When I took care of Constantine Oprisan in the cell, I was very happy. I was very happy because I felt his spirituality penetrating my soul. I learned from him to be good, to forgive, not to curse your torturer, not to consider anything of this world to be a treasure for you. In fact, he was living on another level. Only his body was with us—and his love. Can you imagine? We were in a cell without windows, without air, humid, filthy—yet we had moments of happiness that we never reached in freedom. I cannot explain it. – Rod Dreher quoting Father George Calciu, in Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Dissidents in Christian Countries. (UK Edition) (p. 218). Kindle iOS version. (My emphasis.)
The argument against belief in at least a benevolent and good God, or belief in any sort of rational order to the cosmos at all – from the sheer suffering of the innocent, from the sheer darkness of this world – I’ve never taken issue with. I find it the most powerful, and to be honest unanswerable repost to theism. […] As Yvonne Karmatzov[?] argued, given the sheer enormity of the evils we’re talking about, and their reality in the present, deferring the justification for this to some presumed eschatological future doesn’t make the cost any more morally bearable. […] I regard the problem of evil as irresoluble in the terms available to us. – David Bentley Hart.
Story distils truth
The Devil’s hatred flows from his pain, the pain that must attend life because total control will never come. The future that Satan wills is not the future Satan gets. His is a miserable rage, miserable because it is lonely, and lonely because pain hated can birth only dead-end rage. Misery craves company, and in that company seeks partners in crime; it must be right, desperately wants to prove it is right, and in that attempt silence at last its secret and unending doubt. Unwittingly, it metastasises misery and calls its flourishing good. Pain radiates ever outwards from a satanic heart, flickering, blind, creeping across the face of the earth in search of resolution. But it can only fail, right at the tip of its tale, and fall back into the merciless imperfection of God.
God is love. But we are a long way from knowing, feeling, and appreciating what this means. The great distance between us and that knowing cannot be spanned by the intellect. No technology can pave the way. My own guess is that the character of that great distance is described by the command, “Love thine enemy”. It means, in a way, love your pain.
“Mortal, love your suffering! Fear God and love your suffering!”
The curious interplay of humility and power
“The study of economics pushes people toward a selfish extreme,” he tells me after his class lets out. More to the point, he says, “The scholarship of economics is responsible for spreading a contagion of greed.” – Kravetz, Lee Daniel (quoting Adam Grant). Strange Contagion: Inside the Surprising Science of Infectious Behaviors and Viral Emotions and What They Tell Us About Ourselves (pp. 94-95). [Added this quote 12.3.2025]
The meek, it is said, will inherit the earth.
If we want to understand the truth of this Biblical prediction, the key, surely, is to understand “meek”. Having looked into the deeper meaning of this famous phrase, I think it reasonable to suggest that “meek” here denotes a person who accepts reality as it is, all of it, is prepared to work constructively within the realms of the possible. A meek person sees with clear eyes and kneels before the truth. A meek person is not hubristic, not a fantasist. A meek person knows reality is not what they dream it were or command it to be, and so acts properly in the world, i.e. lovingly, i.e. towards healthful outcomes. Meek, in other words, is a far cry from timid.
(Of course there are other explanations and definitions of “meek”, but this is the one I am adopting for this article.)
One of the main qualities a human needs to become a robust vessel for love, to be able to fully forgive even the most terrible of crimes, is humility. Humility – which I see as functionally, or perhaps operationally, synonymous with meekness – also prevents dehumanisation, enables constructive dialogue, is soul food for healthy community. And yet in a world of seemingly endless convenience and affluence, humility, in its immature guise as idle passivity, seems to guarantee a drifting away from reverential awareness of this loving state of being, a drift that steadily corrodes societal health and cohesion. In other words, it’s hard to appreciate meekness/humility until terrible times are upon us, terrible times brought about, I assert, in part due to our collective failure to appreciate and support meekness/humility throughout our various Western/‘liberal’ cultures.
Perhaps the reason for this lies in the unfortunate paradox hinted at in the above paragraph. On the one hand we have the mysterious human need for suffering as a whip for developing nobility of character. On the other, the power we imagine we need to build the world that can end our terrible suffering creates the very comforts that set in motion the rot that powers our exponential hunger for ever more comfort. Comfort proves to be addictive because we quickly lose our ability to survive without it. As the saying goes, “good times make weak men.” This paradox is what I think of as the power trap.
