Tragedy vs. Evil

Tragedy vs Evil

“When I started Working 

on This Problem, or I guess,

 when it started working on me,

was probably really 

in the mid 80s;

and I found myself suffering 

from two things :

One was a very lengthy sequence 

of nightmares about nuclear destruction --

-- and they're very affecting dreams --

and associated with that was 

a sense of amazement that a dream that was that awful could reflect a reality that could be that awful and an additional amazement out the fact that despite the production of thousands and tens and thousands of weapons of unimaginable destruction and that qualitative, qualitative change in human capacity that represented that people could go about their day-to-day lives without acting as if anything fundamental whatsoever had changed —

Now, I've never really been able to figure out why that disturbed me so much when it seemed to not disturb to any profound degree most of the people I knew….

It doesn't really matter, 

the upshot of it was of it was that I spent I probably spent my whole life trying to understand What Evil was, 

and more importantly 

What might Be 

Done about it 

It's a strange pursuit in some ways for an academic to undertake because Academics tend to Talk about Academic Things and one thing you can say about Evil is that whatever it is it's not bloody well academic.

It's not an intellectual issue, 

it's an existential issue and it's -- 

it's not a theoretical issue 

it's an it's an issue that deals 

with that absolute 

nature of Reality 

and I guess sometimes I think 

that people who go into academia, go into academia to  

shield themselves from having 

to ask questions about 

the absolute nature of reality -- 

So anyways I think before you 

can talk about something --

before you can dare to talk

 about something like Evil 

you should do some thinking 

about What it Is that 

you're talking about, definitionally speaking -- 

I learned this I believe from 

a historian named 

Jeffrey Burton Russell who 

wrote a very detailed history of 

The Idea of The Devil, 

in the days when such histories 

were strange to say the least -- 

He was very interested 

in the history of the embodiment of ideas of Evil 

and one of the things he and 

his work did for me was 

to help me clarify the distinction 

between two terrible things --

The distinction that has 

to be made, and that's the distinction between 

Tragedy and Evil, 

and I don't think you 

can talk about it -- 

'Evil', at all, until you distinguish it from Tragedy; and so I'm going

 to try to distinguish 

Evil from Tragedy by 

making some reference 

to The Essential Existential 

condition of Human Beings. 

I would say that The Nature of 

Human being is such that it

 consists of a confrontation 

of The Bounded Finite 

with The Un-bounded Infinite 

and that those are 

the bare facts of the matter 

and the facts are, that 

The World of Experience 

as it presents itself 

to us is literally 

and not metaphorically, 

complex beyond 

Our Capacity to understand 

and that means that 

people deal, in a real sense

on an ongoing basis 

with The Infinite and 

I Believe that that fact 

is The Reason why 

religious experience 

is essentially, and Belief is 

essentially endemic 

to Mankind --

It's a Human universal 

and it's not because 

people believe, it's because

 human existence as such 

consists of a confrontation 

between The Finite 

and The Infinite 

and religious systems merely 

take that into account -- 

Now, our finitude in the face 

of the infinite has some 

inevitable consequences and 

I would say those consequences are 

essentially the existential 

conditions of Life.

The First of those consequences is --

is that The Finite is always 

overwhelmed by The Infinite --

it has to be because 

it can't encapsulate it 

and so what that meant 

means is that it's that 

Suffering is central to 

The Nature of Human Existence and 

Suffering exists as a consequence of the consequences of Our Limitations. 

I mean every single person who's alive 

is going to die and 

every single person 

who's alive 

is going to deal 

with with serious physical illness 

and mental distress.... 

If they don't Suffer, if they aren't 

suffering it directly immediately, 

right now, on their own, 

it's almost inevitably the case 

that every single person 

who walks The Earth 

is confronting that the bare bones 

of Reality at that level 

in the guise of an afflicted family member 

and so the fact of our finitude is -- 

is again no academic issue, 

it's essential to The Nature of Our Being 

and we're forced to deal with it 

on an ongoing basis 

so I would say insufficiency 

is built into human experience and --

and there are existential 

consequences to that --

Now I read something a long time ago 

and I don't remember who wrote it, 

but it was written about Jewish commentary on 

The Torah -- God is omniscient, 

omnipotent and omnipresent :

What Does He Lack? 

And The Answers' "Limitation." 

and that's that's a... 

That's a Riddle and an Answer 

of unparalleled brilliance 

as far as I'm concerned 

because I think it speaks deeply 

to something about 

The Central Nature of Existence-Itself 

and that is that, without Limitation, 

there's no Being. 

Now, that's a hard thing to understand 

but I think you can understand it 

in a number of different ways -- 

The first thing you might want to understand 

is that I play this game with my students 

sometimes in my class --

I'll come up to a student, pick 

a poor victim at random 

and come up to them, say 

"Okay, We're to Play a Game.", say 

and they say, "Okay --" and I say 

"Well, You Move First --"

Well, they don't know What to Do and 

The Reason for that is because 

The limiting parameters 

of The Game 

have not been defined 

and as a consequence of that 

they're stunned by their infinite freedom into 

complete immobility 

and what that means in a sense 

is that the --

In The Absence of Serious Constraint 

There can be 

no choice 

no freedom 

no existence 

and I believe this to be 

fundamentally True 

just as the fact that 

Human being is vulnerable 

is fundamentally True. 

Here's another example that I think is more --

it's more personal to me 

and it emerged in my imagination 

as a consequence of my contemplation 

of My Son's vulnerability so --

I have children, they're are teenagers now --

I still like them. 

One of my one of the things 

I was really struck by when my children 

were little was how perfect they were --

And I believe that that was 

The benevolence of God in a sense -- 

Children are tremendously difficult; 

they're a tremendous responsibility 

but they're so perfect 

and they manifest that perfection 

in such a remarkable way, 

that That's The Payment for taking on 

The Responsibility of 

bringing them into Being

 and caring for them and 

The Thing about Being a Parent 

is that The Vulnerability of People 

is made manifest to you 

in a way that was never the case 

prior to that and it's not --

It's haunting and it's beautiful 

but it's also exactly right in a way 

and I was thinking, "Well, look at My Son, 

He's a little kid, you know --

You got to chase after him all the time, 

You can get sick, 

People hurt him, you know --

People are going to be mean to him 

he's going to be disappointed in his life 

he's vulnerable and it's -- it's --

it's a constant tragic reality 

that he's vulnerable  --"

I thought "Well, okay, let's say 

we want to do something about that 

so let's say we make him so that 

no one can pick on him --

So it could inflate him to about feet high 

and equip him with a metallic skeleton 

and an ax and a cast-iron exoskeleton 

and you could equip him 

with a computerized intelligence 

that far supersedes his own 

and you could remove his vulnerabilities 

one by one hypothetically 

and of course more and more 

we're in a position where 

we could do that reality and 

one of the things I realised 

right away was that 

as you remove The Vulnerabilities 

You remove The Thing You Love 

and then I started to understand 

more deeply that vulnerability 

was a precondition for human being 

and that was a desirable precondition 

because The Thing is about 

Human Existence that 

are wonderful and remarkable 

are so integrally tied up with vulnerability 

that they're actually inextricable. 

