" Now we know who I am..."

One of the hurdles I've had to deal with from the very beggining, in my writing, has to do with what you might call the banality of evil. Tim has mentioned this in the past and has done again. I have to say that baroque criminality and florid megalomania fascinates me in some ways. The possibility that there might be true monsters is tantalizing, for reasons I'll go into below.

But the thing is, you move from the superficial evidence which would seem to imply some truly bizarre and potent evil lurking in the wings, and the deeper you go, what do you find? Boring, banal little freaks. Tedious, emotionally stunted adolescents and raving paranoids. Shell shocked two dimensional fanatics who lack anything resembling a creative imagination. Squalid psychopaths and perverts.

It's disheartening in some ways. And why is that, you might ask? Surely it's better for us all that there seem to be no 'real' potent monsters lurking about?

Maybe so, but it depends how you define 'better'.

Back in the early days of AB I spent a fair bit of time rapping back and forth with the now sadly dormant Rev Max about this stuff and those exchanges helped me arrive at much of my current understanding of the matter. Anyway towards the end of that trajectory, Max posed the question: are there 'evil kung fu masters' or not? If so, then that would change everything. I agree. Maybe not in the way he meant, but I do. But how exactly would it change anything?

The problem is it's a chimera, it slides through your fingers. Surely there are profoundly skilled and adept people in the world, and there are also profoundly evil and malevolent people in the world. But are there those who are both profoundly adept and profoundly evil and sweeping in their ambitions? My observation has been that those who want to fuck with people tend not to be especially masterful at much, besides lying and manipulation. The growth of consciousness and the drive to abuse others seems to be at cross purposes. Nevertheless, there is a void there. A gap in the evidence, a gap in the explaination. Something is implied here.

In short, are there real supervillains out there? And if not, then why not?

It's not a trivial question I think. And it's part of the reason I started this current iteration of alchemical braindamage. It was one of the first things I talked about when I came back.

If you've been reading my other strand of writings, then you know my overriding concern is with evolution, with personal transformation, with alchemy. It's kind of psychological chemistry, with agents, reagents, catalysts, solutions, sytheses. The world is the vessel wherein our person psychology is cast and recast. It is our mirror, and our fuel.

My fear for the world has always been that fail to live up to our potential. That we don't aim high enough, dream big enough, feel or think deeply enough. We devalue ourselves, devalue others, and demystify the world until it falls over and prepares to kick up it's heels. We engineer catastrophes at the same time as we psychologically disempower ourselves to deal with them.

Most people seem to take one of two approaches to the question of evil. Either you have the quavering deer in headlights approach where you neither understand the problem nor equip yourself to deal with it, or you have the dismissive postmodernist skeptic who deconstructs the problem till it carries no urgency, and no real meaning. Just sick people, just stupid people, just the way things are. Crippled by hysteria or blinded by reason. In either case you've allowed no real room for yourself to grow. You're either a deer, or you're a product of impersonal forces.

I rewatched the movie Unbreakable with my girlfriend the other day, and it makes me think of that. The Elijah Price character played by Samuel L. Jackson is, by any reasonable standard, a broken person. Physically broken, mentally broken, and we begin to suspect, spiritually broken. He seems to grasp at some bizarre notion that Bruce Willis is a larger than life figure, a superhuman savior for the world. And until the end we don't understand why.

We finally see that Price is searching for his complimentary opposite. For the counterweight that would set his life purpose into motion. By helping David Dunn discover that he is a superhero of sorts, this allows Price to step into his own personal vision of greatness. His purpose is validated. He is no longer the sick, broken man. He is the supervillain, the archnemesis. In some way by giving a stranger the permission to become something larger than life, he himself assumes that stature as well.

The psychological mechanism at the core of this is very real. If we insist on stripping others of their meaning and purpose, then we simultaneously strip ourselves of our own meaning and purpose. If we insist on not understanding the truth in the darkness then we will never understand ourselves either.

Like it or not, this plane of existence seems to operate on the principle of duality, on the dynamic of self and other. As we grow, the other grows, in some complimentary and mirror way. As our understanding and recognition for the other grows, our understand and recognition of the self grows as well.

This is a strange thing to contemplate, and sort of counter intuitive. But if you approach the monster with understanding and respect, if you allow him to crystallize in your mind in his fullest expression, you will at the same time crystallize within yourself to your fullest expression. This is how the world works. How it has always worked. There is no 'utopia', no 'dystopia'. There is no final resolution to anything. Only this dialectic, this endless round of conflict, communication and synthesis. The only release is to step into the timeless, but that is another matter.

I think in some ways our real and enduring problem is a kind of enforced neoteny, and prolonged infantilism. We refuse to face the cycles of growth and maturity, we refuse to evolve into our true selves and thus we refuse to allow the other to grow either. And our world putters and gasps and seems to fall into upheaval.

And I feel quite sure on some level that the only way to end this apparently aimless chaos, the only thing that can end it, is this cultural rite of passage, this hero's journey into the dragon's lair. Where we will know ourselves through knowing the dragon, and the story will continue as it always must. Otherwise, we too will remain locked into stasis with the sick, broken and stunted children that we imagine to be lurking in the shadows.