Why acknowledging your capacity for evil is strengthening for your character

A hypothesis

I have recently taken another step in understanding this lesson and I wanted to record it. I’m still processing though, and I don’t know if I have taken it fully to heart yet. If you should absolutely take this lesson too heart. Because it’s a strange question, isn’t it? Why does acknowledging your capacity for evil strengthen your character? Why? Shouldn’t it just make you hate yourself, make you demoralized and perhaps suicidal. Maybe I’m getting too grim too fast but I think that you by acknowledging and really feeling that you can be or/and are evil can waken extremely depressive thoughts. That’s why you should be very, very careful when you are exploring this topic.

Down the rabbit hole we go...

The goal feels sometimes like a perverted selfish dream. You are exploring your capacity for evil for the secret promise of strength and power. You are playing with fire for only selfish gains. If you do find your shadow-self by what mean can you stop yourself from doing mayhem? If you really let it take over you. Maybe your self that you come to know as your good personality find yourself either deeply hurting someone that you love or deeply hurting everything that you have built up that brought meaning to your life. Wouldn’t that completely traumatize you? Isn’t these thoughts too reckless to play with? I think so.

But I have a hypothesis why this promise of strength might not be a false hope or the whisper of the devils, trying to lead you astray. That it might actually just be beneficial and beneficial for all. I felt it rushing in me yesterday and I still feel the buzz today. The weird thing was that I wasn’t not even pondering my evil nature last night, I was reading the human psychologist Carl R. Rogers book A Way of Being which makes a very optimistic case for the human condition. That’s when I was suddenly completely overwhelmed by a weird self-destructive tendency. It was not even a solid feeling, my thoughts just started to stop making sense. All the colors, my hand, the sun stopped register for me in a casual way and a weird surge of instability started to grow from my chest.

This might be a sign that I am turning mentally ill. Maybe but probably not, not in a clinical sense. I think it was the sort of thing that human race has talked about for thousands of years, a religious experience triggered by a long time feeling and thinking. Might sounds overly dramatic but I think it’s a healthy of way of contextualize it. Another more psychological way of describing the happening would be that my cognitive map was being rewritten by a forceful subconscious. While it happened I wrote down everything that a thought as a way of trying to stabilize myself and to let everything out as properly as I could. Now this text will also help me to learn what I was trying to tell myself.

In the first part of the text I’m trying to came up with an answer to a big personal problem I have that I won’t share here. Then I’m trying to grasp Carl Rogers theory about the actualizing tendency in the universe but get interrupted by me reaching peak mental frenzy. I’m starting to be scared of myself. I looked myself in the mirror and I thought that was capable of evil. Then I turned evil. Or at least parts evil. I did not went fully overboard. But I went far enough for me being scared of going there, my heart was pulsating and a thought came for me. Just one swift red thought, but it didn’t feel like my usual ones. I strangled it early but that red thought was probably the evil in me. Even if it didn’t really think anything evil or do anything destructive I still think that what it was. That what it feels like anyway.

So, that sounds like a pretty shitty thing to happen to you right? That’s probably why, as I said, that you should be careful with these kinds of explorations. I think that the understanding of that you have evil in you does make you feel this chaotic, and that it’s true for everyone. Why would it not? It takes mayhem to know mayhem. This is not strictly intellectual learning, you have to understand it with the whole you. What complicates the matter is that your evil twin does not want to you to have control. It wants to see you suffer just for the sake of suffering. It does not think you deserve anything more. That thought actually became my light in the dark, that it does not think I deserve anything. That might be the reason for evil to so forcefully manifesting in me this Sunday evening. It had finally gathered up too much evidence that justifying me hating myself. Too much understanding of how my shortcomings, bad habits and incapability of actually facing the responsibilities necessary was getting in the way of my potential good life.

I talked too the man in the mirror again. I said something like “Johan (that’s my name), you get what you deserve. If you have a filthy room then you do not deserve a clean room. You have to pay attention to how you want your room to look like and why it’s not looking that way. Because if you are not then you have none to blame but yourself and the blame is going to feed your self-destructive wishes. It’s just that simple.”

It really struck a chord with me. It feels sill and childish now that I had to forcefully clarify it too myself. But I needed that. I really needed to understand that.

I guess my point is that by feeling my evil self I finally felt my shortcomings in a releasing manner. I know understand more fully that I hated that I couldn’t feel when I distracted myself from doing meaningful things, that I could just waste away hours on YouTube without feeling bad about it. That’s how me acknowledging my capacity for evil strengthened my soul, it showed me the bottom of a pit that I do not want to be in. It thought me that you have to work for what you get.

But I did not get overboard. I, like everyone else, still have undealt with dark corners left in me and I deeply understand that I need to prepare myself more before exploring them any further. I need to explore this topic in a more philosophical way to reduce the risk of mental harm. I haven’t read many books about evil and just a few about moral. That's a problem but I will overcome it. So, someday there will probably be a two parter to this post, and it will probably be twice as mental as this one.

But for now, Car Seat Headrest, play me out.
https://open.spotify.com/track/4EQlTA60UgWuSrc1UfWUyQ