The Jewish commentary, 

What The Infinite lacks is The Finite 

there's a more abstract way of getting at the same thing if you could do absolutely anything you wanted at any point and be anywhere you wanted and be anything you wanted and if there was nothing that was out of your reach there would be nothing to do because you'd be everything at once and when you're everything at once which is at least in principle the position of God there's no story and there's no being and there's something about being that is a story and without limitation there's no story so then the question starts to become with regards to consideration of human vulnerability is there a way to conduct your life in such a manner that the intrinsic vulnerability that characterizes your life is rendered not only acceptable but desirable and to me that's the central question of existence and I tell you get that wrong you're on the wrong track and if you're on the wrong track man you are in one terrible place I would say with regards to tragedy right humans are vulnerable and that's tragic but if tragedy is the price that we pay for existence then so be it if existence is justifiable and so tragedy itself which is merely a revelation of our vulnerability can't be regarded as evil it's just a it's a condition of existence and so it's necessary to distinguish the tragic conditions of existence from evil before you can even address the problem and I think what that means to some degree is you should not blame on the relationship between the finite and the infinite the terrible failings of humanity that can be laid directly at the feet of human beings so earthquakes aren't evil and cancer isn't evil and mental illness isn't evil and predators aren't evil they're they just are part of the way things are but there are certain categories of human action that are definitely outside the parameters of mere tragedy and those are the things we really have to get a handle on evil for me is differentiated from tragedy by its lack of necessity and it's volunteerism and it's a tenant I think of modern materialistic thought that there are social or material causes for actions and it's an extraordinarily useful theory and I think but I think one of the unfortunate consequences of that is that we've tended to write off much of human misbehavior and attribute it to say insufficiencies and material conditions which is not an it's not an acceptable theory there are all sorts of human cultures that were characterized by virtually complete absence of material luxury well-being whose cultures were highly functional and and highly moral and to describe the propensity towards misbehavior as a consequence of economic inequality is entirely beside the point as far as I'm concerned evil is more pernicious than that which is generated for example by social inequality I think it's actually although this is a terrifying thought in some ways it's more appropriate to consider it a form of demonically warped aesthetic and I'll give you a couple of examples of what I mean by that for example because the exact because the manifestation of this warped pathetic aesthetic makes itself apparent under certain conditions so for example I think it made itself apparent in the imagination of the first politician who can to coined the acronym mad or mutual assured destruction that's an aesthetic of evil to make a joke of a situation that catastrophic indicates the kind of malevolence that lurks behind the fact that such a condition exists the motto on the gates of Auschwitz I believe in the second world war work will make you free that's another manifestation of the aesthetic of evil it's a terrible terrible ironic joke and it's instructive to meditate on what sort of imagination would have the arrogance to tell such a terrible joke the concentration camps are classic examples of evil and I think by analyzing at least certain kinds of events that occurred within them it's easier to get a clear idea of what evil constitutes and one of the stories that's always haunted me I guess is I believe it's another story derived from Auschwitz the prison guards and our wits would take the prisoners who were already stripped of their dignity and to whatever degree possible their identity and their culture under language and their status of valuable beings and yet that wasn't sufficient they needed to be tortured in addition to that before they were killed and the torts are often consisted of a self-evidently counterproductive work a situation that also frequently characterized activity in the Soviet gulag archipelago where perhaps million people met their death.

