Reflections on hating evils that you experience or witness

I am reading Foucault's seminar Psychiatric Power and I have rarely read anything that made me more angry.

I admit one reason I prefer reading thinkers like Agamben, who is very much influenced by Foucault, is that the Italian philosopher has this poetic quality in his writing, as if he never loses sight for very long of some kind of happiness that he glimpses and that lights his way forward even while discussing in detail something infernal. Reading Foucault often makes me feel like I am reading only documentation of life in an inferno. Let's say that there are many things people say and do that can make you feel like you're listening to a song of evil; the gods have fled and all you can see around for miles is hell. This is not a projection and it is not described in error; these are true facts and images of the world we live in today, and it would be far more wrong to ignore or deny them than to be immobilized by anger at the crimes committed. Joy, the divine passion, differs from contentment, a dull, mundane feeling, in requiring that ill reports also be read thoroughly; nothing is avoided, nothing ignored. Hell belongs more certainly to those who would deny it than to those who do not fail to remark it.

For wouldn't it be an interesting and horrible fact about a society if people were routinely punished for being angry about real injustices, while those injustices themselves are continued with impunity?

The modern bureaucratic capitalist world is not so much unjust as barbaric in its stupid cruelties. It produces stupidity through its procedures of exercising control and aiming at efficiency. By stupidity I mean that functionaries, and all who find that they must speak the language of institutions and systems, are discouraged from any spontaneity or creativity as they are basically compelled to issue or apply predetermined statements and choices, and mentally this drags people to the lowest common denominator of the cognitive processes that are pre-designed and that now become what 'thinking' is reduced to and considered to be. This system is barbaric and cruel to such a point, that the more that I learn about it, the more I find it difficult not to feel a certain hate.

Evil by definition is what is hated. If you are persuaded by an ethics, such as those of Christianity or Buddhism, that you should hate no one and nothing, then you may find yourself in a situation that is a dilemma or paradox. The question becomes, perhaps, how to avoid feeling hate about what you judge to be detestably bad. Or perhaps, how you can 'forgive' or 'love' people who do things that are detestably bad. Or even, how you can manage to not be bothered by things that will bother any person with an ethical sensitivity. There were such things, famously, that bothered and were opposed by the greatest heroes, ancient and modern, Greek or Jewish. Even Christ is reported to have done some things out of, or with, considerable anger.

The idea of the person who is not bothered by anything bad that happens is a modern idea that corresponds to the totalizing state that manages people psychologically. It reserves openly avowed negative passions and attitudes (including anger and hate) for representatives of the state and authorities who are authorized to take and/or authorize action against some citizens and persons. With a monopoly on the legitimate use of force, liberal champions of the state reveal their colors as such when they attack psychologically anyone who is against anything. The real target here is not violence or anger (though these are assimilated for tactical purposes, and of course, falsely) but politics as such; that is, opposition to anything. Strong passions and negative attitudes are sanctioned because they are signs of a possible violence, which typically is only imagined by authorities and majoritarians, often as an alibi for their own violence that enables them to disavow it.

Seeing damnation is not damning, though it is troubling. Being troubled about troubling things is good. The concept of mental sickness begins to seem completely wrong. The health industry now assigns people a duty to be happy. There is no such duty. Indeed, the idea of the good requires of us a contrary duty.

What reassures me is maybe just knowing that the power of evil is not total. It can seem nearly so; for example, in Foucault's discussion of what the 'reformer' Pinel was doing in the early 19th century and the violent hatred manifest in the tactics described of the authorities against people they considered mad, this is so extreme, and yet also similar enough to things I have seen and remember, including the violence of a stepfather, and of course read about. I tend to hate hate, like Augustine said he loved love, and it seems to me I share this way of reacting with most people. It is hateful things that we hate. If the evil were total, so that it were as if the world was ruled by an evil power, then we would be in the situation of gnosticism, which held exactly that. That isn't a very encouraging way of thinking, and it was certainly rightly recognized as a dead end when it became popular enough for people in power to worry about its consequences. But in fact, descriptions of evil also have an opposite effect, because they necessarily disclose the possibility of good precisely in the precondition of their descriptions of evil having any sense, since evil is always a negative and reactive force, rather than being productive on its own. Evil only is recognizable or can be posited as such because of the good it negates, and the anger we feel when people are being treated wrongly or with violence is tacitly premised upon our recognizing an expectation that people be treated with kindness, for that is what cruelty negates. Violence does not negate persons in their being as such, since it is entirely possible for there to be a world of person who give and take only violence as it is their way of interacting. Short of the violence of annihilation, such a world could exist and be maintained, at least in large measure. So in the end, being reminded of hateful things that happen indirectly reminds me of the possibility that remains of the good. The strength of my passion for rejecting the horrors and evils, which are similar enough for recognition to things I have experienced, is rooted in the possibility of some other way of living. If evil exists and we call it evil, the good must exist also. In the end, I am left with a strong feeling of disgust that attaches to the actions and statements of what I know to be a very great many of the people who implement and promote almost every social policy and government measure. It has been that way for millennia, and my sense if most rulers, leaders, and elites have a strong tendency to hate the people that they lead or rule over. In the end, this fills me with a kind of hatred because I know very well that contrary possibilities exist. I know that the good life exists as a possibility, and is far closer to being in reach of most people than it seems to be, judging by the way people think and things are done. To be a radical is to have this kind of faith. It sustains you even on long marches through infernal territories, reading and listening relentlessly to accounts of horrors and counts of bodies. Those with the best constitution may only need a few lines of a poem of the good life every so often, and then they can continue, without becoming embittered, on their long march. I admit that it is a challenge and a problem. It's also another reason why we must have a positive right to be unhappy. Then, recognizing that we are because the world is, then alone can we strive for happiness for ourselves and others. So it seems I have to work to cope with my feeling of revulsion that accompanies much of what I read. They will say my attitude is an illness, but we say it's the world that is rightly said to be ill. The world is sick in my head. I am sick of knowing about the world and how things are in it, and I choose that sickness. They punish their messengers, the fools. A promise of happiness is not a promise to be or seem happy. Until the world is redeemed, do not, O god, let me be. There's an easy way out for everyone, and it happens sooner or later anyway.