The dark side

“All of us have this extraordinary capacity for evil, but equally we have this remarkable capacity for good.” —Desmond Tutu, from a speech on genocide

In one week the Northern Hemisphere will experience its darkest day of the year.

It seemed an appropriate time to look in the mirror and explore my own darkness. But this is hard to do with the lights off. I try closing my eyes, and that helps a little.

Desmond Tutu was speaking of the horrors that unfolded in Rwanda and of those that continue to unfold daily in the Sudan. He asserted that to understand these things we must explore the possibility that the perpetrators could be we the horrified. To understand this human capacity for darkness not in order to condone it, but to better bring about conditions in which it is less likely to happen.

And what is darkness but the absence of light?

What is evil? Is it merely the absence of good?

Do I even believe in the idea of good and evil? Certainly my conditioning is to seek out the unmet need behind every act of hurting. This is not to deny culpability for action, my own or others; rather, I find it more productive to think in terms of what might make us as humans more likely to play nicely together.

When I look inside, what do I see? In reflecting on times when I have acted in a way that hurt others, usually I can identify: I wanted food. I wanted rest. I wanted recognition. To be able to contribute, to be listened to, to listen and understand. Sometimes the need was concrete and I just couldn’t meet it. Sometimes it was intangible and I wasn’t able to articulate it.

Certainly it is easy to imagine that everyone would want these things, starting with “basic needs.” But Maslow himself believed that the idea of a hierarchy of needs falsely implies that those needs at the bottom are less important than those at the top, in terms of nurturing a healthy community and not just a living individual. Needs for love, morality, spontaneity, lack of prejudice, etc., are as essential to a healthy community as clean water. In the absence of any one of these, hurtful behavior is more likely to flourish. In the absence of several at once we see war and famine, poverty and exploitation.

My mind wanders into associating pairs of opposites with positive or negative feelings: light and dark, warmth and cold, sound and silence...
...but to a migraine sufferer, it is darkness, not light, that is soothing...freezing is necessary for ice cream.... noise can be music or cacophony...knowledge and ignorance...is ignorance ever good?...certainly knowledge can be used for harm...has our technology outpaced our ability to control our basic impulses...what are our fundamental needs—

—suddenly I look up and an hour has gone by and I’m still alone at the computer and I’ve not furthered my understanding at all with that last paragraph and, and, I really need to pee. I get up and pee. Having done that, I realize I’m needing the opposite of aloneness. I need connection and community.

After leaving a couple voicemails I connect with an actual person. In seconds we are laughing. A happy glow fills my stomach, driving away the winter darkness.

If forced to make a hierarchy and designate one need as the most important, I would say it is connection. Connecting lives, sitting down and sharing laughter and a meal and ourselves with others, has the potential to, if not heal the world, at least take it in that direction.

As Tutu says, “A person is a person through other persons. I would not know how to be a human being at all except I learned this from other human beings.”