In this article we will continue our discussion of the emotional nature of consciousness. We discussed aggression, anger and violence in the previous article. We will now expand on those topics, discussing criminals, prisons, riots and war, in order to better understand how these conditions arise; how to have more empathy and understanding for criminals; and how to better prevent criminals, war and riots in our society by addressing these issues at their emotional and psychological roots.
Criminals, Violence & Powerlessness
“Most criminals, in or out of prison, share a sense of powerlessness and a feeling of resentment because of it.
Therefore they seek to assure themselves that they are indeed powerful through antisocial acts, often of violence.
They desire to be strong, while believing in a lack of personal strength.
They have been conditioned, and furthermore have conditioned themselves, to believe that they must fight for any benefits.
Aggression becomes a method of survival.
Since they believe so strongly in the power of others, and in their own relative powerlessness, they feel forced into aggressive actions almost as preventative measures against greater violence that will be done against them.
They feel isolated and alone, unappreciated, filled with rage which is being constantly expressed – in many case, though not all – through a steady series of minor social crimes.
This applies whether or not major crimes are committed; so the simple expression of aggression without understanding does not help.”1
Criminals, Despair & Powerlessness
“Most criminals act out of a sense of despair.
Many have high ideals, but ideals that have never been trusted or acted upon.
They feel powerless, so that many strike out in self-righteous anger or vengeance against a world that they see as cynical, greedy, perverted.
They have concentrated upon the great gaps that seem to exist between their ideals of what man should be, and their ideas of what man is.
On the one hand, they believe that the self is evil, and on the other they are convinced that the self should not be so.
They react extravagantly.
They often see society as the “enemy” of good.
Many — not all, now — criminals possess the same characteristics you ascribe to heroes, except that the heroes have a means toward the expression of idealism, and specific avenues for that expression.
And many criminals find such avenues cut off completely.
I do not want to romanticize criminals, or justify their actions.
I do want to point out that few crimes are committed for “evil’s sake,” but in a distorted response to the failure of the actualization of a sensed ideal.”2
Criminals & Suppression of Aggression
“Many who unexpectedly commit great crimes, sudden murders, even bringing about mass death, have a history of docility and conventional attitudes, and were considered models, in fact, of deportment.
All natural aggressive elements were denied in their natures, and any evidence of momentary hatred was considered evil and wrong.
As a result such individuals find it difficult, finally, to express the most normal denial, or to go against their given code of conventionality and respect.
They cannot communicate as, say, even animals can, with their fellow men as far as the expression of a disagreement is concerned.
Psychologically, only a massive explosion can free them.
They feel so powerless that this adds to their difficulties – so they try to liberate themselves by showing great power in terms of violence.”3
The Criminal and Prison
“The male in your society is taught to personify aggressiveness with all of those antisocial attitudes that he cannot normally demonstrate.
The criminal mind expresses these for him, hence the ambiguous attitudes on the part of society, in which renegades are often romanticized.
The detective and his criminal wear versions of the same mask.
Following such ideas, you end up with segregations in which the ill, being powerless, are isolated; the criminals are kept together; and the old are held in institutions or in cultural ghettos with their own kind.
Transferences of personal problems are all involved here, and clusters of beliefs.
The criminal element represents the individual’s own feared and unfaced aggressions.
These fears are closeted on an individual basis, and those people who express them socially are imprisoned.
The enforced incarceration of violent men often leads to a riot, and the private closeting of normal aggression often brings psychological rioting and outbursts of physical symptoms.
In all cases, little effort is made to understand the basic problems beneath, and the social segregations merely build up the pressure, so to speak, so that those with like beliefs are kept in situations that only perpetuate the basic causes.
Society as you know it, not understanding the nature of normal aggression, considers it violent.
The prisons and law enforcement agencies need criminals in the same way that criminals need them, for they operate within the same system of belief.
Each accepts violence as a method of behavior and survival.”4
Prison
“You isolate the criminal element in an environment in which any compensations are refused.
The entire framework of a prison – with its bars – is a constant reminder to the convict of his situation, and reinforces his original difficulty.
Any normal home life is denied him; and along with the overall concentration upon the problem at hand, all other stimuli are purposely held to a minimum.
In their ways, the warden and guards subscribe to the same set of beliefs as that held by their prisoners – the idea of force and power is accentuated on both sides, and each believes the other its enemy.