Staying truly meek – maintaining a healthy relationship with reality – takes continuous effort, much like tending a garden. The rewards are nebulous and in the future. Similarly, “eternal vigilance is the price of liberty”. This knowledge is clearly out there, and yet on the whole we seem incapable of tasting how important it is until it’s too late, doubly so while pampered by technological conveniences and the comforts they bring.
As history shows, should moral drift continue uncorrected for too long, a whole people can lose its mind. Neoconservative/neoliberal obsession with global hegemony is one form of this, Soviet communism another, Hitler’s fascism another, corporate and billionaire power yet another. Again and again, unspeakable tragedy and evil spill across the pages of history.
Creatures of power and control, we civilised humans seem very good at discovering new ways to grossly undervalue the profound wealth promised by meekness, even though history has mercilessly exacted a terrible price for our folly. I choose to know we actually don’t want it this way, that we’d rather build a nobler, more honest world. I think we’ve fallen into a trap and aren’t sure how to get out. I think meekness/humility is a big part of the answer.
So, are there any meek people in today’s world we might query? We could ask them if are they inheritors of the earth, and perhaps learn what that means in practice. Rod Dreher did precisely this and recorded his findings Live Not By Lies: A Manual For Dissidents in Christian Countries.
Those rare few who suffer greatly and overcome it to tell the tale – such as Father George Calciu, quoted above – emanate an “intense inner peace” (Live Not By Lies, p. 224). Is this peace the inheritance of which the Bible speaks? The intensely peaceful emit unmistakable love, wisdom and soul-health. And though of course the living and undeniable truth of this phenomenon will always defy consensus definition, aren’t these the qualities we ought to develop if we want a healthier relationship with evil, one that greatly inhibits its ability to metastasise into collective storms of wanton destruction? Shouldn’t we take all this more seriously?
In the presence of the truly peaceful, the truly meek, we are profoundly moved. This strongly suggests humans innately know both the character and validity of meekness, of humility. In other words, true meekness is a real phenomenon humans (and perhaps all life) are attuned and drawn to, revere, and can attain.
Why, then, do we insist on undervaluing it?
- Because it is elusive.
- Because we civilised humans deeply mistrust letting go and falling back, faithfully, into the merciless imperfection of it all.
- Because suffering – humility’s apparent progenitor in a world of creature comforts – is too unwieldy a phenomenon to implement as a measure for fostering and sustaining humility with mechanical reliability.
Consequently, insidiously, because our civilisational evaluation reflexes understandably favour the concretely measurable over the mysterious and ineffable, we have inexorably measured our way into knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. Civilisation, among many other things, weaves a womb of cynicism. Cynicism and genuine humility seem to me mutually exclusive. And yet cynicism hollows us out, and in so doing generates a countervailing need for health, authenticity, and peace, qualities that we need humility to attain and sustain.
Humility is clearly a positive quality; it cannot lust after power, and seeks to help others flourish and thrive, to mature into full adulthood and take responsibility for their lives. It also has the courage to act when it has discerned what needs to be done. No matter how elusive it is, I believe it profoundly unwise to discard humility’s immeasurable value from our sociopolitical ruminations.
I think we are all aware of how these fundamental contradictions have left deep marks on civilisational development, and I think we all intuit their curious interplay, dimly or clearly, in our own turbulent development as individuals. So once again at this blog I ask:
Is it naïvely idealistic, or even cruel, to imagine and advocate that we re-embrace and revere true meekness, true nobility of character, as a guiding principle in our lives?
If it is, must we instead meekly accept dehumanisation, war and their evils as unavoidable features of our existence forevermore? Would we be wiser to not waste any more time figuring out how to be meek? Or do endlessly adapted pragmatic compromises, as manifested in ever-evolving international laws, organisations and peace treaties, set up by politicians and lawyers, create the best of all possible worlds?
Or does this paradoxical line of questioning mislead?
The West cracks as reality’s vice tightens
I’m quite convinced, in the UK these days, that we only reward failure. – Ian Proud, member of HM Diplomatic Service from 1999 to 2023Pournelle’s Iron Law states that in all cases, the [most incompetent] will always gain control of the organization, and will always write the rules under which the organization functions. – Source
Hegemonic ambition is not meek; it refuses to bow to reality. Hegemony is cracking apart as reality breaks through. Western hubris reached for the whole world again, and is falling back empty handed again.
