Don’t Give Evil Power
Everyone thinks that wishing others harm and hurting them is repulsive. Have you ever felt your dark side bullying or trying to seduce you? Sometimes it is easier to treat others as tools to achieve our own goals. If you want to be the best at your job, all you have to do is step over others. It’s a much faster way to reach your goals that gives more satisfaction with fewer delays. Don’t we all covet this, at least in part?
People are always looking for immediate gratification. As our previous example shows, we want to avoid putting everything in the lurch, the effort, and waiting months before we achieve our goals by honest means. If we can reduce that time, why not? This is at least what those who become trapped in such a circle of harmful thoughts think. They stop treating others as people and begin to use them as tools to pursue their own interests.
The power of evil
We have all met people who have changed for the worse. They have become manipulative and started doing things that used to bring them up in the past.
This is the first mechanism that evil uses to seduce us. It makes us hurt by what other people have done to us. We feel like a victim of situations. We act as if we don’t deserve the pain that others have caused us. We get tired of all the problems we have to deal with one after the other. Resentment towards others takes over from us and begins to gradually transform us into just the kind of person we don’t want to become.
Exploited people may themselves become exploiters. Those who have been criticized may become critics. After experiencing a lot of pain, we may decide that we no longer agree to be topped by people and begin to treat others exactly as we have been treated. We do not understand that people who are the target of our own harmful behavior are innocent. They belong to the same group to which we ourselves used to belong.
If we open our eyes, we find that we have allowed ourselves to be poisoned. It’s as if we’re in a fruit basket surrounded by rotten apples. Because we have been unable to move out of that situation and among those people, we are rotting too. We will be polluted by seductive evil. It makes us treat people as tools to satisfy our own needs, or simply hurt others in the same way we have been hurt.
The charm of power
We resent resentment towards others and find their malicious behavior silly. The truth, however, is that by behaving this way, they achieve what we ourselves want to achieve. Beneath the surface is a powerful reason why we allow our dark side to seduce us. For the same reason, we stop seeing others as they are and begin to see them as instruments. All this has its roots in the desire for power.
Taking control gives us power, as does subjugation, manipulation, lying and insulting… We do all this on purpose. From time to time, we don’t even care that we destroy others completely for our own benefit. When we finally have the situation under control, we find it only increases our appetite. We just get more excited. How far would we be prepared to go?
While ignoring other feelings may feel good to us for a while, over time it makes us bitter and sad. We humans seek goodness because it calms us down. While evil may benefit us in some way or help “justice” happen to us, the result is not the same.
We are seduced by the power that causes evil in us. Unless we are vigilant, this innocent flirtation with evil can lead us to a point of no return. Treating others as instruments can help us achieve what we want, but it also robs us of balance, peace, and happiness. We may forget that in doing so, we always find ourselves in the payer’s place: we have to sacrifice who we are as we try to achieve more and more. Is it worth it?
Illustration: Catrin Welz Stein