A typical Auschwitz example 

was the requirement for prisoners to carry 

50-pound sacks of wet salt

from one side of the compound 

and then back again -- 

Now, that's Evil as far 

as I'm concerned,

and you have to think about that from an aesthetic perspective 

in a sense, because it's a celebration of horror and it's a it's a conscious attempt to violate the conditions that make life itself tolerable and it's aimed at dehumanization destruction of the ideal and at an even deeper level revenge against the conditions of existence itself I've tried to understand the developmental pathway that leads to acts like that my academic research as well as my clinical experience has revealed to me that what appears to lie at the bottom of motivation for the excesses of behavior that characterize evil are too tightly causally related factors one arrogance another resentment and both of those are tied up with vulnerability of human beings in the face of the infinite but but tied up with something more profound as well the most thorough account of this that I've managed I think at least two partially comprehend I believe is contained in the first couple of the stories in the Old Testament in Genesis the story of Adam and Eve in the fall of man and the immediately following story of Cain and Abel as far as we can tell those are very very old stories they predate Judaism at least in some of their in some of their structural elements it's conceivable that some of the and those stories are as old as the human capacity to tell stories itself assuming that they were grounded in an oral tradition that predated the written tradition and we know that oral traditions can last at least in some forms unchanged for periods of up to , years so the anthropological and archaeological evidence is fairly clear on that point these are very very very old stories and people remember them and created them for reasons we really don't understand and they're they're strange and mysterious and unforgettable all at the same time the story of Adam and Eve as far as I can tell is the story of the coming of consciousness the coming of self-consciousness to mankind and I think that the human that the human human self-consciousness is what separates us from animals in Genesis there's an insistence that when Adam ate the Apple that Eve offered to him the scales fell from his eyes and the first thing that he realized was that he was naked and what that seems to me to mean is that I mean I think it means first of all that women make men self-conscious and I think there's ample reason to presume not and there's good evolutionary reasons for suggesting why that might be the case because sexual selection among human beings has been a primary force of evolutionary development and sexual selection and human beings is primarily conducted by women so for example as Roy has pointed out in his address to the APA a few years ago and I hope I get this right twice as many of your relatives who are women ISM as men and that means that women are more frequently reproductive ly successful than men and that they reject most men and the rejection of a man for reproductive purposes by a woman is the most serious form of rejection that's possible from an evolutionary point of view because the judgment is that well you might be nice enough to talk to but you're sure not fit to have your genes propagate into the next generation so it's no wonder that women can make self make men self-conscious and I think there's some reason to presume that it's the sexual selection forces that women placed upon man that drove rapid human cortical evolution and the development of self-consciousness now that's a leap and there's way I can justify that in the course of this particular talk but I think there is good reason to presume that it's the case in Genesis human beings become self conscious and the first thing that happens to them is that they realize they're naked and then the next thing that happens to them is they develop the moral sense to tell the difference between good and evil and it's a very strange thing because in some sense before our creature is self conscious there is no distinction between good and evil because as I said before a predator is not evil it's just a predator the fact of a predator like a wolf might be a tragedy for the rabbit but you can't be assuming that the wolf is evil merely because it wants to eat the rabbit but with the dawning of self-consciousness there seems to be the emergence of a moral sense that's essentially unique to human beings and that has something to do with our capacity to reflect upon the mechanisms of our action and then for some reason to be able to modify those actions and to choose which ones to implement into the future in the future we don't understand that and you can even deny if you'd like that the the phenomena of free choice exists but our culture is essentially predicated on the notion that it does exist and in the absence of evidence that it doesn't I'm going to take the easy way out and assume that it does otherwise things fall apart and they fall apart badly when after Adam and Eve becomes self conscious the first thing they do is close themselves and to me that's a mythological description of the emergence of culture as an intersession between the negative the fundamental vulnerability and nakedness of the human form and the depredations of nature if you realize that you're vulnerable and prone to death the first thing you're going to do is to start rearranging the manner in which you construe yourself so that you can protect yourself from such an unfortunate outcome that's I think partly why God curses Adam with the necessity of work once he finds out once God finds out that people have become self conscious like if you know that what's that winter is lurking in the future for example you're going to work and animals don't work they're just motivated to do whatever they do but humans work and that means they subvert their day to day motivations their immediate motivations for the purposes of future security and there's a real cost to that I mean part of the cost is separation from the pure and unadulterated flow of life and I believe that people suffer from that absence of flow continually and and and the advantage they gain from it is that they can plan for the future but the disadvantage is that they're calculating and cold and separated from their own instinctual resources Eve of course is cursed by what's going to be terrible pain in childbirth and that's related to the development of the immense skull size that characterizes human infants and their incredibly lengthy period of dependence which is also associated with their immense print after Adam and Eve become self-conscious they hide and this is actually a comical part of Genesis it's never really read as a comedy but it is a comedy even the fall itself is a comedy and so they're hiding away behind a bush and God comes walking through the garden and God the infinite is accustomed to walking without him with no interruption of the flow of information between them madam is narrowed God says you know where where have you gone and Adam says oh well I'm hiding and God says which is kind of stupid really and this is why it's a comments like he's hiding behind a bush this is God and he can see through bushes and like Adam should know that it doesn't really matter he's hiding me on this bush anyways and and God so Adam says I'm hiding and and God says well why well you know what why are you hiding lots cuz Adams ashamed and Adam says well I'm naked and this is an example of the tremendous compression of human wisdom into a few lines that characterizes mythology say well why would people hide from God once they realize they're naked and I would say well that's pretty obviously once you know you're vulnerable or do you really have enough courage to manifest any sort of semblance of a divine destiny well answer that is pretty much clearly no and it's no bloody wonder and so the hiding is people hide when they're self-conscious and vulnerable and where they hide from me they hide from their deepest destiny and it's no wonder God says okay yeah well you figured that out how that happened and Adam says and this is karma hoodoo was the woman's fault which i think is really funny and which I actually may have been the original sin and not the eating of the apple right the first time that the man blamed the woman for his self-conscious misery I think that's the real fall and not the rise of self-consciousness itself anyways we know the rest of the story God says oh well the cats out of the bag now you know you know you're vulnerable and from here on in history starts your own a paradise you're out of unconscious identification with the natural world you're going to work you're going to sweat lots of the time it isn't going to work and women they're going to be beholden to their husbands not because that's divine Fiat but because the developmental the developmental dependency of a human infant is so extreme that women are cursed to rely on men for protection when they're at their most vulnerable fine so that self-consciousness and an explanation for why people would hide away from their destiny but then the next story the Cain and Abel story really elaborates that out and describes it and so Cain and Abel of course are two sons of Adam and Eve and they're really the first people because of course Adam and Eve were made by God so they're really not people at all because people are born and Cain and Abel are the first two people and they characterized as far as I can tell to canonical patterns of reaction to the terrible vulnerability that's revealed as a consequence of the development of self-consciousness Cain and Abel make sacrifices to God why human cultures make sacrifices that's what they do sacrifice sacrificial rituals a human universal blood sacrifices a human universal human sacrifice at least in some anthropological epics was regarded as a human Universal why do people make sacrifices to God to please them seems like a mystery of modern people I ask my students what sacrifices did you make to go to university well they can answer that / of a second you know they can't party as much as they might have they can't drink nearly as much beer as they might have liked to more seriously a lot of them work a lot of them have put their families in serious financial straits to send them to university they've given up all sorts of things in order to pursue pursue a course of action that they believe will best ensure their harmonious relationship with the nature of reality everyone makes sacrifices ok we can say that now because we're psychologically sophisticated and linguistically sophisticated we know something about human psychology but thousands and thousands of years ago before people had this explicit psychological acumen the best they could do is act out and tell stories about human psychology because they hadn't developed any further than that and Cain and Abel is one of those stories the sacrifices are burnt on an altar why well a smoke rises well so what well God's up in the sky and if the smoke rises up there and he gets a whiff of it he can tell what the quality of the sacrifice was and you can laugh about that and you can think it you can think about it as primitive but it's not permanent its artistic and it's beautiful in it and it's accurate and