A few days ago (on 28 Feb 2025), President Trump and Vice President Vance clashed with Zelenskyy in front of live cameras in the Oval Office. The angry squabble seems to mark the end of Zelenskyy’s moment in the sun, and with it hasten Ukraine’s now inevitable collapse.
From the moment I began looking into the Russia-Ukraine conflict in August 2022, it stank of something incomprehensibly foul and historically pivotal. After two and a half years closely following this soul-destroying tragedy, I am now persuaded it was set in motion by relentless US/UK/Western interference in Ukraine as a hubristic means of getting sufficient control of Russian subsoil assets, in order to recapitalise its existentially desperate banking sector. To this end, Putin has been demonised by the West for decades as global enemy number one; he is a highly competent defender of Russia’s sovereignty and interests and as such has thwarted the West at almost every turn.
Because the UK/EU’s economies have become too financialized and/or bogged down in bureaucratic kludge, and because the perpetual economic growth the banking system requires – by design – is now impossible for them to sustain absent a huge influx of fresh capital, elements of their political classes / permanent states / banking powers determined long ago to topple Putin shortly after the 1990s scavenging of the Soviet carcass ground to a halt, with US neocons on board as part of their own grand hegemonic plans. Hence continued NATO eastward expansion since the collapse of the USSR despite US promises to the contrary, hence dogged demonisation of Putin et al., and hence the increasingly uniform chorus of reporting by Western media on this pivotal geopolitical tension. One need only examine the overtly antidemocratic events now underway in Romania to get a sense of how vital access to Russian subsoil assets is to the moribund West.
But all their plans are coming to a tragically costly naught; there is nothing more hubristic and pathocratic than systemically required perpetual economic growth, which is the dynamic of empire. The EU/UK ‘alliance’ is now coming apart at the seams as one set of leaders delicately begins its tricksy political dance of obeisance at the court of King Trump, while the other set triples down on its desperate hubris with plans to rearm, and “pacify” (defeat) Russia militarily. Germany, France, Holland and Austria could hardly be further from a stable political government acting in accordance with the will of their peoples, while Croatia, Hungary and Slovakia have taken decisive turns away from UK/EU intransigence and Romania, Georgia and Serbia are moving strongly – or trying to – in a similar direction.
This resolute inability to accept an unwanted reality is characteristic of a psychopath’s terror of having his abnormality exposed to the world (“tearing down his Cleckley mask”), as we will see in the next section. The possibility that this inability is systemic to the EU leadership due to over-commitment and poor-quality leadership in a high-stakes geopolitical drama, rather than evidence of actual clinical psychopathy in each of the relevant leaders, is one I find interesting. Łobaczewski’s Political Ponerology, which I reference heavily in the next section, doesn’t address it, at least not explicitly. But I intuit that a kind of group pathology can indeed take hold due to circumstances alone, though am unaware of any studies of this possibility in the political space. Perhaps The Corporation: The Pathological Pursuit of Profit and Power is a strong argument that situational or emergent group psychopathy is real. Pournelle’s Iron Law describes an underlying dynamic that might drive such a process.
Is a cold war between the EU/UK and the US now on the cards? Are the EU and UK establishments desperate and ‘psychopathic’ enough to dare such a thing? The extraordinary amount of political, financial, military, media and even psychological capital invested in the grotesque Ukrainian folly will make its unwinding very messy, so messy that I can imagine hostilities persisting doggedly until something fundamental breaks.
Peace between Ukraine and Russia and a return to good relations between the US and Russia promise harsh geopolitical and geoeconomic demotion for the UK/EU ‘alliance’. As I reasoned in previous articles on this topic, the EU/UK risks becoming an economic and geopolitical backwater if it fumbles this epochal historical moment. The relevant Western establishments show absolutely no sign of meekness, and every sign of hubristic, pathocratic insanity. Based on their current behaviours and commitments, I predict they will fumble; it’s too late for an alternative outcome. I hope UK and EU citizens become alert to this grave danger, namely that powerful and desperate forces are being cornered into choosing militarism over peace, become aware that this path would prove disastrous, and stop it before it explodes.
