As someone whose not a direct seer this topic interests me. On one hand I am interested in understanding what’s said about evil vs. what’s real as well as the whole map of progress (what seems to be in alignment with ‘good’) and just how much ‘evil’ is required to give good it’s steadiness and resilience.
In particular when I look at people’s social interactions it seems like a lot of people just aren’t good at handling entropy and when it comes to bullying and the like or treating other people terribly it’s a way of shoving their own entropy off on someone else (and sadly - when it comes to power - shit rolls downhill, which is part of why childhood is often a dangerous and miserable time when everyone else has as much power to really screw up your path).
I do wonder how angels and demons sort of ‘live’ in the entropy.
I suffered from narcissistic abuse in ways that you would not believe, and after my experience (and a lot of pain and suffering till the point that I thought of killing myself) I realized the abuse was a blessing. Crazy uh? It took me a decade to realize that the narcissist had a mission in my life, that it was helping me realize how broken I was. I was too compassionate, too willing to please, I lacked proper healthy boundaries, I always thought of the others first, I had no self esteem so I thought I had to please others and be their doormat so they would love me, etc…
I went through a stranger societal / medical gaslighting where I was dx’d as being on the autistic spectrum at age 11, was told by neurologists that I had a high IQ but was, by definition of being on the spectrum, going to be such a social idiot that I’d need to trust other people’s take on a given situation far and a way over my own. That set me up for almost another 20 years of trying to find and fix everything wrong with me, early on being an obligate floor-mat, trying to pick at whatever secret nuggets of wisdom and truth anyone else had for not being on the spectrum, and at the end of that period I had a bit of an existential crisis when I realized it wasn’t true, I wasn’t a social idiot, what was perhaps more frightening was that I was looking for patterns of wisdom in what was turning out to be cluster B behavior in those around me.
One can say that such sets and settings are hidden blessings, IMHO they’re double-edged swords that cut both ways. For example I graduated highest honors from college, got f’d repeatedly in the work world, and now that in my early 40’s I’m back living at home with my parents. A big part of it was I just didn’t understand the Machiavellianism of the work world, didn’t have that map in my head properly (got lied to by people constantly about what human nature was - and they had the advantage of my autism dx against me), I think it really took until someone mentioned Straw Dogs by John Gray and I sat down and read it that I finally felt vindicated enough by my own observations to throw that childhood model away entirely rather than always looking over my shoulder and second-guessing everything.
So the upside - I might have done a lot of moral structuring, I also got economically f’d hard enough that I’ll probably never have the status or income to have kids.
Sam Vaknin actually gets pretty deep into this - they’re trying to strip away whatever ‘you’ have as a healthy identity and turn you into something as empty and vampiric as they are.
I really lucked out in not having anything like that hit me in childhood but I clearly did meet many adults in my life like this who put the gauntlet down and made it clear, in no uncertain terms, that if I wasn’t just like them in every way that I needed it beaten out of me and that I needed to understand that to be a human (and perhaps a male) means your useless meat until proven otherwise and that life isn’t given to you - that you have to fight like hell against others for your right to deserve it (many of them reminded me a lot of Denzel’s character in Training Day) - yeah I’ll pass on that koolaid tyvm.
As this is a separate and more general theoretical conversation about good and evil and not contributing to the original post’s specific question, I’ve moved this to it’s own thread so both conversations can occur without being mixed up.
The forum software automatically cross linked the topic for reference.
Pulling a response over from the other thread (on this topic):
The trouble with our society, and the way personality development works, it takes an independent adult to understand that whereas in childhood there’s rarely such freedom and - I really hate to say this - I’ve been lucky to eek out freedom in adulthood just by having people as close to me that I can trust. The work world really is a tree of apes shitting on each other and people who live their whole lives under bullies and economic instability - it’s no wonder to me that our politics are as awful as they are when almost everything we’re doing in society is covert game theory, transfer frontier, multipolar traps, effectively trying to find whatever ways we can to covertly knife up anyone whose not us and take their stuff and their status by legal means. It’s an environment of algorithmic social climbing where actual ‘people’ are out of style. The hideous side effect of that is it’s a world almost designed for narcissists.
That’s why I can’t help but feel like the big fight is one with entropy. Some people are good at regulating their own systems but have put significantly less time into regulating other people’s systems (that’s the risk of the path I took when I was younger - ie. fixed myself but opened myself up for bullies) and there’s people who made their weaponry purely exterior, have little or no self control outside of militarizing against others, those sorts of people are the variety we’re finding our joy in discussing.
One of my life goals right now, aside from getting my career functioning to the degree I’d like it to, is also to survive the 40’s re-Machiavelianizing of male to male communications - not just mastering a defense strategy but also not having that defense strategy devour the real me in the process. I feel like for most of my 20’s and part of my 30’s there was a sort of post-college pro growth period where people were trying to tamp that sort of thing down, and it seems like the people who are really bitter by their late 30’s and early 40’s just can’t hold it in any longer and it’s starting to come out again.
@MagickAndBreakz I’m afraid Silentwaters has decided to be a special snowflake, as being asked to respect the 90 day rule like everyone else, and wait before offering services or personal writings via PDF (as opposed to posting them here) was far beneath them.
They have passive aggressively removed as much content as they were able, dirty deleting everything you were responding to here as well as her intro.
Damaging the forum like this and failing to respect the rules has earned her a ban and she will not be welcome back.
I’m sorry she flaked on your rather thoughtful and intelligent conversation. Luckily you quoted enough that it still makes sense and your content is sensible and valuable, so I’m leaving it up, gaps and all.
