Understanding evil is a painful but necessary step on the path to personal enlightenment. Agree or disagree?

My reply:

Yes, but not everyone is adapted for it in the same way. Not in the way some people are. Some people are very good at looking at and intimately understanding and experiencing evil, and some aren’t. They just can’t. And that’s ok. I believe that for those people the important thing is to be in relationship with people who do. And they’re probably bringing things to the table that the evil-seers need, too. So no, I don’t expect everyone to really understand or be interested in understanding evil. But I do think they’ll be ruined if they aren’t intimately connected with someone who does.

– Someone wrote a reply, testing my theory-

Yes, I would just say that everyone needs to understand it to some degree, but what that looks like and how much some people are adapted for it varies enormously. I don’t think humans are designed to be self-contained. And I think we overestimate the degree to which we can develop ourselves to be complete and perfect and whole.

It’s great when we move toward that goal, I’m not denying that at all. But it’s a tension. Your capabilities are limited, and they’re meant to be limited. And you also have exceptional capabilities. And those limitations and capabilities are meant to be shared and to operate in tandem with others.

We’re not hyper-individualistic, even if our individuals are hyper-capable compared to other species; we’re hyper-social. We can’t function without other people. We’re not meant to. And when when we do, we discount the degree to which we got that capability from the products of someone else’s efforts and talents. We are always, at all times, a thousand feet deep in an ocean of the social products of all other humans, living and dead.

I’m married, and I have kids, and exploring this particular topic has been a subject of a lot of my personal experience. I love to look into the abyss. I like understanding evil. And my wife doesn’t. Or at least there are kinds of understanding she likes and kinds she doesn’t, and that holds for me too. I like philosophical and political and social evil and am interested in them. But I don’t like interpersonal evil. It’s too vague and slippery and painful.

So I don’t enjoy some stories that she likes, the drama, the confusion, the stupidity, the misunderstandings, the emotion, the tears. I get really stressed out. But they don’t bother her. And she hates the conflict that I enjoy. I like the “on the walls” conflict, and she likes “inside the walls” conflict. Well, both exist. I’m not well-adapted to one and she’s not well-adapted to the other. Our lack of interest makes it hard to even understand the conflicts that the other person tolerates and even enjoys.

And that’s ok, because we have each other. We’ve outsourced some of the burden of life and understanding it. So maybe it isn’t that all people don’t need to understand evil, but maybe they need to understand their evil, the evil that it is their part to confront. And that’s going to look very different among different people. There’s more than enough evil to go around, and we all have our niche.

My wife sometimes seems naive to me. She doesn’t know, she doesn’t understand what’s out there or what people are capable of. She’s too kind, too generous, too easy to take advantage of, too optimistic, too credulous. But that’s fine. She has me. And I’m not perfect. I’m prejudiced around my own function. I’m not kind or generous or optimistic enough. Reality is mixed, it’s not all one thing, and you never know what your dealing with. So we tackle it together and negotiate.

And I think that’s fine. We’re always going to be at a bit of a disconnect, there’s always going to be a tension between our perspectives. But that’s ok. We don’t all have to be everything. We just need to be informed enough that we’re not disastrously imbalanced, or we need to be in relationship to others who balance us. Being connected frees us up more to specialize. The more isolated and disconnected we are, the greater the burden on us to generalize and take on all the burden of understanding by ourselves. And even that continuum is something we have to negotiate and find balance in.

-A further reply from the same person-

 Yes, I’m well known for going on way too long about everything. So I would never criticize anyone else for going on.

I didn’t used to be (or see myself) as being so specialized or particularly masculine (because let’s face it, this is a masculine trait I’m ascribing to myself). In fact, I’ve always been a bit gebder-atypical. I did gymnastics and figure skating, I was a stay-at-home dad providing primary childcare for many years, I did all the clothing shopping and decorating for our home, all the cooking, the laundry, etc. I hated cars, sports, violence, and red meat. I was anything but the poster child for traditional masculinity.

But the longer you’re married to someone, the more you specialize into your roles and grow into being the man or the woman in the relationship. It emerged, despite all my apparent contributions to the contrary. So I’m actually far more manly and less of a generalist than I was before all that! Being around someone different and being different from them ends by making you more like them in some ways, but more like yourself in others. You internalize them in your own head and outlook, but you’re able to more fully inhabit how you differ from them too, because that’s how economies work. Bigger organization equals more specialization. So I became more manly just by being married, even when I was feeding the baby and buying dresses.

The great thing about marriage is that sex compels you to tie yourself to just the sort of person who is most likely to criticize and misunderstand you. And it ties them to the sort of person they most fear and misunderstand themself. And frankly, that’s probably what you both need. That’s what makes life possible, a meeting of opposing forces. That’s how you get dynamism. You can’t have a single force with a single direction, you have to have opposing forces. That’s true even in physics.

The world contains more evil than you could meaningfully understand or confront. And it contains more good than you could meaningfully understand and cultivate. And that’s ok. You’re not meant to be complete and be able to tackle everything all on your own or invent your whole world or everything you will ever need from scratch.

We rely on others, past and present, to figure out thousands of tiny bits of it for us. To make us complete. That makes us vulnerable, but it also means we’re needed. We’re an important part of something. We have a role to play. It confines us, yes, but it also gives us purpose. It has some unforgiving demands, but it also presents amazing opportunities if we are willing to pay the price.

You seem like you’re particularly sharp. And you’ve had some problems too, and that can be an asset. I got bullied like heck as a kid, and I learned a lot from that. In particular, how easy it is to let bad things that happen to you convince you that you’re justified in being a jerk yourself.

I’ve tried carrying everything on my own. I figured I was so smart and so capable that I genuinely could figure out anything better than anyone. I was also remarkably emotionally disciplined and figured there was nothing I couldn’t handle. And when I went through hard times in college I got super depressed and started having panic attacks and sleep disorders and was even cutting myself. And I didn’t tell anyone. I’m fact I avoided revealing anything. And that was stupid! I can say that now with the benefit of time and change. I was #$&@ing wrong. I did need other people, and they were helpful, and actually there were more people available to be helpfully connected to than I had thought.

My brilliant self sufficiency was dumb. It didn’t even have much of a purpose, until I could start connecting it to other people. Because you’re always just you, until you become more than you in relationship to other people. As much as that hurts and frustrates and inconveniences us.

Anyway, this is much too big of a reply again, obviously. The risks of opening up are big. They can be catastrophic. I can’t whitewash that. No one has hurt me like my wife and my kids. I never even imagined that anyone could hurt me like that or do that to me until they did. But nothing was more worth it. And a lot of things I was worried about were actually not a big deal at all, and I should have done them sooner and embraced them more eagerly. It’s easy to underestimate just how far those scary endeavors can take you and how much they can help you. It’s easy to imagine the costs, but the benefits are what will really surprise you.