I think your problem is believing you can defeat darkness with light, when the reality is that just gets light crucified and bathes all in perpetual darkness. The unfortunate truth is darkness, whether the fires of hatred or the bone chill of sociopathic greed, only responds to the force they’re so eager to dole out. Light, goodness, benevolence is by its nature amenable, and it is that very benevolence, that flexible, amenable, “can’t we compromise and both exist?” that malelevolence uses to gain dominion, and it never offers the same. Benevolence, when left with no other recourse, must choose to take up the tools so comfortable to malevolence, murder, or be extinguished ie go along which means you’re no longer benevolent, just another compliant subject of the malevolent, and thus complicit.
My problem isn’t thinking it can, it’s knowing it absolutely can, by it doing exactly that in very memorable moments of even recent history. Of course the more barbaric the more incapable of teaching it the error of its ways though love, that’s why it’s a knowledge that needs to be gained, taught, transfered throughout the centuries. By responding to the barbarian with yet more hate is to only poke at its instinctive need to retaliate, but to at least do nothing at all, and avoid it—using our knowledge to find ways around it. Is it the pets fault the pet peed in the house, or the only one of the two that’s even able to know any better? Selfishness, hate—doesn’t know any better, love does. Therefore it’s loves responsibility to respond to it the most reasonably, even if it’s at its own expense, because again it would be wrong to throw the blind man in contempt for making blind like mistakes. It literally doesn’t know they just walked into the wrong bathroom etc.
Just because something is to barbaric or “sociopathic” doesn’t make it impossible to respond to it without retaliation in some way, or irrelevant to do so, it just makes it an obstacle for those surrounding it that are presently lucky enough to know better to find a way around the problem so to speak, to cater to it even; to toss away what our barbaric instinct would demand of us in the moment and replace it with the logic and reason that a selfless state of mind brings otherwise.
I think your problem is believing you can defeat darkness with light, when the reality is that just gets light crucified and bathes all in perpetual darkness. The unfortunate truth is darkness, whether the fires of hatred or the bone chill of sociopathic greed, only responds to the force they’re so eager to dole out. Light, goodness, benevolence is by its nature amenable, and it is that very benevolence, that flexible, amenable, “can’t we compromise and both exist?” that malelevolence uses to gain dominion, and it never offers the same. Benevolence, when left with no other recourse, must choose to take up the tools so comfortable to malevolence, murder, or be extinguished ie go along which means you’re no longer benevolent, just another compliant subject of the malevolent, and thus complicit.
My problem isn’t thinking it can, it’s knowing it absolutely can, by it doing exactly that in very memorable moments of even recent history. Of course the more barbaric the more incapable of teaching it the error of its ways though love, that’s why it’s a knowledge that needs to be gained, taught, transfered throughout the centuries. By responding to the barbarian with yet more hate is to only poke at its instinctive need to retaliate, but to at least do nothing at all, and avoid it—using our knowledge to find ways around it. Is it the pets fault the pet peed in the house, or the only one of the two that’s even able to know any better? Selfishness, hate—doesn’t know any better, love does. Therefore it’s loves responsibility to respond to it the most reasonably, even if it’s at its own expense, because again it would be wrong to throw the blind man in contempt for making blind like mistakes. It literally doesn’t know they just walked into the wrong bathroom etc.
Just because something is to barbaric or “sociopathic” doesn’t make it impossible to respond to it without retaliation in some way, or irrelevant to do so, it just makes it an obstacle for those surrounding it that are presently lucky enough to know better to find a way around the problem so to speak, to cater to it even; to toss away what our barbaric instinct would demand of us in the moment and replace it with the logic and reason that a selfless state of mind brings otherwise.