here's why is because before the invention of the electrical light and maybe before the invention of fire and the closest to human being could ever get to direct confrontation with the absolute unknown was to look up at the night sky because the night sky especially when it's sprinkled with stars confronts you directly with the fact of the infinite and to make the presupposition that God resides in the infinite and and you're having a direct experience of the infinite at that moment is not a primitive notion it's a it's a very intelligent and and creative hypothesis and so the notion that God occupies the sky the dazed guy being equally as impressive as the night sky is not a primitive hypothesis it's a reflection of the nature of a certain kind of human experience you burn something and you send the smoke up God gets a crack at determining the quality of your offering the quality of your sacrifice well let's get let's be perfectly clear about this if your sacrifices aren't first-rate the nature of your relationship with the infinite is going to suffer dreadfully and that's exactly what the story of Cain and Abel reveals now Abel he's a trusting character he believes in the nature of experience in the nature of existence when he's called on to make a sacrifice he sacrifices the best that he has to offer and that makes God happy and as a consequence everything that Abel touches turns to gold everyone likes them they respect them his crops multiply he's successful with women plus he's a wonderful guy so you could hardly imagine a more annoying creature if you possibly attempted to do it whereas Cain C Cain has reacted to his self-consciousness by withdrawing from the infinite and there's a tremendous danger in that because it starts to mean that he relies purely on his own devious devices to sale is shipped through the shoals of life he believes as his arrogance develops as a consequence of his withdrawal from the infinite a contact that he can't tolerate because he can't tolerate his own vulnerability that he is able to deceive the structure of reality itself to offer second-rate sacrifices to God himself who can see absolutely everything because the infinite is absolutely everything and to prevail nonetheless well needless to say this does not work and it doesn't work in an obvious way if you talk to people and they reveal to you their unnecessary suffering it's very straightforward to look behind what it is that they have to say they'll tell you the poor decisions they made in their lives and the opportunities that they didn't take and the chances that they didn't they didn't have enough courage to grasp and the sacrifices they fail to make there's nothing mysterious about it and their own experiences teach them full well that they pathologized the relationship they have with the nature of reality well that's a terrible thing well in Cain is dreadfully unhappy he's unhappy because nothing he ever wants happens and that's partly because he doesn't really want it because if he really wanted he'd make the right sacrifices the salt is rubbed into his wounds by the existence of his brother for whom everything seems simple but of course really isn't Cain goes to complain to God and I had to read three or four different translations of these particular verses to figure out what this meant then he says what in the world is going on here I'm marking myself to the bone I'm sacrificing things left right and center everything I touch turns to dirt everything turns against me like what's up with the nature of reality Cain's essential vulnerability is revealed and exacerbated by his pathological attitude towards his own actions God says to him insulae sin is a predatory cat that crouches at your doorway and leaps on you ad will it but if you only wanted to you could master it and that is absolutely the last thing that Cain wants to hear because if things are going from bad to worse for you and you're playing a causal role in it there's nothing more horrible than something that someone can do you but reveal to you in a way that you can't deny that you're entirely complicit in your own demise and that's exactly what God does to Cain and so what is Cain do well the logical thing would be listen because if the structure of reality itself tells you something it's best to listen since there's no way out of it but that's not what Cain does he's so incensed by his scent essential vulnerability compromised and exacerbated by his failure to make the appropriate sacrifices and to conduct himself appropriately that he decides then in their number one to destroy his ideal to reduce the tension that he feels when that ideal exists as a contrast point and number two to destroy the favorite son of God and so he goes out into the field and kills Abel and God comes along and says where's my favorite son and Cain says I killed him and it's so interesting to me that that story is placed really it's the third story in the Old Testament it's it's with the archaic stories and it's a story that reveals as far as I can tell that there are two essential patterns of reaction to the self-conscious vulnerable conditions of existence and one is humble approach to infinity with determined attempts to make the appropriate sacrifices the other is arrogance resentment the keeping of everything good for oneself and the degeneration of the soul into something that's homicidally murderous well the story doesn't stop there and it gets really compressed in this part and that's perhaps because some of its being lost with the passages of time but the next thing that happens is that well God doesn't punish Cain and you think that's kind of strange I mean Old Testament God he's punishing people left right and center it's right why not Cain and you think well he marks Cain and he says to the people who around that they should leave him alone because he's been marked by God as to be left alone and the reason for that I think and this is something that's reflected on our legal system is that murder promotes revenge and revenge destroys societies and so God puts an end to the situation right there and then by telling people that despite the fact that Cain has has committed a terrible crime that there will be no retribution Cain goes off and gets married and he has a number of generations of offspring if you insult a member of the first generation of Cain's offspring he doesn't kill you it kills seven of you and if you insult a member of the second generation of Cain's offspring he doesn't kill seven of you he kills seven times seven of you and then on down the rape down the road of the offspring of Cain is tubal Cain and tubal Cain is the artificer of weapons of war and this stunningly brilliant story says in it's incredibly compressed fashion that the motivation that drives the commission of the worst human atrocities is an inevitable social consequence of the refusal of the self-conscious individual to make the sacrifices appropriate to establishing a harmonious life and their consequent degeneration into a kind of murderous and resentment filled raged rage propagating endlessly through its variations in society until everything comes to an end and the next story is the flood and it's not surprising because if things go from bad to worse long enough everything falls and it's a terrifying story and I didn't understand that story I didn't understand that story for years it wasn't really until I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn that that I developed I think the cognitive capacity them to even understand what the story meant because Solzhenitsyn said it is Nobel Prize accepting speech a single new stop flying can bring down a tyranny which is a stunning thing to say but I would also say something that's been amply demonstrated in the th century because we have we have historical examples of people who did precisely that Gandhi did it facto Havel did it Nelson Mandela did it Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was definitely one of the acts blows that brought down the Soviet Union a stunning achievement for a person who started writing that book by memorizing it when he was a concentration camp victim this far away from starvation it shows you as clearly as anything possibly can how powerful the human spirit can be if it's willing to take on the obligation of its relationship with the divine and also how terrible things can become if the responsibility of that burden is not shouldered now it's no wonder as far as I can tell that people don't think this way because thinking this way is it's catastrophic in a way because the burden it places on the individual is so extreme that it's almost unbearable while in a but but that's exactly why it is in Genesis to begin with that Adam hides but he becomes conscious of his own vulnerability it's like he thinks well a creature such as I I could never bear such a burden well there's a lot more to people than meets the eye and the only way I learned that was by looking at people and my own peoples in my own capacity for evil because I started to realize that we regard ourselves as narrow little beings in a particular kind of box and there's real comfort in that although there's tremendous limitation you cannot see your way out of that box until you know well what I teach my students I teach them about Nazi Germany and I try to make them understand that there's an overwhelming probability if they were in Nazi Germany in the s that they would have been perpetrators and Nazis and overwhelming probability and if they can't accept that because it's a historical fact they have absolutely no idea who they are now imagining yourself as a Nazi perpetrator is an unbearably terrifying thing to do but I don't believe that you can do I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil because people can tell you till they're blue in the face about your capacity for good it just sounds like ah it sounds like wishful thinking it sounds like the sort of thing that an advertiser might tell you on TV it's just too good to be true and I don't think people believe it but I think that if you tell people that you know in the cold dark corners of their mind there are motivations that are so terrible that they would they would traumatize themselves if they were ever revealed that everyone knows at some level of analysis that that's absolutely true you think there's evidence throughout history that it's possible for people to be enlightened and you'd think since enlightenment is viewed as the medication for vulnerability and death that everybody would be struggling as hard as they possibly could to be enlightened if such a state exactly and precisely exists but if the barrier to enlightenment is the development of self consciousness of the individual humans infinite capacity for evil then you can be immediately convinced about why enlightenment is in such short supply when I finished my first provisional examination of the sorts of motivations that drove people to set up concentration camps and to torture people terribly in those camps I came to a terrible conclusion it was a conclusion that I think in some ways was the worst thing that had ever happened to me maybe intellectually and morally I thought I came to understand why it is that people dependent on their group identity in their cultural identification because that helped protect themselves from their own vulnerability you have to believe things