On the positive side, it is highly probable humanity is now past the existential global danger threatened by the Biden administration’s hubristic fantasies; the Trump administration has stated clearly that the unipolar moment is over, and initiated what will prove protracted and difficult negotiations with Russia – and China and India – to establish a stable multipolar system. I wish all parties well in this endeavour. Peace is not war, and I choose peace.
Another positive is that popular trust in Western authorities continues to evaporate. More and more people want to understand, for themselves, what is going on. A skeptical renaissance is finding its feet on the uneven rubble of this UK/EU/neocon collapse. It is a passionate, anarchic, creative, courageous and meritocratic – though at times ill disciplined – attempt to unearth and examine as much as possible of what has been hidden from view for too long, to make sense of the basic problem, to stop the rot, and to somehow co-create something healthier, saner, more humane. The pressure and electrifying speed of events is driving this endeavour.
For this endeavour to bear good fruit, meekness must be given a central role; we see the catastrophic consequences of unchecked pathocratic incompetence in the tragic destruction of Ukraine and precipitous decline of EU/UK relevance. The Trump administration has made a rapid and welcome return to reality. If Europe and the UK are going to survive the whirlwind they sowed, a similar return is required: meek recognition of, and sober familiarity with, current geopolitical realities. What we stand to inherit if we learn to be meek and vigilant in sufficient numbers is sanity. Sane, managed correction will of course be painful, but far less painful than chaotic collapse.
History moves in mysterious ways. At certain thickly tangled junctures, a sledgehammer is the right tool for the job, just as a slap in the face is sometimes the perfect corrective. But can Trump’s brute hammer blows lead to nobler outcomes, such as of the quality evoked by the quote that heads this article? I want to believe the potential is there; not only does the skeptical endeavour touched on above show great promise, Trump is clearly provoking some much-needed soul searching across Europe:
What is the deep reason for Europe's bewilderment in the face of a devastated Ukraine? Due to its excessive Eurocentric superiority complexes, the EU failed to see, know, or understand that Russia could crush it with a single blow... The hypothesis of the European Union (and actually the absolute certainty) was that Russia is very weak, and Europe is very strong. The war in Ukraine demonstrated Europe's military incompetence compared to Russia. The initial hypothesis was incorrect. Europe bases its policy on strength. Lacking strength, it was left without a policy...
EU countries are confused, as they cannot answer the question: ‘If Russia can easily crush us, then what is our place in the world?’ A traumatised person, when there is no way out, becomes disoriented and often falls into despair.
This is precisely what is happening with Macron, Meloni, Ursula von der Leyen, and other European leaders. They are silent or stammering. European leaders are paralysed by Trump’s decisions because they do not know what to do in this unfamiliar world: a world where the European Union has no deterrent against Russia. It is as if European leaders only learned today that Russia has six thousand nuclear warheads, which it will use in the event of a war with Europe...
In psychoanalysis, the first step in dealing with trauma is to reconnect with reality. Here it is: Russia has politically destroyed the European Union. The European Union is politically dead. It will have to rebuild from this tragic reality. Negotiations between Trump and Putin are a daily humiliation for Europe... It will take time to realise its inferiority compared to Russia. – Professor Alessandro Orsini. Trump-Putin. The EU no longer understands its place in the world. Published by “il Fatto Quotidiano”, seen on Twtter/X. (My emphasis.)
The next section draws on material from Political Ponerology by Andrew Łobaczewski to shed a little light on how we got into this mess.
The deep understory of ponerology and psychopathy
Let us remember that [an essential psychopath’s] typical behavior defeats what appear to be his own aims. Is it not he himself who is most deeply deceived by his apparent normality? Although he deliberately cheats others and is quite conscious of his lies, he appears unable to distinguish adequately between his own pseudointentions, pseudoremorse, pseudolove, etc., and the genuine responses of a normal person. His monumental lack of insight indicates how little he appreciates the nature of his disorder. When others fail to accept immediately his “word of honor as a gentleman,” his amazement, I believe, is often genuine. His subjective experience is so bleached of deep emotion that he is invincibly ignorant of what life means to others. – Łobaczewski, A. (2022). Political Ponerology: The Science of Evil, Psychopathy, and the Origins of Totalitarianism [Kindle iOS version]. p. 190. (My emphasis.)
