Seeing Others As Instruments Is Easy, Seeing Them As People Is More Complicated
Desiring the harm of others or harming others is a reality that repulses us. However, have you ever found yourself tempted or seduced by this dark side? Treating people as instruments to achieve our purposes is much easier. If you want to be the best in the company, just boycott your colleagues’ work. It’s a much shorter path to getting what you want and also the one that will give you satisfaction with less delay. Isn’t that what we’ve always lusted after?
The human being always looks for the immediate satisfaction of what he wants. Recovering the previous example, it doesn’t serve us to give our all, make an effort and wait months until we can, in an honest way, reach our goal. If we can shorten this time, why not? That’s how those who get carried away by what we think is wrong think. They stop treating others like people and start using them as tools: obstacles or means to their ends.
The seduction mechanisms of evil
We all know good people who turned out to be bad. Manipulative individuals, of very bad character, who began to do what they once suffered in their own skins. This is the first evil seduction mechanism. Feeling hurt by what they’ve done to us, seeing ourselves as victims of circumstance, not deserving of all the gratuitous harm received. Tired of all the adversities, one after the other, rancor seizes us and we become who we don’t want to be.
An abused person can turn into an aggressor. Someone who is the object of criticism can adopt the role of critic. After so much pain we decide to stop “being silly” and act like others did to us. We are not aware that the target of our actions is innocent people. A group we belong to someday.
However, there is also another evil seduction mechanism that leads us to treat others as instruments rather than people: seeing how those around us achieve power through their evil actions. We hate them because they are so lucky and so bad! All these negative emotions make us want to reproduce their actions, because our own honesty does not give us the luck they are having.
If we open our eyes, we can see that we have allowed ourselves to be poisoned. It’s like we’re in a fruit bowl surrounded by bad apples. When we don’t move away from this situation, from these people, we also end up infected. Contaminated by this seductive evil that makes us treat others as instruments to satisfy our needs or, simply, cause the pain we once received.
People are attracted to power
In everything that has been mentioned so far, we have been in contact with rancor and with this feeling of “feeling silly” seeing others misbehave and get the results we would like to achieve. But underneath all of this there is a powerful reason why the dark side absorbs us and why we stop seeing people as such and start looking at them as objects: power.
Taking control gives us power, dominating too, manipulating, lying, harming… All of this is done intentionally and, sometimes, without wanting to completely destroy the other person, if we benefit from it. Now we are in control of the situation and that feeds our own will even more. We let ourselves be carried away. How far will we be able to go?
While treating others by ignoring their feelings may make us feel good for a moment, the fact is that in the long run it will embitter and sadden us. As human beings we look for the good because it makes us feel at peace. Although evil somehow benefits us or allows us to obtain “justice”, the result will not be the same.
The power that evil gives us seduces us. This innocent flirtation that we can maintain at first will turn into something that can’t be turned back if we’re not careful. Treating others as objects can allow us to get what we want, but it will take us away from balance, peace, happiness. Let’s not forget that by behaving like this there is a price to pay: that of sacrificing our being to have it. It is worth it?
Images courtesy of Catrin Welz Stein.