because you just don't know everything so you have to believe things they fill in the gaps the beliefs fill in the gaps if the beliefs are stripped from you then your defenses against the infinite are stripped and it's no wonder that people will defend their beliefs I thought well you do if you're too involved in defending your beliefs you're going to be willing to kill other people in their defence and we're so technologically powerful now that we can no longer be willing to kill other people in the defense of our own beliefs because the time for that is passed and I realized well with you if you don't stand up for your beliefs you leave yourself bereft you're open to the depredations of the infinite that's equally intolerable it seems to leave no way out there is a way out you know and I think it's the way out that genuinely religious people have tried to offer humanity for thousands and thousands of years and the way out of the conundrum posed to you by your reliance on ideological beliefs and your vulnerability in the face of the unknown is the development of a truly integrated and powerful character and that's a individual development and it means constant confrontation with things you don't understand and constant attempts to ensure that your character is composed of truth and solidity rather than deceit and to make of yourself something that's built on a rock and not predicated on sand and the thing is it's one thing to tell people that because maybe they should take care of themselves but I don't know if that's enough to tell people because they don't take care of themselves that well but it's a completely other thing to say look you know every time you make a pathological moral decision you move the one the world one step closer to complete annihilation and I absolutely believe that I think the historical evidence is crystal clear and I also think that every time you make an appropriate moral decision and you manifest moral courage in the face of your own vulnerability then you move the world one step farther from the break and every that's the case for every single person you know Solzhenitsyn said drawing on his Eastern Orthodox Christian background every single person is the center of the world a center of the world not the center of the world the world is a complicated place it can have all sorts of centers it's hard to believe that you might be one of them but everything about human existence is hard to believe the fact that it's here at all is hard to believe the nature of it's hard to believe everything that human beings does is so ridiculous and remarkable that it's like it's a consistently and constantly unfolding miracle the idea that each of you might be a center of the cosmos in that infinite admixture of ridiculousness and absurdities is hardly more than one more ridiculous thing to swallow all summarize I guess said the tragedy is a precondition for being being is the interplay between the finite and the infinite and in that interplay there's tragedy and there's no way out of that evil something different evils the conscious attempt to make the conditions of existence more pathological than they have to be and it's motivated by conscious intent the motivations arise because people pay a terrible price for their self conscious awareness and that awareness is their awareness of their vulnerability and that is a terrible thing to be aware of that vulnerability can be confronted forthrightly accepted and the appropriate decisions made alternatively people can retreat into their own rationalistic arrogance and attempt to deceive themselves and everyone else about the nature of their own existence and about the nature of reality that pathway leads to nothing but destruction I think that there's good reason to assume that it's too late in the developmental course as a species for that path to be acceptable anymore because we're too powerful and if too many people stay on that path we're going to do ourselves in and so I would say as we've become more technologically powerful an increasing moral burden is being placed on each of us it matters to the to the to the destiny of the cosmos whether or not you get your Morlock straight and I don't mean that in a trivial way I believe that that's as close to an empirical fact as anything that can be demonstrated I also believe that's as terrifying a thing to consider as anything you could possibly imagine and maybe it's too much to ask of people but you know our great religious traditions do continually remind us that inside every human being there's a spark of divinity and that idea is a precondition for our entire system of law there's always the possibility that it's true and if it's true it means that there is a there's a there's an infinite avenue of potential that lays open to every single person and that the ability to transform the terrible conditions of reality into something not only acceptable but worthy of celebration actually lies within our grasp an alternative that the alternative to that is the continual generation of a kind of hell that's so incomprehensibly awful that by any reasonable person standards it has to be regarded as something to avoid that's all I have to say about thatWhen I started working on this problem or I guess when when it started working on me was probably really in the mid s and I found myself suffering from two things one was a very lengthy sequence of nightmares about nuclear destruction and they're very affecting dreams and associated with that was a sense of amazement that a dream that was that awful could reflect a reality that could be that awful and an additional amazement out the fact that despite the production of thousands and tens and thousands of weapons of unimaginable destruction and that qualitative qualitative change in human capacity that represented that people could go about their day-to-day lives without acting as if anything fundamental whatsoever had changed now I've never really been able to figure out why that disturbed me so much when it seemed to not disturb to any profound degree most of the people I knew it doesn't really matter the upshot of it was of it was that I spent I probably spent my whole life trying to understand what evil was and more importantly what might be done about it it's a strange pursuit in some ways for an academic done undertake because academics tend to talk about academic things and one thing you can say about evil is that whatever it is it's not bloody well academic it's not an intellectual issue it's an existential issue and it's it's not a theoretical issue it's an it's an issue that deals with that absolute nature of reality and I guess sometimes I think that people who go into academia go into academia shield themselves from having to ask questions about the absolute nature of reality so anyways I think before you can talk about something before you can dare to talk about something like evil you should do some thinking about what it is that you're talking about definitionally speaking I learned this I believe from a historian named Jeffrey Burton Russell who wrote a very detailed history of the idea of the devil in the s when such histories were were strange to say the least he he was very interested in the history of the embodiment of ideas of evil and one of the things he his work did for me was to help me clarify the distinction between two terrible things the distinction distinction that has to be made and that's the distinction between tragedy and evil and I don't think you can talk about it evil at all until you distinguish it from tragedy and so I'm going to try to distinguish evil from tragedy by making some reference to the essential existential condition of human beings I would say that the nature of human being is such that it consists of a confrontation with the bounded finite with the unbounded infinite and that those are the bare facts of the matter and the facts are that the the world of experience as it presents itself to us is literally and not metaphorically complex beyond our capacity to understand and that means that people deal in a real sense on an ongoing basis with the infinite and I believe that that fact is the reason why religious experience is essentially and belief is essentially endemic to mankind it's a human universal and it's not because people believe it's because human existence as such consists of a confrontation between the finite and the infinite and religious systems merely take that into account now our finitude in the face of the infinite has some inevitable consequences and I would say those consequences are essentially the existential conditions of life the first of those consequences is is that the finite is always overwhelmed by the infinite it has to be because it can't encapsulate it and so what that meant means is that it's that suffering is central to the nature of human existence and suffering exists as a consequence of the consequences of our limitations I mean every single person who's alive is going to die and every single person who's alive is going to deal with with serious physical illness and mental distress if they don't suffer if they aren't suffering it directly immediately right now on their own it's almost inevitably the case that every single person who walks the earth is confronting that the bare bones of reality at that level in the guise of an afflicted family member and so the fact of our finitude is is again no academic issue it's essential to the nature of our being and we're forced to deal with it on an ongoing basis so I would say insufficiency is built into human experience and and there are existential consequences to that now I read something a long time ago and I don't remember who wrote it but it was written about Jewish commentary on the Torah God is omniscient omnipotent and omnipresent what does he lack and answers' limitation and that's that's a that's a riddle and an answer of unparalleled brilliance as far as I'm concerned because I think it speaks deeply to something about the central nature of existence itself and that is that without limitation there's no being now that's a hard thing to understand but I think you can understand it in a number of different ways the first thing you might want to understand is that I play this game with my students sometimes in my class I'll come up to a student a pigment poor victim at random and come up to them say okay we're to play a game say and they say ok and I say well you move first well they don't know what to do and the reason for that is because the limiting parameters of the game have not been defined and as a consequence of that they're stunned by their infinite freedom into complete immobility and what that means in a sense is that the in the absence of serious constraint there can be no choice no freedom no existence and I believe this to be fundamentally true just as the fact that human being is vulnerable is fundamentally true here's another example that I think is more it's more personal to me and it emerged in my imagination as a consequence of my contemplation of my son's vulnerability so I have children there are teenagers now I still like them one of my one of the things I was really struck by when my children were little was how perfect they were like and I believe that that was the benevolence of God in a sense children are tremendously difficult they're a tremendous responsibility but they're so perfect