There is an inexhaustible resource within us, a psychic energy, as powerful as any other force of nature. It insists on expression. Aimed at all that is good, it fortifies us against the dark. When we direct it toward evil, it turns against us.
It’s easier than we think to create experiences that are bad for us, addictively bad, but that feel good. The nervous system does not morally distinguish between expansion and depravity if both produce challenge, concentration, and ordered thinking. Good and bad intentions can both organize consciousness into experiences that feel like triumph.
A smooth criminal enters the same state of flow as a professional athlete at the Olympic Games. Both face demands that require a concentration so intense that there is no attention left over for insecurity, regret, distraction, or worry. As a result, neither is self-conscious, and all sense of time passing is gone. These states flood us with a feeling of aliveness powerful enough that we’ll do them for their own sake, without cash or prizes, and even, perhaps especially, when they are dangerous.
Evil can feel right. If we learn to survive through deceit, then manipulating people and circumstances to protect ourselves from vulnerability will addict us to the relief of feeling untouchable. The more success rewards manipulation, the less vulnerable we feel and the more desensitized we become. Our capacity for caring for others shrinks the more we need to feel above them.
Our perception can distort reality until we pity the do-gooder, feeling them to be simplistic, beneath us, a chump. In our minds, we’re justified, not corrupt, victims of the world rather than aggressors against ourselves. Over time, ordinary life begins to feel emotionally flat. The high is no longer enough; it doesn’t have the sharp edge we need to dance on to silence everything else. To feel alive again, we require increasing levels of domination.
With time, we get better and better at what we practice. The experiences that make us feel most alive condition us to seek more of the thing that produced them. How we answer those impulses determines who we become.
Lawlessness makes us simple and predictable, not sophisticated. We imagine people admire us, even envy us. Superiority is always part of the pull. But our motives are obvious and juvenile. The need to feel above others isolates us. No one is envious.
Real growth increases our complexity. It requires integrating the darker aspects of our humanity without surrendering to them. We refuse to work for the devil. It’s earning the ability to love and serve without superiority. Then we become capable of suffering without turning cruel. We stop confusing destruction with aliveness.
Quote: For I do not do the good I want to do, but the evil I do not want to do—this I keep on doing. Romans 7:19
Song Accompaniment: Waiting For The Rain To Come Down, Griffin House
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