When the events are natural disasters or “acts of God,” those who bear witness sympathize readily with the victim. But when the traumatic events are of human design, those who bear witness are caught in the conflict between victim and perpetrator. It is morally impossible to remain neutral in this conflict. — Judith Herman
We were walking around the back of the school, in the hazy gold light that spoke of summer. I was fifteen at the time, accompanied by my male best friend and a muscle-bound weightlifter dude I met through the track team. I ran distance and Xavier, as I will call him, threw the discus and the shotput.
Something caught my eye: A silver car, a man yelling at a woman. I don’t remember the particulars, but only the thought: He’s going to hit her. I walked over to intervene.
I don’t know what I would have done, only that maybe, somehow, the presence of a teenage girl might break the trance of violence. But I never reached that car; bestie and Xavier intercepted me and held me back until the angry man and the silent woman drove off into the yellow light.
“But he was going to hit her,” I said.
They didn’t deny that possibility, but they couldn’t understand why I cared so much about a stranger. And yes, their obstruction was based on personal care: They didn’t know that woman or her circumstances, but they knew me and didn’t want to see me get hurt.
It didn’t occur to them – two big dudes – that the three of us together could have asked if the woman was all right and needed help. If she did need help, maybe we could have brought her into the school and found the principal to sort things out. Likely, she would have gone with the man anyway, but at least our voiced concern would have communicated: I see you, and what you’re going through right now isn’t okay or right.
To my friends, it was probably just another example of crazy Amhrán, who did weird shit and was probably going to end up in a ditch someday. It was around the same age that I learned the many Greek words for love and realized something: The guiding principle of my life isn’t eros or philia, storge or philautia. It’s agape.
And while I didn’t verbalize this at the time, I stumbled upon another truth: If you choose to truly follow love and to embody your ideals in the world, you will put yourself at risk. People will consider you codependent, self-destructive and rather nuts.
All too often, the path of love means that you will suffer – and you will suffer alone, because we despise the vulnerable, which is something all lovers are. We don’t understand why someone would forsake self-interest or even personal safety on behalf of someone else, unless they’re an identified first-responder and getting a paycheck for it.
“Put on your own oxygen mask first,” they say. And if you don’t help the armless man in the next seat put on his, well, you gotta look out for number one, don’t you? Shame about the asphyxiation. Too bad he didn’t have arms.
The economy of harm
The bystander is forced to take sides. It is very tempting to take the side of the perpetrator. All the perpetrator asks is that the bystander do nothing. He appeals to the universal desire to see, hear, and speak no evil. – Judith Herman
It’s easy, maybe a little too easy, to regard dominator society as evil. I try not to succumb to the temptation, but it’s difficult because it goes against my deepest convictions about what should be, which are interwoven with my experiences of the Divine and the ultimate meaning or purpose of being. I always somehow settle on love: As embodied beings in which the Divine is immanent, we are called to love, to tend, to care, and to correct the errors that have entered Flatland because of our collective choice to turn away from love.
At the core, I think I would define “evil” not as death, sickness or hurricanes, but as the intentional inflicting of harm. This is, of course, how hierarchical systems operate: Dominators compel obedience through harm or the threat of harm, in a manner astutely captured by Machiavelli’s The Prince.
This system offers undeniable material benefits to individuals who are willing to enact harm. And because these systems are intensely hierarchical, the objects of this harm are overwhelmingly not fellow warriors who could trade blow for blow, but those perceived as weaker or more vulnerable. On a societal scale, this often centers on populations classified as “minorities,” the poor, women and children, as well as non-human nature and the environment.
On the smaller, more personal scale, what I’ll call the “economy of harm” manifests as domestic violence, child abuse, the torture of animals and bullying in all its forms.
We don’t make this choice – collectively or personally – because we are innately evil or sinful. Rather, a society structured on hierarchical force socializes us to obedience. Obeying authority – honor thy mother and father, thy boss and thy leader – is seen as a social good, so much so that disobedience is pathologized as mental illness, innate criminality or simply weakness (which is unforgivable in a dominator milieu). Becoming that authority is the closest people get to becoming God.