and they manifest that perfection in such a remarkable way that that's the payment for taking on the responsibility of bringing them into the be into being and caring for them and the thing about being a parent is that the vulnerability of people is made manifest to you in a way that was never the case prior to that and it's not it's haunting and it's beautiful but it's also exactly right in a way and I was thinking well look at my son he's a little kid you know you got to chase after him all the time you can get sick people hurt him you know people are going to be mean to him he's going to be disappointed in his life he's vulnerable and it's it's it's a constant tragic reality that he's vulnerable I thought well okay let's say we want to do something about that so let's say we make him so that no one can pick on him so it could inflate him to about feet high and equip him with a metallic skeleton and an ax and a cast-iron exoskeleton and you could equip him with a computerized intelligence that far supersedes his own and you could remove his vulnerabilities one by one hypothetically and of course more and more we're in a position where we could do that reality and one of the things I realized right away was that as you remove the vulnerabilities you remove the thing you love and then I started to understand more deeply that vulnerability was a precondition for human being and that was a desirable precondition because the thing is about human existence that are wonderful and remarkable are so integrally tied up with vulnerability that they're actually inextricable the Jewish commentary what the infinite lacks is the finite there's a more abstract way of getting at the same thing if you could do absolutely anything you wanted at any point and be anywhere you wanted and be anything you wanted and if there was nothing that was out of your reach there would be nothing to do because you'd be everything at once and when you're everything at once which is at least in principle the position of God there's no story and there's no being and there's something about being that is a story and without limitation there's no story so then the question starts to become with regards to consideration of human vulnerability is there a way to conduct your life in such a manner that the intrinsic vulnerability that characterizes your life is rendered not only acceptable but desirable and to me that's the central question of existence and I tell you get that wrong you're on the wrong track and if you're on the wrong track man you are in one terrible place I would say with regards to tragedy right humans are vulnerable and that's tragic but if tragedy is the price that we pay for existence then so be it if existence is justifiable and so tragedy itself which is merely a revelation of our vulnerability can't be regarded as evil it's just a it's a condition of existence and so it's necessary to distinguish the tragic conditions of existence from evil before you can even address the problem and I think what that means to some degree is you should not blame on the relationship between the finite and the infinite the terrible failings of humanity that can be laid directly at the feet of human beings so earthquakes aren't evil and cancer isn't evil and mental illness isn't evil and predators aren't evil they're they just are part of the way things are but there are certain categories of human action that are definitely outside the parameters of mere tragedy and those are the things we really have to get a handle on evil for me is differentiated from tragedy by its lack of necessity and it's volunteerism and it's a tenant I think of modern materialistic thought that there are social or material causes for actions and it's an extraordinarily useful theory and I think but I think one of the unfortunate consequences of that is that we've tended to write off much of human misbehavior and attribute it to say insufficiencies and material conditions which is not an it's not an acceptable theory there are all sorts of human cultures that were characterized by virtually complete absence of material luxury well-being whose cultures were highly functional and and highly moral and to describe the propensity towards misbehavior as a consequence of economic inequality is entirely beside the point as far as I'm concerned evil is more pernicious than that which is generated for example by social inequality I think it's actually although this is a terrifying thought in some ways it's more appropriate to consider it a form of demonically warped aesthetic and I'll give you a couple of examples of what I mean by that for example because the exact because the manifestation of this warped pathetic aesthetic makes itself apparent under certain conditions so for example I think it made itself apparent in the imagination of the first politician who can to coined the acronym mad or mutual assured destruction that's an aesthetic of evil to make a joke of a situation that catastrophic indicates the kind of malevolence that lurks behind the fact that such a condition exists the motto on the gates of Auschwitz I believe in the second world war work will make you free that's another manifestation of the aesthetic of evil it's a terrible terrible ironic joke and it's instructive to meditate on what sort of imagination would have the arrogance to tell such a terrible joke the concentration camps are classic examples of evil and I think by analyzing at least certain kinds of events that occurred within them it's easier to get a clear idea of what evil constitutes and one of the stories that's always haunted me I guess is I believe it's another story derived from Auschwitz the prison guards and our wits would take the prisoners who were already stripped of their dignity and to whatever degree possible their identity and their culture under language and their status of valuable beings and yet that wasn't sufficient they needed to be tortured in addition to that before they were killed and the torts are often consisted of a self-evidently counterproductive work a situation that also frequently characterized activity in the Soviet gulag archipelago where perhaps million people met their death a typical auswitch example was the requirement for prisoners to carry -pound socks of wet salt from one side of the compound and then back again now that's evil as far as I'm concerned and you have to think about from an aesthetic perspective in a sense because it's a celebration of horror and it's a it's a conscious attempt to violate the conditions that make life itself tolerable and it's aimed at dehumanization destruction of the ideal and at an even deeper level revenge against the conditions of existence itself I've tried to understand the developmental pathway that leads to acts like that my academic research as well as my clinical experience has revealed to me that what appears to lie at the bottom of motivation for the excesses of behavior that characterize evil are too tightly causally related factors one arrogance another resentment and both of those are tied up with vulnerability of human beings in the face of the infinite but but tied up with something more profound as well the most thorough account of this that I've managed I think at least two partially comprehend I believe is contained in the first couple of the stories in the Old Testament in Genesis the story of Adam and Eve in the fall of man and the immediately following story of Cain and Abel as far as we can tell those are very very old stories they predate Judaism at least in some of their in some of their structural elements it's conceivable that some of the and those stories are as old as the human capacity to tell stories itself assuming that they were grounded in an oral tradition that predated the written tradition and we know that oral traditions can last at least in some forms unchanged for periods of up to , years so the anthropological and archaeological evidence is fairly clear on that point these are very very very old stories and people remember them and created them for reasons we really don't understand and they're they're strange and mysterious and unforgettable all at the same time the story of Adam and Eve as far as I can tell is the story of the coming of consciousness the coming of self-consciousness to mankind and I think that the human that the human human self-consciousness is what separates us from animals in Genesis there's an insistence that when Adam ate the Apple that Eve offered to him the scales fell from his eyes and the first thing that he realized was that he was naked and what that seems to me to mean is that I mean I think it means first of all that women make men self-conscious and I think there's ample reason to presume not and there's good evolutionary reasons for suggesting why that might be the case because sexual selection among human beings has been a primary force of evolutionary development and sexual selection and human beings is primarily conducted by women so for example as Roy has pointed out in his address to the APA a few years ago and I hope I get this right twice as many of your relatives who are women ISM as men and that means that women are more frequently reproductive ly successful than men and that they reject most men and the rejection of a man for reproductive purposes by a woman is the most serious form of rejection that's possible from an evolutionary point of view because the judgment is that well you might be nice enough to talk to but you're sure not fit to have your genes propagate into the next generation so it's no wonder that women can make self make men self-conscious and I think there's some reason to presume that it's the sexual selection forces that women placed upon man that drove rapid human cortical evolution and the development of self-consciousness now that's a leap and there's way I can justify that in the course of this particular talk but I think there is good reason to presume that it's the case in Genesis human beings become self conscious and the first thing that happens to them is that they realize they're naked and then the next thing that happens to them is they develop the moral sense to tell the difference between good and evil and it's a very strange thing because in some sense before our creature is self conscious there is no distinction between good and evil because as I said before a predator is not evil it's just a predator the fact of a predator like a wolf might be a tragedy for the rabbit but you can't be assuming that the wolf is evil merely because it wants to eat the rabbit but with the dawning of self-consciousness there seems to be the emergence of a moral sense that's essentially unique to human beings and that has something to do with our capacity to reflect upon the mechanisms of our action and then for some reason to be able to modify those actions and to choose which ones to implement into the future in the future we don't understand that and you can even deny if you'd like that the the phenomena of free choice exists but our culture is essentially predicated on the notion that it does exist and in the absence of evidence that it doesn't I'm going to take the easy way out and assume that it does otherwise things fall apart and they fall apart badly when after Adam and Eve becomes self conscious the first thing they do is close themselves and to me that's a mythological description of the emergence of