What to Do About Bad People? « Clarissa's Blog
It takes experience to know right from wrong. You can’t base your judgments about it on ego: “He hurt my ego, therefore he was wrong!”
From my studies of deep psychology, I am able to see that those who hurt others are always damaged or damaging themselves in some ways. You can look at it from the point of view of neurological mirror cell theory. What I do to you I am in a way also doing to myself. When Nazi soldiers were commissioned to kill people directly with rifles, they couldn’t take more than a few weeks of doing it without becoming sick, because they were also doing the killing to themselves.
Of course, there are those who are emotionally dead, who have some neurological miswiring, and these are the thoroughgoing psychopaths among us, whose behavior cannot be changed.
In the case of the majority, though, many of them would be relieved if they were denied the scope to express bad behavioral patterns. They would gain a part of themselves back through not being misogynist, or dominant in an abusive way.
I’m convinced there are all sorts of people walking around who do now know what’s wrong with them, because they have been socially trained to express themselves in negative patterns, for instance by repressing emotion in order to express a “male identity”. Repressing emotion might seem like a good way to assert one’s dominance, as you can climb higher over people if you don’t feel their reactions. Ultimately, one kills oneself this way, though, to the point that one cannot have any genuine human relationships.
To be able to see when someone is doing this to themselves, and to intervene appropriately on behalf of both parties, is what I call “intellectual shamanism”.
It takes experience to know right from wrong. You can’t base your judgments about it on ego: “He hurt my ego, therefore he was wrong!”
From my studies of deep psychology, I am able to see that those who hurt others are always damaged or damaging themselves in some ways. You can look at it from the point of view of neurological mirror cell theory. What I do to you I am in a way also doing to myself. When Nazi soldiers were commissioned to kill people directly with rifles, they couldn’t take more than a few weeks of doing it without becoming sick, because they were also doing the killing to themselves.
Of course, there are those who are emotionally dead, who have some neurological miswiring, and these are the thoroughgoing psychopaths among us, whose behavior cannot be changed.
In the case of the majority, though, many of them would be relieved if they were denied the scope to express bad behavioral patterns. They would gain a part of themselves back through not being misogynist, or dominant in an abusive way.
I’m convinced there are all sorts of people walking around who do now know what’s wrong with them, because they have been socially trained to express themselves in negative patterns, for instance by repressing emotion in order to express a “male identity”. Repressing emotion might seem like a good way to assert one’s dominance, as you can climb higher over people if you don’t feel their reactions. Ultimately, one kills oneself this way, though, to the point that one cannot have any genuine human relationships.
To be able to see when someone is doing this to themselves, and to intervene appropriately on behalf of both parties, is what I call “intellectual shamanism”.
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