Responding to Evil Without Becoming Evil
A few years ago we published a podcast episode of the Grateful Flow Tool with the elusive Buckethead, one of the Top 10 and most prolific guitar shredders of all time. Barry Michels and Buckethead have come together again: this time for the music and spoken word collaboration in this video. With the backdrop of a soulful riff from Buckethead, Barry muses on how we can respond to evil without becoming evil ourselves.
THE WORDS
The mission of evil is to destroy the human race. The best way to do this is to pit us against each other, each side believing the other side is the embodiment of evil.
Today, you can feel this happening in every area of life—politically, socio-economically, racially, ideologically. We no longer view the people we disagree with as created in the image of God, as springing from the same source as we have.
This fragmentation of the human race was nowhere more beautifully expressed than in a poem called “The Second Coming” by William Butler Yeats, the early 20th-century Irish poet. The first time I read this poem it was such a haunting, visceral experience.
It begins with the line: “Turning and turning in the widening gyre.” A gyre is something that spirals farther and farther out from the center, where things cohere. That image is so evocative of the centrifugal forces ripping us apart.
And then the next line: “The falcon cannot hear the falconer.” We're supposed to be the protectors and stewards of the natural world. But instead, we've exploited the natural world for our own selfish uses to such a degree that the natural world is no longer listening.
And then the next line: “Things fall apart. The center cannot hold.” Yeats is saying that we're being pulled apart by forces he considered evil.
Listen to his depiction of evil and imagine it in your mind’s eye: “A shape with lion body and head of a man; a gaze blank and pitiless as the sun ... That twenty centuries of stony sleep were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle, And what rough beast, it's hour come round at last, Slouches toward Bethlehem to be born?”
You will see this beast staring out at you from behind more and more people's eyes. And the real test will be how you respond. Do you become a monster yourself? The famous 19th-century philosopher Frederick Nietzsche warned us, “He who fights with monsters should be careful, lest he becomes a monster.”
Each of us will have to face evil in our own lives. And we must learn to respond to evil without becoming evil.