This makes it extremely difficult to resist the call for wrong action, which is what I was trying to get at in this poem. Austrian psychologist Alice Miller wrote quite a bit on how Germanic traditions of child-rearing (heavy on authoritarianism) led to the Nazis, although I haven’t read her work myself.
Hierarchical society is built on breaking the will of others, and that includes the deputies who participate in these acts. It also includes those who witness suffering and do nothing.
The rule of thirds
The victim, on the contrary, asks the bystander to share the burden of pain. The victim demands action, engagement, and remembering. – Judith Herman
Often, when I consider the matter of intentional harm, I come back to what I call the “rule of thirds.” A third of people actively support authoritarian behavior and a third actively resist it; the remaining third are bystanders who could go either way.
My observations stem initially from Nazi-era Germany, but they seem to be somewhat widespread; in my country today, for example, a third of people support authoritarianism and the end of democracy, a third are actively fighting to preserve democracy … and a third simply doesn’t care. “Both sides are corrupt,” they shrug, and go back to watching cat videos and focusing on their daily lives.
Most people, I wager, think they would be among the third of resisters … but they wouldn’t. They may disagree with what’s going on, but they won’t speak up, much less intervene, because that would pose risk to themselves. And risk is damn uncomfortable.
“Am I my brother’s keeper?” snarls Cain.
What’s more – and sadly, I have seen this – is that the bystander will effectively shun the victim of injustice. They won’t meet their eyes or speak to them; they look away, a mark of submission to authority. All too often, friends will distance themselves from or even abandon victims of suffering. If pushed, they will demur, saying things like: “Well, you shouldn’t have worn that. It must have been something you did. I’m sure they had reasons. There is always another side.”
After World War II, American GIs forcibly dragged villagers to the adjacent concentration camps to bear witness to the horrors there. The message: “Face what you have done.” They couldn’t; only the children of that generation came to terms with the Holocaust, doing what they could to prevent it from happening again.
Bystanders, in essence, suffer a kind of moral injury – not as severe as those “just following orders,” but a moral injury just the same. This is why they avoid victims: Their presence discomforts them, pointing out their cowardice, their failure to live up to moral standards. They must face themselves as unloving people, which is profoundly difficult, since we have a deep need to see ourselves as the hero of the story.
This is why, I think, our present cultural moment hits philautia so hard: We are called again and again to engage in “self-care” as if it were some sort of sacred act. By holding our own comfort as the highest good, we sink into moral turpitude. After all, we’re good people, right? We did everything we were supposed to do: We obeyed.
Weird Barbie has your back
Loyalty and devotion lead to bravery. Bravery leads to the spirit of self-sacrifice. The spirit of self-sacrifice creates trust in the power of love. — Morihei Ueshiba
One surefire way to become a victim of violence or bullying is to stand up to the bullies; ironically, it’s also the only way to stop it. Perhaps this is why individuals on the margins – AKA, the weird kids – are more likely to have your back because they have less to lose. People who are most likely to benefit from the hierarchical system – straight, cisgender, white, male, able-bodied, upper- or middle-class – are the least likely to risk themselves on behalf of another.
My super-big bodybuilding friend – who was also my running partner – was, like me, afraid of dogs. One night, we were out running and a German Shepherd chased after us, intent on harm. Xavier sprinted ahead, leaving me behind to be savaged. (Thank the Gods that the owners called the dog off just before it got me; I heard its breath huffing a pace away.)
This is not a coincidence. Nor is it a coincidence that the man who shot Gabby Giffords was initially disarmed by a middle-aged woman, assisted by two men – all unarmed in firearms-happy Arizona.