In private correspondence, Łobaczewski wrote to Laura Knight-Jadczyk (editor of the first edition of this book): “For them you are their worst enemy. You are hurting them very painfully. For a psychopath, revealing his real condition, tearing down his Cleckley mask, brings the end of his self-admiration. You are threatening them with destruction of their secret world, and bring to null their dreams of ruling and introducing [a social system where they can rule and be served]. When his real condition is publicly revealed, a psychopath feels like a wounded animal. You are partly right in finding some similarity of the essential psychopath with the thought [processes] of a crocodile. They are somewhat mechanical. But, are they guilty that they have inherited an abnormal gene, and that their instinctive substratum is different from that of the majority of the human population? Such a person is not able to feel like a normal person, or to understand a person bearing a normal instinctive endowment. [It is important] to try to understand the psychopath, and have some pity for them.” – Ibid, p. 302, Editor’s note.
Even psychopaths want to do what’s right. Everybody does. But as diverse individuals, we find it easy to disagree about what right is. The Devil is in the detail. The Devil also lurks on the road to becoming meek. And yet there is always common ground, namely, wanting to do the right thing. In other words, I’m arguing here that our challenge is not insurmountable, as does Łobaczewski. It boils down to how to avoid the ugly temptation of dehumanisation.
On several occasions in Political Ponerology, Łobaczewski compares psychopathy with colour blindness. He repeatedly goes out of his way to point out the almost autonomic character of this accident(?) of nature. Just as it is not my fault I inherited green eyes, it is not the fault of a psychopath that he was born psychopathic. Thus is a psychopath’s ignorance of human nature “invincible”; a leopard cannot change its spots*.
Nonetheless, we each have a responsibility to deal as wisely as we can with the hard fact of psychopathy. I agree that pity, which flows from meekness as we have defined it here, is warranted in service to our responsibility. Otherwise, a kind of Heart of Darkness vector of embittered and entrenched enmity between ‘normal’ and ‘abnormal’ humans gathers intensity and momentum. Now that we have nuclear weapons and other means of global self-destruction, pity and humility could not be more important.
Having read Łobaczewski’s work, I am persuaded ponerogenic factors have corrupted the Western world, an observation shared both by Łobaczewski and the many people interviewed in Live Not By Lies, all of who lived in totalitarianism. But our ponerogenic turn is hardly a surprising development; amassed power can scarcely avoid corrupting itself. The mighty power of the state is an irresistible flame to the psychopathic moth, regardless of party-political costume and bunting. I would even go so far as to suggest power over others has about it the basic character of psychopathy.
There is no line between the elites at the top and the rest below them. The [ponerogenic] entity must have full control at all levels. This is likely particular to a pathocracy. However, the nature of the state and its relationship with power means the seeds of pathocracy are always there ready to insinuate their offshoots into all areas as soon as conditions permit. – Ibid, p. 346. (My emphasis.)
That said, ponerogenic systems are not cut from whole cloth by genius psychopaths advancing the virtues of some new and wondrous ideology; again, we are not dealing with infallible Übermenschen, nor must we burn everything to the ground and start from scratch. There is baby and dirty bathwater here, it’s just a matter of determining which is which. Similarly, Łobaczewski is at pains to point out that one characteristic of pathocracies is their self-destructive incompetence, as hinted at above. It goes roughly like this: A movement emerges due to one or more genuine societal grievances. When the movement offers sufficient promise to effect large-scale change, it attracts various types of psychopath who begin to corrupt it from within. Corruption is, in essence, a collapse vector. Psychopaths lack pivotal sensitivities and abilities needed to understand and fit in healthily with other humans. They fear exposure because, like wolves, they know life is predatory and will kill all threats. To survive and thrive, they have to refashion the world in their image, so corrupt some existing group / movement /political party to that end.
Attraction to a particular movement has little to nothing to do with the cause per se; a psychopath’s deepest need is to be worshipped, obeyed; to be right. The random cause he or she selects to feed this need is a distant second to the need itself. It follows, then, that as time passes, the movement’s original founders are silenced or evicted, and the organisation takes on a progressively sinister and totalitarian aspect as it is corrupted from within.
