Abstraction and the origin of evil

Where I disagree with Jordan Peterson

A few days ago I stumbled on a heart-breaking video of a young woman lying beaten and unconscious in the back of a pickup truck as a parade of people celebrated around her. In a scene now burned into my eyelids—probably yours as well—a man holds the defenceless woman by her dreadlocks while her bloody body lays face down in the trailer, her legs bent at impossible angles. A young boy, probably only fourteen years old, spits on her from outside the truck before its tires raise the desert-dust and it disappears. She was kidnapped while celebrating at a festival; a young traveller, someone you might meet at a rave. Probably a spiritual seeker. She was abused and humiliated all because she represented some ‘thing’—an abstraction—that someone hated. There are few things in this life that are truly black and white. The murder, torture, and rape of innocent people is one of them. Such acts are a betrayal of the gift of sentience. They are the very ground upon which all morality stands.

For this short essay, it doesn’t matter the background of the perpetrator or the victim. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter that I had a great-grandmother who was Jewish. Within the matrix of time, we will each find examples in our neighbourhoods of both evil and suffering at its hands. If we want to understand where this evil originates, then we must be willing to look past our pain towards the patterns underlying the actions. We need to peer beyond the veil of surface things like skin colour, or group membership. We need to use the darkness we witness with our eyes and bodies to motivate us to seek its source, which lies hidden somewhere deep within the psyche of humanity itself.

Every group has a bloody history somewhere down the line. Inescapably then, lurking within each of us—handed down to us—is the same unwholesome capacity, habit, or proclivity that we now see graphically out in the world. Although not all the seeds of evil have flourished into action, should you look deep enough into your own mind with enough honesty you will see that the rosey garden has some thorns.

So, what is the capacity for evil?

There are a few underlying facts that we must account for:

1. The capacity for evil is universal: It affects every race, gender, political system, and religion.

2. The capacity for evil is social: It can be carried out by large groups.

3. The capacity for evil is systematic: Beyond the momentary acts of animals or impulsive rage, humans are capable of evil that is organised and takes time.

4. The capacity for evil is viral: It can spread from one person to another, from one group to another, or from generation to generation.

What these facts necessitate is that the source of evil is in the mind.

Although we have different kinds of bodies and inhabit different places at different times, the presence of mind is universal. Minds are also what binds us together socially. Bodies and places can be grouped together in surprising ways and change over time. Tribes are always evolving, new members are joining and leaving, and borders are being redrawn. But in each case, it is a mind and groups of minds that come together and make choices to take action.

Compared to our bodies, minds are capable of systematic actions that take time, planning, and are difficult. Unlike our pets, complex minds are capable of highly symbolic beliefs, language, and ideology—the kind that can give permission to evil, and the kind of abstraction that can propagate like a virus from one person to another and between generations. Memes, beliefs, ideas, and forms, all are capable of disembodiment, more so than ever in this digital age.

So, it’s too simple and too easy to point fingers and say that is evil and all we have to do is exterminate it. No, we must turn our finger pointing 180 degrees towards our own faces. We must begin by admitting that the source of evil is within us all and therefore within this very mind reading these words. We must understand how it works for the sake of us all. We must look towards the mind itself.

In some fundamental sense, I believe the true discovery of the origin of evil is an experiential thing. Something we encounter by looking very carefully at our own minds. Because the source of evil is not in words themselves and so can’t be perfectly expressed in them. So what does the experiential recognition look like?

Witnessing the seeds of ignorance

From a first-person perspective, the origin of ignorance that can give rise to evil looks like this: It begins with something like a proto-thought. A kind of underwater ripple below the mind’s surface. This ripple, which probably has roots somewhere deep in our ancestry, can gain momentum and turn into a wave. Once that wave has the full power of a notion, a thought, or an idea, then it is able to take the body and emotions for a ride—like a surfer on a wave; or rather a small canoe that’s been caught by a thunderstorm.

There can be many ripples at once and many competing waves, each pulling the sensations of the body towards different kinds of actions. At a higher level, these look like interacting desires and fears. When ripples turn into a surge they create time: Thoughts that represent sequences of actions in the world beyond the now. Prospective behaviours can carry different levels of attraction or repulsion depending on the strength of the thought-wave.

For example, when the thought of ice cream emerges, it delivers the hot sensations of desire and a Pavlovian salivary response in the mouth as the body prepares itself for what it has only so far imagined. If the wave is allowed to grow, more thoughts join in, directing our hands towards a mobile phone and a food delivery app. If those thoughts are allowed to perpetuate, then the body lives out the sensations of desire, giving rise to movements like ordering the ice cream and picking it up from the driver, until you’re holding the empty container in your hand nursing feelings of guilt and self-consciousness. New thoughts of self-judgment trigger sensations that draw the body towards avoidance, towards Netflix or Twitter, towards distractions from the punishing ripples threatening to turn into waves of self-hate.

Now, just replace the desire for ice cream with the desire to hurt someone. How much greater might the desire for vengeance be than the desire for ice cream? How much greater is the burning fire for justice if you or your family has been a victim of discrimination, oppression, or violence? We might even argue that those are justified feelings. We might argue that we need those exact responses to punish wrongdoers and to maintain a fair world. And there’s truth to that, but we can also see that much of the time our thoughts and beliefs are not that justified, nor do we know their true source. The ripples in the mind are paradoxically both ancient and yet totally fresh.