culture as an intersession between the negative the fundamental vulnerability and nakedness of the human form and the depredations of nature if you realize that you're vulnerable and prone to death the first thing you're going to do is to start rearranging the manner in which you construe yourself so that you can protect yourself from such an unfortunate outcome that's I think partly why God curses Adam with the necessity of work once he finds out once God finds out that people have become self conscious like if you know that what's that winter is lurking in the future for example you're going to work and animals don't work they're just motivated to do whatever they do but humans work and that means they subvert their day to day motivations their immediate motivations for the purposes of future security and there's a real cost to that I mean part of the cost is separation from the pure and unadulterated flow of life and I believe that people suffer from that absence of flow continually and and and the advantage they gain from it is that they can plan for the future but the disadvantage is that they're calculating and cold and separated from their own instinctual resources Eve of course is cursed by what's going to be terrible pain in childbirth and that's related to the development of the immense skull size that characterizes human infants and their incredibly lengthy period of dependence which is also associated with their immense print after Adam and Eve become self-conscious they hide and this is actually a comical part of Genesis it's never really read as a comedy but it is a comedy even the fall itself is a comedy and so they're hiding away behind a bush and God comes walking through the garden and God the infinite is accustomed to walking without him with no interruption of the flow of information between them madam is narrowed God says you know where where have you gone and Adam says oh well I'm hiding and God says which is kind of stupid really and this is why it's a comments like he's hiding behind a bush this is God and he can see through bushes and like Adam should know that it doesn't really matter he's hiding me on this bush anyways and and God so Adam says I'm hiding and and God says well why well you know what why are you hiding lots cuz Adams ashamed and Adam says well I'm naked and this is an example of the tremendous compression of human wisdom into a few lines that characterizes mythology say well why would people hide from God once they realize they're naked and I would say well that's pretty obviously once you know you're vulnerable or do you really have enough courage to manifest any sort of semblance of a divine destiny well answer that is pretty much clearly no and it's no bloody wonder and so the hiding is people hide when they're self-conscious and vulnerable and where they hide from me they hide from their deepest destiny and it's no wonder God says okay yeah well you figured that out how that happened and Adam says and this is karma hoodoo was the woman's fault which i think is really funny and which I actually may have been the original sin and not the eating of the apple right the first time that the man blamed the woman for his self-conscious misery I think that's the real fall and not the rise of self-consciousness itself anyways we know the rest of the story God says oh well the cats out of the bag now you know you know you're vulnerable and from here on in history starts your own a paradise you're out of unconscious identification with the natural world you're going to work you're going to sweat lots of the time it isn't going to work and women they're going to be beholden to their husbands not because that's divine Fiat but because the developmental the developmental dependency of a human infant is so extreme that women are cursed to rely on men for protection when they're at their most vulnerable fine so that self-consciousness and an explanation for why people would hide away from their destiny but then the next story the Cain and Abel story really elaborates that out and describes it and so Cain and Abel of course are two sons of Adam and Eve and they're really the first people because of course Adam and Eve were made by God so they're really not people at all because people are born and Cain and Abel are the first two people and they characterized as far as I can tell to canonical patterns of reaction to the terrible vulnerability that's revealed as a consequence of the development of self-consciousness Cain and Abel make sacrifices to God why human cultures make sacrifices that's what they do sacrifice sacrificial rituals a human universal blood sacrifices a human universal human sacrifice at least in some anthropological epics was regarded as a human Universal why do people make sacrifices to God to please them seems like a mystery of modern people I ask my students what sacrifices did you make to go to university well they can answer that / of a second you know they can't party as much as they might have they can't drink nearly as much beer as they might have liked to more seriously a lot of them work a lot of them have put their families in serious financial straits to send them to university they've given up all sorts of things in order to pursue pursue a course of action that they believe will best ensure their harmonious relationship with the nature of reality everyone makes sacrifices ok we can say that now because we're psychologically sophisticated and linguistically sophisticated we know something about human psychology but thousands and thousands of years ago before people had this explicit psychological acumen the best they could do is act out and tell stories about human psychology because they hadn't developed any further than that and Cain and Abel is one of those stories the sacrifices are burnt on an altar why well a smoke rises well so what well God's up in the sky and if the smoke rises up there and he gets a whiff of it he can tell what the quality of the sacrifice was and you can laugh about that and you can think it you can think about it as primitive but it's not permanent its artistic and it's beautiful in it and it's accurate and here's why is because before the invention of the electrical light and maybe before the invention of fire and the closest to human being could ever get to direct confrontation with the absolute unknown was to look up at the night sky because the night sky especially when it's sprinkled with stars confronts you directly with the fact of the infinite and to make the presupposition that God resides in the infinite and and you're having a direct experience of the infinite at that moment is not a primitive notion it's a it's a very intelligent and and creative hypothesis and so the notion that God occupies the sky the dazed guy being equally as impressive as the night sky is not a primitive hypothesis it's a reflection of the nature of a certain kind of human experience you burn something and you send the smoke up God gets a crack at determining the quality of your offering the quality of your sacrifice well let's get let's be perfectly clear about this if your sacrifices aren't first-rate the nature of your relationship with the infinite is going to suffer dreadfully and that's exactly what the story of Cain and Abel reveals now Abel he's a trusting character he believes in the nature of experience in the nature of existence when he's called on to make a sacrifice he sacrifices the best that he has to offer and that makes God happy and as a consequence everything that Abel touches turns to gold everyone likes them they respect them his crops multiply he's successful with women plus he's a wonderful guy so you could hardly imagine a more annoying creature if you possibly attempted to do it whereas Cain C Cain has reacted to his self-consciousness by withdrawing from the infinite and there's a tremendous danger in that because it starts to mean that he relies purely on his own devious devices to sale is shipped through the shoals of life he believes as his arrogance develops as a consequence of his withdrawal from the infinite a contact that he can't tolerate because he can't tolerate his own vulnerability that he is able to deceive the structure of reality itself to offer second-rate sacrifices to God himself who can see absolutely everything because the infinite is absolutely everything and to prevail nonetheless well needless to say this does not work and it doesn't work in an obvious way if you talk to people and they reveal to you their unnecessary suffering it's very straightforward to look behind what it is that they have to say they'll tell you the poor decisions they made in their lives and the opportunities that they didn't take and the chances that they didn't they didn't have enough courage to grasp and the sacrifices they fail to make there's nothing mysterious about it and their own experiences teach them full well that they pathologized the relationship they have with the nature of reality well that's a terrible thing well in Cain is dreadfully unhappy he's unhappy because nothing he ever wants happens and that's partly because he doesn't really want it because if he really wanted he'd make the right sacrifices the salt is rubbed into his wounds by the existence of his brother for whom everything seems simple but of course really isn't Cain goes to complain to God and I had to read three or four different translations of these particular verses to figure out what this meant then he says what in the world is going on here I'm marking myself to the bone I'm sacrificing things left right and center everything I touch turns to dirt everything turns against me like what's up with the nature of reality Cain's essential vulnerability is revealed and exacerbated by his pathological attitude towards his own actions God says to him insulae sin is a predatory cat that crouches at your doorway and leaps on you ad will it but if you only wanted to you could master it and that is absolutely the last thing that Cain wants to hear because if things are going from bad to worse for you and you're playing a causal role in it there's nothing more horrible than something that someone can do you but reveal to you in a way that you can't deny that you're entirely complicit in your own demise and that's exactly what God does to Cain and so what is Cain do well the logical thing would be listen because if the structure of reality itself tells you something it's best to listen since there's no way out of it but that's not what Cain does he's so incensed by his scent essential vulnerability compromised and exacerbated by his failure to make the appropriate sacrifices and to conduct himself appropriately that he decides then in their number one to destroy his ideal to reduce the tension that he feels when that ideal exists as a contrast point and number two to destroy the favorite son of God and so he goes out into the field and kills Abel and God comes along and says where's my favorite son and Cain says I killed him and it's so interesting to me that that story is placed really it's the third story in the Old Testament it's it's with the archaic stories and it's a story that reveals as far as I can tell that there are two essential patterns of reaction to the self-conscious vulnerable conditions of existence and one is humble approach to infinity with determined attempts to make the appropriate sacrifices the other is