Thin divide between good and evil
WE humans live with custom-fitted spectacles. (Thanks Prof Obie). Culturally, theologically, race prejudiced, class orientated, naked evolutionistic, materialistically, this way or that way, but nevertheless, the familiar glasses untested and biasedly tainted.
We, often sanctimoniously and profusely convinced, argue that we understand the divide between good and evil clearly. Very clearly. That we take this most primal issue in life seriously on. With all our hearts, our home-conditioned souls fully involved. Our acts to follow.
Most of the homo sapiens species, from the West to the East, want to be on the side of what is good, what is righteous and what is moral to the bone. Why then does it look so different in perspective depending on your location in a whirling world?
Evil is a very shrewd human entity. But perhaps on the other hand, it is a mere thriving concept because all rivers of life flow and overflow without pre-ordained fundamental structure and mere humans have no choice but to create dedicated answers to oncoming waves.
Because of the weight of that almost unbearable task, evil manifests like second nature, a second skin, and with severe consequences. And sadly, too often, evil is having a field day with us all. He can become a she, then turns into a cruel political system, a biased economic system, often it gradually undermines a previously “moral” political party, when sections start to get addicted to the taste of “gold”.
And ordinary people too, busy with their own clapped-vision lives, do not realise how simplistic views on many issues slip in without them realising how evil, the dark side of the soul, lingers within ourselves as a chameleon, a conman, an unidentified stranger making him/herself at home in our unsuspecting psychological make-up.
All too fuzzy? Yes, the devil is in the detail. Always. In macro and micro contexts. In their mortal and perhaps immortal interplay. It should be revisited again and again. And again.
Let me then convey this scene to you. It is the beautiful autumn school holidays, the school doors and windows are all locked up, the school grounds numbed, carrying no children, nor their laughter, or their shouting in delight of being exuberantly alive.
Now it was all deserted. I drove down the long road next to this specific school and saw a scruffy young man, bowed head, with a hoodie on, slowly walking down the road next to the school. From time to time he slyly glanced in the direction of the school fence, the gates, assessing any opportunity to find a way to get to whatever one can steal and to get in through the scrapyard of another empty godless day.
Then I saw his face. It showed severe neglect, the effects of violence, misuse of alcohol, drugs. It showed shrewdness, anger, the capacity for instinctual violence. It showed the end of the line when a humane way of living had been finally lost in the hopeless past of his decaying life.
This man, I sensed his anger, was dangerous. It was the school to be robbed, then, if not, perhaps there would be a woman down the line busy hanging washing on the line and that would offer another opportunity to get a criminal mind into play to show evil what evil could do. The sadness, the unfolding sadness.
Okay, let’s take a quick vote around. You the reader, do you think that this person should be brought into custody, then bringing the law into the scenario, hopefully finding past criminal offences so that he can be justly jailed. He has to take up his new fight then against other damaged human beings in the vicious arena that we call jail.
And then for us to sigh in relief and go on with our cherished lives within the constraints of the law. Jail then being the symbol between the ways of the good people and the very bad, the evil ones?
Please consider this statement. A jail is not the definitive borderline between good and evil. It is a mere subjective, often shrewd line in the sand to make us go on with our lives and to lock up simplified evil and then to forget about the way complexities manifest in life.
That guy walking next to the school grounds… Why was he there on his own? Most likely because he wasn’t welcome in one of the gangs where many hopeless young men find common ground for their anger, the angst of existence, the existential fact that they are at the bottom of the “food chain” without work, no learning, no income, no decent lodgings, no space for self-respect, no respect or caring from society. They are on their own.
A degraded way of living dangerously follows… alcohol, drugs and violence, because your soul has left you in the way past for shoreless continents.
The hoodie young man was not part of that sad way of living. He most likely was so far gone that he would be a liability for a scheming gang that needs to operate smoothly to get to profitable ends, without invoking the might of the law. He was not welcome there anymore.
A hyena prowling on his own, with no reprieve, no free laughter, only a grimacing passing of hours every day of his lost life.
Evil manifested in clothes and a hoodie? Yes, but what about the fact that over many decades his family and society were considered second/third hand, deprived of infrastructure, financial means, dumped into unwanted holes where no one else saw any scope to make some profit at some time in the foreseen future.
Born into a family gradually soaked into decades of the loss of self-esteem, harsh circumstances from day to day and the end result, as history sardonically tells the story of suffering and competing groups of people, that the competition to survive in life would start following the evolutionist way that is to survive at all costs, and then it was, and is, all about the survival of the fittest. A mortal fading away of humane morals.
So, evil, how do we define it? The past brought the hoodie guy waves of racist, classist ideologies, and before some readers take the easy way out to one dimensionally curse the deplorable past, the past has now become the present. It is less a skin colour thing now, or perhaps just turning the other way round now, but the same sad essence of driving a society is continuing.
We don’t allocate substantial moral thought, finances, political leadership, participating of the broader society to take the lost part of society, hopeless, damaged, men, women and children into our unwavering care.
No, we slyly keep on manoeuvring in greed for governmental tenders to enrich the favoured extended us, we keep buying oversized houses and bulky flashy vehicles to impress other like-minded materialists and at the same time superficially stroking our own base-conditioned value system.
But we, being slaves of bracketed normalcy, buy our food and wine in abundance, talk excitedly about a next expensive holiday, switch the security system on and then we turn the TV on to watch another sitcom.
So I, like the people in the cars in front of me, and the others following me down that tarred road, we all ignored the hoodie man in the wilderness of his life, all not realising that evil is not only an active deed, it is just as much passive disregard of the “other”.
Evil is not just what we do. It is also what we don’t do.
So, we ignorantly drove past him. The uncared for child he once was, the years he spent hiding from frustrated human beings that lashed out around them.
As we turn on the news on the car radio, some music, we don’t have a clue of the moment in time that a human being psychologically snapped and all then that remained afterwards was evil incarnated on two walking legs.
● Van der Walt is an estate agent with degrees in theology and philosophy