Hating from the guts

I ruffled a few feathers yesterday with my reference to Ted Kaczynski. That name seems to provoke a visceral reaction in some people and it was thought that I was holding him up as a model. Here are some more names—see if your emotions jump: Osama B. Laden, Adolph Hitler, Joe Stalin, Judas. If you get a negative gut reaction, look at it--what causes your stomach to twist? Did any of these people actually harm you in a personal tangible way? For most of us, no. They did harm many people and allowed many evil things to happen, but you as an individual karmic phenomenon know only what the culture has told you about them. We as a species love to create demons and scapegoats. When your stomach jumps in anger or fear at the mention of a name, are you merely signing on to the hue and cry, the shriek of indignation that apes send up as they follow an interloper across the plain in hot pursuit?

I try not to automatically judge a person to be evil just because our cultural movers and shakers have decided it is so. (When you really look at many of the so-called villains in history, all a lot of them did was damage the property or interests of the controlling class of society.) I am not going to be an apologist for Hitler or Ted Kaczinski or Thutmose II. What I am saying is that the past has passed and the bad that these Villains have done will work itself out of the system eventually. We do not know all the complexities of their karma or that of their victims. Demonify them if you must, but I feel it is not our place to judge--that is beyond any of our pay grades. I guess the way I would like to feel about the really ogre-like humans who have lived throughout history is to think of them as tragic expressions of some really bad karmic issues we humans have in our societies. We can never know how Hitler felt about himself deep down in his little-boy heart. Maybe rather than an evil monster, he was simply an all-too-human lightening rod for the evil that swirls about all humanity and needs to gain concrete expression in order for us to recognize it and fight it.

Here are some reasons I brought Ted K. into yesterday’s thoughts:

1) I feel he is a stereotypical Outsider, a crazy man in the wilderness, a wild-eyed sociopath in exactly the same vein as Jeremiah, Thoreau, and Johnny Appleseed. Some of these guys have been good, others not-so. I make no judgment on Ted's methods or his madness, only that he was outside the loop.

2) My system of believe does not admit the possibility that any human being could be all bad. The bad is always mixed with the good in unforeseen, inexplicable ways.

3) I have not read much of the Unabomber’s writings. All I could say for sure is that he was certainly not a very concise writer and had difficulty coming to the point. But he DID try to express his feelings and thoughts and I therefore feel some kinship. My thoughts are probably no more sane.

4) The world must have people like him to throw our smugness back into our faces and keep us re-thinking what we are really doing here. I was not yesterday serving him up as a role model, I was saying that we will always need people who refuse to follow, even if they are violent. Who has killed more people, Ted K. or George Bush?

5) At the end, I introduced what seemed like a contradiction to some in suggesting we FOLLOW the crowd and turn off our electricity at 8 PM. I do not feel following per se is bad; I feel that what is dysfunctional is blind adherence to popular leaders and fads; the unthinking going with the flow that most of us do will not take us to where we need to go to survive on this planet. To put it at its simplest: we must outgrow our tribal groupthink and live as if we were members of a vast community which includes ALL living things. Politicians, leaders, charismatic shouters are like nasty older siblings who are trying to get you on their side in a family argument. They use your visceral ape-tribe emotions to control you. Don’t go there. Question EVERYTHING.