Профессор рассматривает природу зла в современном обществе и действия корпоративных элит

Dennis Patrick Slattery is Emeritus professor in Mythological Studies at Pacifica Graduate Institute in Carpinteria, Calif. and a resident of New Braunfels. Recently I journeyed back to Pulitzer Prize winning author, Ernest Becker. He won the prize for his now classic The Denial of Death (1973), which explored in depth America’s fear of one’s life ending. I read it years ago when it was first published. While he has written others works since then, Escape from Evil (1975), forces us to think about just what evil is. What his goal is he lays out in the Introduction: “In seeking to avoid evil, man is responsible for bringing more evil into the world than organisms could ever do merely by exercising their digestive tracts. He concludes his Introduction by stating clearly: “This is the main argument of my book, and in the following chapters I want to try to show exactly how this comes about, how man’s impossible hopes and desires have heaped evil on the world.” He will spend the next 176 pages delineating with great particularity how man has accomplished such a feat. Now all the above has led me to a series of questions that I have no easy answers to, but I do know that all of us might want to reflect on them and add their own. • What is evil? • Why is evil? • How do we know what evil is? • Is evil the same for all of us? • Do different cultures and people define it differently? • Do they experience its presence or absence in individual ways? • Can something be evil when one is 16, but no longer evil when one is 65? • What determines such determinations? The famous British author, C.S. Lewis wrote Till We Have Faces (1956). In it he offered an image of how evil white men with white shirts and ties can be speaking softly to one another while making decisions that will prove destructive in several ways to the lives of millions. In our current cultural confusion, I notice how local and national news outlets feed like scrapping birds to report horrendous behaviors of human beings towards one another. Our current insanely obscene quick access to weapons only fuels the spread of evil. Today, large local and global bureaucracies and capitalist tycoons perform evil acts every day on those with little or no power or options. For instance, the essentially frozen minimum wage in our country and others is an evil act. It is a way of exerting power over the powerless for self-serving ends. Their names are most often hidden from us, a nod, I sense, to the shame and guilt they do not wish exposed. Bargaining abilities of the less fortunate are kept under control, as are efforts of those who wish to form communities to strengthen their voices and desires. Thankfully, this situation is changing with the advent of groups that advocate effectively for those who have little or no voice. Evil morphs, shifts, hides, distracts, sometimes travels in disguise as virtue, like “we want to help those who are destitute.” In fact, keeping whole populations under the calloused thumb of corporate elites and those who feed off them, is cultural evil in the extreme.