To quote a splendid and insightful John Milton’s classic statement about the power of the human mind, that it is its own place, and can “make a heaven of hell, a hell of heaven.†This fabulous statement marks the psychological celebration of the mind’s infinite capacity to make any of us villains or heroes by enabling us to be caring or indifferent, selfless or selfish, creative or destructive.
People are not born evil, but rather with survival abilities, and specific neural patterns to be anything conceivable — just as toddlers promptly learn to speak and understand any of a thousand languages in an instant in their growth. We get a nudge from nature in various directions and into various vistas, such as being more inhibited or bold, but who we become is ultimately a complex process of cultural, historical, religious, economic and political experiences in familial and other institutional settings.
Instead, few of us really know ourselves or most others in our lives. We can hardly have confidence in assertions of what we would do in a new or alien situation because we chose to live in familiar, safe, predictable situations. And we play the same roles over and over in each of our various behavioral settings, as do those we think we know.
Most of us fail to acknowledge the limit to which our behavior is under situational control, because we give priority to believe that is all is internally presented. We wander around masked in an illusion of vulnerability, mis-armed with an arrogance of free will and reasonability.
Those roles come with scripted actions and dialogues that soon are familiar to our audiences, since we are rarely compelled to improvise but say the lines as stated. Another illusion we cherish is that the line between good and evil is impermeable and impregnable, with those bad guys on the other evil side and we and our kind and kin are forever located in the realm of goodness and bask in glory.
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