In other words, psychopaths did not create the West; the West is not a pathocracy in its essence. Elements within it have been naturally corrupted due to various organic factors pertaining to humanity, victimhood, resentment and discontent, psychopathy, and the power of nation states. The less emotional we are – the meeker we are – about this natural, organic, predictable ponerogenic turn in the West, the more clear eyed and effective we can be as we address it.
For example, draining the current US swamp may simply create a Trumpian swamp. Eternal vigilance is the price of liberty. The US people are already bitterly divided by previous propagandising. The manipulatable weather-vane of paranoid hate spun this way and that by media-fed fear storms can only deepen the challenge we are here discussing. Submitting uncritically to those who cynically manipulate us is not meek, not clear eyed. In stark contrast, the love meekness fosters is the surest way to navigate this devilishly difficult terrain. When we lazily submit to the dark seductions of dehumanisation, vengeance, and hatred, we become fertile soil for a continuing slide into totalitarianism, we become unwitting tools of ponerogenic processes. Only meekness can break us out of this now deadly historical pattern.
In sifting Western baby from bathwater, we also need to be dispassionate – meek – about the world we have become accustomed to. In communist Czechoslovakia, dissident Christian priests were persecuted, imprisoned and tortured. Some, as adduced above, found it in their hearts to forgive their torturers, and in so doing found a love that created moments of such sublime happiness, they have not found its like in the free world. Can we learn from their hard-earned wisdom and build in lasting appreciation for love in our governance systems, by doing what it takes to create a stable home for love in our hearts? What might that entail?
“It seemed that the less they were able to change the world around them, the stronger they had become,” Križka tells me. “These people completely changed my understanding of freedom. My project changed from looking for victims to finding heroes. I stopped building a monument to the unjust past. I began to look for a message for us, the free people.” The message he found was this: The secular liberal ideal of freedom so popular in the West, and among many in his postcommunist generation, is a lie. That is, the concept that real freedom is found by liberating the self from all binding commitments (to God, to marriage, to family), and by increasing worldly comforts—that is a road that leads to hell. – Dreher, Rod (2024). Live Not By Lies (UK EDITION): A Manual For Dissidents in Christian Countries (p. 224). Kindle Edition.
What proportion of our wants are manufactured by advertising agencies? In this frantic age, do we know what we really want? Healthy systems, or systems that feed our hedonistic appetites? Can one social system be both? Personally, I suspect not, but I am not here to advocate some ready-made Utopia that would neatly replace what we have. That is the road to dystopia. Again, we need to be meek – clear eyed – about everything. Cherry-picking is anathema to proper meekness.
I find Christianity attractive because of Christ’s command to love our enemies, not because I fancy I could build a perfect ideology from its content. “Love thine enemy” is my three-word Bible. As already argued in this article, that it is possible to honour this instruction is undeniable. That it is also very hard to accomplish is equally undeniable. It is this realistic combination I trust.
Harder still though – perhaps impossible – is to love an entire degenerate system. A relationship with a torturer is intimate, personal, one-to-one. A relationship with a system, an institution, The Blob, etc., is anonymous, impersonal. This is an important distinction. When our enemy is something large, diffuse and distant, we have insufficient information about it, feel impotent, bewildered, victimised, trapped in a Kafkaesque nightmare that is systemically incapable of connecting with us in any human way. If offers us nothing truly human to hold on to. (See Apple TV’s Severance for what I think of as an excellent depiction of a Kafkaesque nightmare.)
We’ve discussed the generalised discontent that breeds the resistance movements that psychopaths co-opt. Much discontent today is generated by bureaucratic machinery that seems incapable of responding humanly to the humans they ostensibly serve. The frustration and tension that encounters with machine-like – psychopathic? – public and private bureaucracies cause can be extreme. When we have to endure this sort of anonymous suffering, meekness and loving forgiveness are as likely an outcome as daisies sprouting from a wall of steel filing cabinets. This is the very suffering that is fertile soil for the totalitarian evil from which heroes rise to warn us of the evils of totalitarianism.
Must we therefore repeatedly endure collective hell to produce the heroes we need to prevent its emergence? I certainly hope we are not caught on the horns of that tautological dilemma. David Bentley Hart regards the problem of evil as “irresoluble in the terms available to us.” I humbly beg to differ. It is not God that permits evil as part of some mysterious plan, it is the totality of what existence is that has failed to come to healthy terms with evil. Humanity is part of that ‘failure’, but our time is not yet done.