In my country, the people who display military-grade weapons in public – in case, you know, the yogurt tries something funny in the dairy aisle – are almost uniformly white men. Oh, there are a scant few white women in the mix, too, but people of color realize that they will be gunned down in the street if they tried to take the same “liberty” of public weapons display.
The impetus goes beyond sketchy yogurt into a kind of moral callousness. Philautia and self-preservation are the highest moral goals, drowning out the perceived foolishness of self-sacrifice. In my ex-dojo, the sensei talked a good deal about how he is coming home and doesn’t care if the other person does.* This troubled me through the years because – utopian to the bone – I do care if the other person survives the experience. Yes, if you try to harm me, I will defend myself and then, most likely, flee the scene to gather the requisite law enforcement.
(*Please don’t think that all aikido is like this. In origin, aikido is not so much a fighting art – although it’s useful for that — but the result of one man’s spiritual visions concerning the universal nature of love. I still study aikido; I just moved to a dojo that’s a better fit, philosophically and personally.)
Personally, I’d want the aggressor to enter a space of remorse and reconciliation: To dry out from addiction (the source of many crimes). To confront and heal the excruciating pasts that drive so many to harmful behavior. That’s not always possible, of course, which is why we may never do away with prisons entirely – but we could lessen their use if we shifted away from dominator culture. It’s pretty hard to tell people to refrain from violence when violence is considered sacred, and to curtail bullying when we put bullies in the corner office and public office.
To do the work of love, we must become vulnerable – to risk ourselves, and especially our own comfort. We must choose to share the burden of pain: to act, engage and remember, to address wrongs, to offer solace to the hurting.
We must not permit ourselves to tread the easy road of the bystander. And if we still require comfort, let us rest in this: That easy road leads to moral injury, which is a form of miasma – a spiritual stain. Like tar, it’s hard to scrub off and will accrue layers of shit and debris. Left uncorrected, we eventually find ourselves stiff and trapped under these tarry layers – capable of feeling nothing but our own moral filth.
White Cat Grove 
https://venusianair.blogspot.com/2010/09/evil.html
https://bdelectablemnts.runboard.com/t2681
Evil thrives when good men do nothing.
I enjoyed this peice. I do however think some people are just EVIL. Although I am Catholic I struggle with forgiveness,
After 27 years in law Enforcement; I seen Evil up close. The kind whom rape a child,. Or a women. I ve seen women being
victimized pushing a baby caraige, then assaulted for money. Rape victims, I even captured a man who killed 3 relatives trying to help him. Yes Evil exists, when we are confronted with it, WE MUST NUTRLILZE it at all costs .
There are some men who do still value,
Honor, and righteousness; Who would be there if needed. I am hopeful you think there are some out there.
Thanks for reading!
Evil is a complicated situation, when you drill down. A lot of folks who do horrific things come from horrific families — intergenerational trauma galore, poverty, you name it. One common story: “I never knew my dad because he was in prison and mom was strung out on drugs, so I hit the streets.” In some cases (this is true for the Parkland shooter), mom drank or did drugs while pregnant, which created permanent effects on the developing fetus and likely contributed to later behaviors.
Changing society — eliminating poverty, addressing intergenerational trauma, keeping kids from being raised by abusive or absent parents — can probably prevent a lot of this. Not all; psychopathy (“the criminally insane”) is a wiring issue.
So, yes: We need to neutralize harm, and that means we will always need law enforcement and CIT units, for example. We should try to rehabilitate those who can be rehabilitated, and humanely detain others who cannot safely live in society.
But the larger *social* problems that create these scenarios in the first place need to be addressed. And all too often, bad stuff happens because we *let* it happen, both on the small scale and the large. We’re not brave enough to intervene, so we cast our eyes aside.
I struggle with forgiveness, too; good thing that it’s not considered a Pagan virtue! I was thinking of doing another blog entry on this topic, and why forgiveness is actually *not* a social benefit because it erases accountability and puts the burden of “making things whole” on the victim rather than the perpetrator.
Stay tuned!