arrogance resentment the keeping of everything good for oneself and the degeneration of the soul into something that's homicidally murderous well the story doesn't stop there and it gets really compressed in this part and that's perhaps because some of its being lost with the passages of time but the next thing that happens is that well God doesn't punish Cain and you think that's kind of strange I mean Old Testament God he's punishing people left right and center it's right why not Cain and you think well he marks Cain and he says to the people who around that they should leave him alone because he's been marked by God as to be left alone and the reason for that I think and this is something that's reflected on our legal system is that murder promotes revenge and revenge destroys societies and so God puts an end to the situation right there and then by telling people that despite the fact that Cain has has committed a terrible crime that there will be no retribution Cain goes off and gets married and he has a number of generations of offspring if you insult a member of the first generation of Cain's offspring he doesn't kill you it kills seven of you and if you insult a member of the second generation of Cain's offspring he doesn't kill seven of you he kills seven times seven of you and then on down the rape down the road of the offspring of Cain is tubal Cain and tubal Cain is the artificer of weapons of war and this stunningly brilliant story says in it's incredibly compressed fashion that the motivation that drives the commission of the worst human atrocities is an inevitable social consequence of the refusal of the self-conscious individual to make the sacrifices appropriate to establishing a harmonious life and their consequent degeneration into a kind of murderous and resentment filled raged rage propagating endlessly through its variations in society until everything comes to an end and the next story is the flood and it's not surprising because if things go from bad to worse long enough everything falls and it's a terrifying story and I didn't understand that story I didn't understand that story for years it wasn't really until I read Alexander Solzhenitsyn that that I developed I think the cognitive capacity them to even understand what the story meant because Solzhenitsyn said it is Nobel Prize accepting speech a single new stop flying can bring down a tyranny which is a stunning thing to say but I would also say something that's been amply demonstrated in the th century because we have we have historical examples of people who did precisely that Gandhi did it facto Havel did it Nelson Mandela did it Solzhenitsyn's Gulag Archipelago was definitely one of the acts blows that brought down the Soviet Union a stunning achievement for a person who started writing that book by memorizing it when he was a concentration camp victim this far away from starvation it shows you as clearly as anything possibly can how powerful the human spirit can be if it's willing to take on the obligation of its relationship with the divine and also how terrible things can become if the responsibility of that burden is not shouldered now it's no wonder as far as I can tell that people don't think this way because thinking this way is it's catastrophic in a way because the burden it places on the individual is so extreme that it's almost unbearable while in a but but that's exactly why it is in Genesis to begin with that Adam hides but he becomes conscious of his own vulnerability it's like he thinks well a creature such as I I could never bear such a burden well there's a lot more to people than meets the eye and the only way I learned that was by looking at people and my own peoples in my own capacity for evil because I started to realize that we regard ourselves as narrow little beings in a particular kind of box and there's real comfort in that although there's tremendous limitation you cannot see your way out of that box until you know well what I teach my students I teach them about Nazi Germany and I try to make them understand that there's an overwhelming probability if they were in Nazi Germany in the s that they would have been perpetrators and Nazis and overwhelming probability and if they can't accept that because it's a historical fact they have absolutely no idea who they are now imagining yourself as a Nazi perpetrator is an unbearably terrifying thing to do but I don't believe that you can do I don't think that you have any insight whatsoever into your capacity for good until you have some well-developed insight into your capacity for evil because people can tell you till they're blue in the face about your capacity for good it just sounds like ah it sounds like wishful thinking it sounds like the sort of thing that an advertiser might tell you on TV it's just too good to be true and I don't think people believe it but I think that if you tell people that you know in the cold dark corners of their mind there are motivations that are so terrible that they would they would traumatize themselves if they were ever revealed that everyone knows at some level of analysis that that's absolutely true you think there's evidence throughout history that it's possible for people to be enlightened and you'd think since enlightenment is viewed as the medication for vulnerability and death that everybody would be struggling as hard as they possibly could to be enlightened if such a state exactly and precisely exists but if the barrier to enlightenment is the development of self consciousness of the individual humans infinite capacity for evil then you can be immediately convinced about why enlightenment is in such short supply when I finished my first provisional examination of the sorts of motivations that drove people to set up concentration camps and to torture people terribly in those camps I came to a terrible conclusion it was a conclusion that I think in some ways was the worst thing that had ever happened to me maybe intellectually and morally I thought I came to understand why it is that people dependent on their group identity in their cultural identification because that helped protect themselves from their own vulnerability you have to believe things because you just don't know everything so you have to believe things they fill in the gaps the beliefs fill in the gaps if the beliefs are stripped from you then your defenses against the infinite are stripped and it's no wonder that people will defend their beliefs I thought well you do if you're too involved in defending your beliefs you're going to be willing to kill other people in their defence and we're so technologically powerful now that we can no longer be willing to kill other people in the defense of our own beliefs because the time for that is passed and I realized well with you if you don't stand up for your beliefs you leave yourself bereft you're open to the depredations of the infinite that's equally intolerable it seems to leave no way out there is a way out you know and I think it's the way out that genuinely religious people have tried to offer humanity for thousands and thousands of years and the way out of the conundrum posed to you by your reliance on ideological beliefs and your vulnerability in the face of the unknown is the development of a truly integrated and powerful character and that's a individual development and it means constant confrontation with things you don't understand and constant attempts to ensure that your character is composed of truth and solidity rather than deceit and to make of yourself something that's built on a rock and not predicated on sand and the thing is it's one thing to tell people that because maybe they should take care of themselves but I don't know if that's enough to tell people because they don't take care of themselves that well but it's a completely other thing to say look you know every time you make a pathological moral decision you move the one the world one step closer to complete annihilation and I absolutely believe that I think the historical evidence is crystal clear and I also think that every time you make an appropriate moral decision and you manifest moral courage in the face of your own vulnerability then you move the world one step farther from the break and every that's the case for every single person you know Solzhenitsyn said drawing on his Eastern Orthodox Christian background every single person is the center of the world a center of the world not the center of the world the world is a complicated place it can have all sorts of centers it's hard to believe that you might be one of them but everything about human existence is hard to believe the fact that it's here at all is hard to believe the nature of it's hard to believe everything that human beings does is so ridiculous and remarkable that it's like it's a consistently and constantly unfolding miracle the idea that each of you might be a center of the cosmos in that infinite admixture of ridiculousness and absurdities is hardly more than one more ridiculous thing to swallow all summarize I guess said the tragedy is a precondition for being being is the interplay between the finite and the infinite and in that interplay there's tragedy and there's no way out of that evil something different evils the conscious attempt to make the conditions of existence more pathological than they have to be and it's motivated by conscious intent the motivations arise because people pay a terrible price for their self conscious awareness and that awareness is their awareness of their vulnerability and that is a terrible thing to be aware of that vulnerability can be confronted forthrightly accepted and the appropriate decisions made alternatively people can retreat into their own rationalistic arrogance and attempt to deceive themselves and everyone else about the nature of their own existence and about the nature of reality that pathway leads to nothing but destruction I think that there's good reason to assume that it's too late in the developmental course as a species for that path to be acceptable anymore because we're too powerful and if too many people stay on that path we're going to do ourselves in and so I would say as we've become more technologically powerful an increasing moral burden is being placed on each of us it matters to the to the to the destiny of the cosmos whether or not you get your Morlock straight and I don't mean that in a trivial way I believe that that's as close to an empirical fact as anything that can be demonstrated I also believe that's as terrifying a thing to consider as anything you could possibly imagine and maybe it's too much to ask of people but you know our great religious traditions do continually remind us that inside every human being there's a spark of divinity and that idea is a precondition for our entire system of law there's always the possibility that it's true and if it's true it means that there is a there's a there's an infinite avenue of potential that lays open to every single person and that the ability to transform the terrible conditions of reality into something not only acceptable but worthy of celebration actually lies within our grasp an alternative that the alternative to that is the continual generation of a kind of hell that's so incomprehensibly awful that by any reasonable person standards it has to be regarded as something to avoid that's all I have to say about that.