We are not puppets; we are free to err. We are still learning, still creating new situations to learn from. This evolutionary process need not be eschatological; I find it more helpful to picture it as organic. Part of how we handle the problem of evil is by developing the wisdom – the meek courage – to face it and not blanche. In part, this means the courage to humanise evil, to naturalise it, and then go on to develop better understandings of and relationships with its emergence, functioning, and relevance. This is what Łobaczewski advocates.
To be the sort of hero Križka is looking for to face this mighty challenge, we must act in some way. But acting against a large, remote, non-self-aware system, especially something as amorphous as The Blob or the EU, requires the creation of a movement: an organisation with a goal. Setting up an organisation powerful enough to resist The Blob comes with all the dangers discussed above.
As a movement grows in power, so it attracts attention from those poor souls we call psychopaths. Knowing this eventuality is probably unavoidable, and understanding how to respond effectively to this threat, are essential skills we must develop and internalise. Humility will be one of its components. Of course this is a group effort, and one very difficult to sustain. It’s one thing for the scientific method to enforce methodological humility on its practitioners – and we can see how corruptible even science is under the influence of ideology or corporate interests; the hot emotionality of what passes for scientific discussion today beggars belief –, quite another for a stressed, underfunded, imperfectly staffed organisation to keep everyone involved honest, open-minded and humble.
But perhaps one curious fact is grounds for a little optimism. Much like the Biblical Devil, psychopaths respect genuine courage and strong, open and full honesty. All of us, even psychopaths, know love when we finally encounter it. Because this is so, part of being a Križka hero in the quest that is human existence is developing the courageous self-honesty of meekness. It is a moral responsibility we all have as non-psychopaths. The higher the percentage of us aware of these things and prepared to act constructively on that awareness, the more likely it is that an incorruptible response to the challenge of evil will be mounted.
Conclusion
What does it profit a man to gain the whole world, and lose his soul?
The character of a challenge can be simple to discern without making it easier to overcome. But knowing the nature of a task often plays an essential role in successfully mastering it. You cannot be a fantasist and truly love your enemy. You cannot have hubristic ambition to control the world and love your enemy.
In the film The Matrix, humanity’s AI overlords discover that their human slaves cannot thrive in paradise. It recreates the tawdry mess and bustle of our current modernity, whereupon things begin to function properly. In Starman, Jeff Bridges’ character, an alien, shares what he likes most about humanity: “You’re at your best when things are at their worst.” These are of course cliches, but that doesn’t mean they miss the bullseye. It simply means such observations have been made by many and stood the test of time.
In The Wizard of Oz, the heroes’ terrifying enemy, the Great Oz, is revealed as a frightened old man pulling levers and pushing buttons behind a thick curtain. Much the same sort of truth is exposed in ancient tales like The Fisher King, or even Hans Christian Andersen’s The Emperor’s New Clothes. And while it may seem egregiously trite to wave away the truly horrific depravity and unspeakable evil hundreds of millions have been forced to endure in recent history, I believe things have become as bad as they are because we have not been sufficiently vigilant. We have not been sufficiently vigilant because our wisdom and meekness have atrophied greatly as civilisation’s mechanical prowess has advanced at their expense. In tandem with our incredible powers of mass-psychological manipulation, mass surveillance, mass production and mass destruction, evil has thrived to assume mountainous and terrifying proportions.
We look up at its hideous strength, and pale.
And yet what needs to be done now is the same as it always has been: to be as wise as serpents and as gentle as doves. Wise humility may be hard to achieve, but it is the core challenge that for me best describes humanity’s noble purpose. I’m not suggesting anything new or fantastical.
Because necessity is the mother of invention, and because the profound adjustments required are towards health and sanity, I’d say the odds are in our favour. It is as yet unclear how costly these adjustments will prove, but the gravity of life itself is on their side.
* For the sake of brevity, I’m reducing the wide variety of psychopathic types Łobaczewski discusses to what he terms the “essential psychopath”. Because this type is obviously the purest, it best serves our purposes as the model for the nature of the challenge psychopathy represents.
