OBL
Taking a moment to whiff the zeitgeist, I’m reading what people are saying about the death of Osama Bin Laden - the cheers, the suspicions, reality checks, and disappointment at the cheers and am noticing how the perception of evil, whether justified or not, relies on the mechanics of the psyche which tap into our sense of someone being less than human.
In the case of OBL or any other super-villain, the sense is of someone personifying that which is absolutely less-than-human; a dog, a piece of shit, a mother-fucker, an asshole, rat, bastard, etc. Just calling them criminally insane or malignantly imperfect isn’t strong enough. It’s not satisfying to us. Not the logical mind ‘us’, but the psyche. We need to feel the hate inside of us, and to enjoy it. The mind, which typically functions to provide or simulate objectivity must be pacified so as not to dilute the emotion with nuanced possibilities or questions. The target is therefore demonized and diabolicized to pull the authoritative focus from the abstract reasoning of the cortex down into the limbic depths.
To identify with such a person (or really super-signified image based upon a person) is unthinkable. When we are challenged to question this absolutism, either by looking at facts dispassionately and relativistically, or by looking at the cartoonishness of the feelings and images associated with the target and seeing the fictive exaggeration in them, we feel a psychological resistance. We experience that there is somehow not enough time to consider such things and must embrace the emotion as defining authority and let the justifications follow from there.
On the other hand, I think that tragically the world has become too large and perverse to really expect society to be able to consider each individual as a sacrosanct being, fully enfranchised with all of the rights and privileges thereof. It would be nice if we could change and improve that, if we could see, as a civilization, that everyone has a part of them that’s innocent - that one person’s freedom fighter is another person’s terrorist, because that’s true. But as we pass the 7 billion mark, we seem to be going the other way, because civilization isn’t innocent or perfect either. It’s had a shitty upbringing too, and if you take a shot at it, you know that it’s going to go after you too. It’s going to break your door down and kill your family and neighbors just for good measure and then it’s going to pat itself on the back and furrow it’s brow and talk about peace and war and necessity. Why wouldn’t it? Why would society, any society, be any more or less ugly and bloodthirsty than the worst of it’s members?
