My last post was an evil one…er, about evil.
If you happened to have caught it, you might remember my five quintessential evil acts…
- Exclusion
- Hatred
- Greed
- Indifference
- Cruelty
Wait, I can hear someone thinking, those aren’t evil. They aren’t even illegal.
True.
But all the criminals locked up these days aren’t necessarily evil. True that they did some bad stuff to end up in there…but in my mind evil is just another thing altogether.
You might also recall that the common thread running through this evil-ness is self-interest…
it is at the core of evil…in my opinion.
That is, self-interest elevated too far above impact, or the antithesis of impact over interest, as you might read somewhere else in this blog.
I ran across a video of the South African civil rights activist and Anglican bishop, Desmond Tutu. In it he makes the case for a moral universe.
His words made me ponder once again the nature of good versus evil.
Isn’t it true that our initial word view, if you can call it that, fresh from the womb, is one of complete and utter self-interest?
In fact, at that infantile stage of thinking, we can’t even distinguish a world apart from ourselves. It’s all connected to us…we are at the center.
Later on we graduate from that level of thinking…
well, sort of.
We gradually begin to recognize that a world indeed exists separate and apart from ourselves. And it’s a dog-eat-dog world indeed…a real jungle out there.
You see, we can’t quite shed that need to be at the center, can we?
But the truth that Bishop Tutu is getting at, I believe, is that we are NOT at the center…
it is.
The universe is.
And we are all connected to it…not the other way around.
And by virtue of that connection, we are all connected to each other.
The universe is the glue that binds us…like it or not.
And that very idea means that there is no place in the universe for this obsession with self-interest. It is open rebellion against the universe.
That’s what makes it…and the five evil acts that so often accompany it…evil.
They are contra-connection.
But the universe is larger, stronger and truer than it (self-interest) or they (the five evil acts) are…
and as Bishop Tutu proclaims…the universe will ALWAYS prevail.
The universe is full of light and light is stronger than darkness.
Those whom we look up to as champions of light, or beacons of universal hope, were entirely un-self-interested.
The ones Tutu mentions…
Ghandi
Dalai Lama
Mother Teresa
and others I have mentioned in the past…
Mandela
ML King
They lived their lives in a way that recognized our universal connection.
They were stalwarts against the evils of self-interest run amok, which leads to oppression and unnecessary suffering.
They were good. They were moral.
And their very existence proves the case for the moral universe…as Tutu proclaims.
You know how our lights shine in the darkness?
How we can win against it…against the evils of self-interest?
By our impact.
Just like they did.