From ignorance to evil

That said: When we’re talking about evil we’re not really talking about a fit of rage, impulsive desire, or animalistic instincts. We’re talking about something more incessant and less responsive to the moment. We’re talking about something that is able to dissociate from feelings and sensations happening now in service of a disconnected ideology. It is something that is able to maintain a course of evil; something genocidal and resistant to time.

The roots of evil are similar to our ice cream example above, but they involve another crucial step. Beyond just grasping a thought and perpetuating a feeling, they involve the total identification with a matrix of abstraction. Some might say that this is not just the root of evil, but the root of both good and evil. The capacity to hold onto abstraction is eating from the tree of knowledge. It’s reaching your hand up, grabbing the set of thoughts resembling the apple and totally identifying with it: Consuming it and thereby becoming one with it.

The human capacity to grasp onto abstraction, to merge oneself with it, is our extradition from the Garden of Eden. It is the emergence of consciousness into a highly symbolic field. It is the cognitive revolution. It is our capacity to give energy to thoughts of ice cream rather than the ice cream itself, which can bind us in a longing for forms that we can never in fact fulfil. The apple in the tree is made of emptiness: A false idol rather than a real, edible, thing.

Freedom from stuckness

That said: It’s not even abstraction itself that is the problem, but our stuckness to it. We can reach out and eat the ice cream and the field of experience changes, our feelings change, and our thoughts change. But reaching out to symbols and abstractions disconnected from the field of experience can keep us and future generations locked in strange desires for lifetimes. The abstraction of hell and heaven, religion, ideology, politics, and dogma, do not melt like ice cream on a hot day. So long as humans are there to give them energy in the form of attention, belief, and identification (bottom-up), they remain powerful and capable of driving our feelings, thoughts, and actions (top-down).

This is the force we must somehow contend with. Getting stuck on a dangerous abstraction is what fuels many of humanity’s most notorious moral disasters, from the Spanish Inquisition to the holocaust, from terrorist attacks to school shootings. No one can dissociate so heavily from the compassion within their hearts except through delusional stuckness on a thought or belief.

If only those men in the pickup truck knew their own minds they could be free from such intense misunderstanding and the horrific consequences that follow. Those men have themselves been victims of the abstractions they carry and the abstractions that others have imposed on them. They have all taken their capacity to dream in awful directions, unable to see it for what it is and therefore possessed by their own imagination. They are stuck and therefore unable to build a peaceful vision.

In true fact, most of the world is stuck on an abstraction. Most of us, most of the time, are being driven by a field of symbolic belief, unable to observe its emergence and its influence. Unable to let it go. This is also why the Zen teachers have been so interesting. They refused to give us a field of abstraction. They refused to offer a belief system because they saw that the only way out of trouble was to become conscious of the limitations of abstraction itself. Better abstractions are a temporary solution, but not a permanent one.

This is where I tend to diverge from people like Jordan Peterson who are obsessed with defining a set of abstractions to save humanity, but in so doing create themselves all kinds of new enemies and opportunities for hate. The apparent light of a new belief system too soon will turn to darkness. We have to step somewhere beyond, or before, the ideologies—all of them—and look at the persistent gaps in ideas themselves. There ought to be no possible justification for evil because we see that no idea can be placed above the suffering under our noses. We must be free of the capacity to stick to an idea at the behest of love, which is always moving, always ready to help reduce suffering rather than create it for some absurd cause generated by ignorant minds.

Only freedom from the field of abstraction is a long-term solution to the problem of both good and evil. Freedom is a fertile ground from which to grow a healthy garden—a harmonious ecology of mind—because we are free to let the garden whither with the seasons of life, rather than force life to bend to our dogmas of a good garden. We can allow the ideas of ice cream, vengeance, discrimination, and all sticky concepts, to melt before our eyes if we know that they will no longer satiate us or contribute to our flourishing.

The rivers and the winds will always outlive and out-prosper mountains and stones.

What this freedom looks like is the capacity to notice a ripple in the mind and choose whether to let it turn into a wave. One is able to intervene or not intervene, or let go of intervening, as needed. That’s because one’s habit of identification has found a resting place beyond abstractions, so that the capacity for identification and stuckness is much weaker, and its emergence is observable. The origin of good and evil—duality itself—can be witnessed within our own mind, in each moment, and therefore be directed towards good as far as it remains good, and no longer.

Thanks for reading,

Ruben

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PS - Abstraction is a very technical and scientific thing. It’s a process also underlying much of the success of artificial intelligence. It’s the capacity to take information and find symbolic patterns or statistical regularities. In many ways, it’s a superpower and a basic necessity for intelligence and meaning. So it’s not abstraction itself that is evil, but the rigidity of it. Even what looks like a good abstraction can become evil if it’s held too tightly in place. As it has been said, the road to hell is paved with good intentions; with abstractions that seemed good until we placed them on a pedestal above the facts in front of our eyes.

We (Professor Heleen Slagter and I) have also written a now popular scientific paper about how meditation allows us to reduce abstraction, to gradually let go of the habit of grasping at symbolic representation so that we might become a bit more free and self-aware. You can read that here, should you be interested in the technical side of things.