Ethics versus Suppression, 2

Both the ethical and the suppressive individuals want to survive, personally; the difference is in the intention toward one’s fellow man, toward others: the ethical individual wants that everyone else survives, too. The suppressive one wants everyone else dead. As I said, the why is that, while at the root of the ethical individual there is some love for his fellows and the awareness that life is a group effort, at the root of the suppressive there is the secret terror of others: he lives in a parallel world, where every other individual is an enemy, an enemy to destroy, overtly or covertly. And the enemy is constantly attempting to kill him, so he feels in constant danger and in need of defense in any possible way, beginning with any form of covert attack a single individual surrounded by enemies can put into effect. Sure, that parallel world is not real. Sure, the suppressive is raving mad, needless to say. But on the surface he can look pretty normal, well−balanced, respectable, authoritative, and get very influential and thus powerful, though. And the more things are influenced by him or her, the more degraded they get, the more people get despondent, the more dissembled and hard to detect he becomes. The human and material collapse caused by the influence of the suppressive is his or her best hideout.

Remember we’re here to get somewhere: it’s not a matter of descanting on this, but of “does it work?” Does this viewpoint enable us to understand and predict and handle?