, the people took the innovator, cut him into small pieces, and planted a piece in each field of the tribe. The next year everybody had a good crop.

In Chapter I, I employed a personification of evil. It's a way to make a subject interesting and put points across. However, you would be misled if you took my characterization of Evil as a living being literally. In reality, evil has no life. Rather, it is a result of our actions. Until we accept this fact, we resemble the prisoners in a cave from the following interpretation of an allegory of Plato's The Republic.

Imagine people tied up in a way so that they can only look straight ahead. All they see are shadows on the walls. Since these people have never seen anything but shadows, they naturally assume the images are real. For them nothing else exists.

Imagine now that one of the prisoners is set free and taken out of the cave into the sunlight. The sights would be difficult to accept and he might be too frightened to look at the real world.

If compelled to look at the light itself would that not pain his eyes and would he not look away and flee to those things which he is able to discern in the shadows? Would he not regard them as more clear and more exact as the objects illuminated by the sun?

Eventually the freed person realizes that the images he'd seen on the cave walls were only shadows of the world around him that he now views so clearly. He's happy about his own altered circumstances and feels sorry for the prisoners left behind.

He returns to the cave and is first overwhelmed by the darkness. His temporary blindness causes him to bumble around in his old world. The others might say he'd come back with his eyes ruined. As he tells the others of his discoveries they refuse to believe him. They know only the world of shadows and have no reason to doubt that their world is real. He's not the same old companion and they resent the news he brings about another reality. They might even kill the person who challenges their cherished beliefs.

My purpose in telling the above story is to inspire you to at least reconsider your traditional beliefs about evil. However, I must make something very clear. I am not anti-religion, anti-business, anti-establishment, anti-lawyers, or anti-anything except the three destructive emotions of resentment, envy, and fear that are covered later in this chapter. For the record, I believe in GOD. What I'm trying to do is tell you what I've seen outside the cave. When what I've seen conflicts with the shadows, your preconceptions, you may resist and resent. All I ask is that you keep an open mind.