The guards are certain that the incarcerated are the dregs of the earth and must be held down at all costs.
Both sides accept the concept of human aggression and violence as a method of survival.
The prisoners’ energies are usually used in boring, innocuous tasks, even though some attempt is made to provide vocational training in many institutions.
Both prisoners and officials, however, take it for granted that most of those now behind bars will return time and time again.
The convicted project their personal problems out upon the society.
Society returns the “favor.”
In the same way individuals often think of certain characteristics as criminal or evil, and attempt to isolate those portions from other areas of their own activity.
Power and the lack of it, and the attitudes surrounding either mode, are often involved.”5
Riots
“Riots can be an outlet for a release of energy, introducing a group of individuals to the intimate recognition that highly concentrated vitality exists.
They may not have found it earlier in their lives.
This recognition can lead them – and often does – to seize their own energy and use it in a strong creative manner.
A natural catastrophe or a riot are both energy baths, potent and highly positive in their ways despite their obvious connotations.
In your terms this in no way absolves those who start riots, for example, for they will be working within a system of conscious beliefs in which violence begets violence.
Yet even here individual differences apply.
The inciters of riots are often searching for the manifestation of energy which they do not believe they possess on their own.
They light and start psychological fires, and are as transfixed by the results as any arsonist.
If they understood and could experience power and energy in themselves they would not need such tactics.
As racial problems may be worked out on many levels, through a riot or a natural disaster, or a combination of both, according to the intensity of the situation on a psychological level; and as physical symptoms can be pleas for help and recognition, so can natural misfortunes be utilized by members of one portion of the country, or one part of the world, to obtain aid from other portions.”6
War
“We often have in your society the opposite suggestion of “Every day, in every way, I am getting better and better.”
Given quite regularly: “Every day, in every way, I am growing worse, and so is the world.”
You have meditations for disaster, beliefs that invite private and mass tragedies.
They are usually masked by the polite clothing of conventional acceptance.
Many thousands may die in a particular battle or war, for example. The deaths are accepted almost as a matter of course.
These are victims of war, without question.
It seldom occurs to anyone that these are victims of beliefs — since the guns are quite real, and the bombs and the combat.
The enemy is obvious. His intentions are evil.
Wars are basically examples of mass suicide — embarked upon, however, with all of the battle’s paraphernalia, carried out through mass suggestion, and through the nation’s greatest resources, by men who are convinced that the universe is unsafe, that the self cannot be trusted, and that strangers are always hostile.
You take it for granted that the species is aggressively combative.
You must out-think the enemy nation before you yourself are destroyed.
These paranoiac tendencies are largely hidden beneath man’s nationalistic banners.
“The end justifies the means.” This is another belief, most damaging.
Religious wars always have paranoiac tendencies, for the fanatic always fears conflicting beliefs, and systems that embrace them.”7
“We say we want to put an end to war, yet we go on making missiles, guns, tanks, and bombs, and arming other countries in the name of peace. We are alarmed about violence, yet we let our children watch hour after hour of violent television programs…Even when we can clearly see the urgency of stopping pollution and putting an end to violence, we lack the will and the wisdom to translate our desire into effective action…Even one person standing against violence, whether it is in the home, in the community, or between nations, can become a source of inspiration for everyone who comes in contact with him.”8
Wars & Disasters
“There are as many reasons for “earth illnesses” as there are for body illnesses.
To some extent the same can be said of wars, if you consider a war as a small infection; in the case of a world war, it would be a massive disease.
War will finally teach you to revere life.
Natural catastrophes will remind you that you cannot ignore your planet or your creaturehood.
At the same time such experiences themselves provide contact with the deepest energies of your being – even when they are being used “destructively”.
War has often served as an emotional stimulus, as an escape in terms of drama, excitement and belonging for those who have felt alone, powerless and isolated.
In its own way, a neighborhood fire serves the same purpose, among others, and so does a local or regional disaster.
The nature of your conscious mind demands change and dramatic meaning, a sense of power, and aspirations against which to judge individual direction.
A “perfect” society, idealistically speaking, would provide these qualities by encouraging each individual to use his potentials to the fullest, to revel in these challenges, and to be led on by his great natural excitement as he or she tries to extend powers of creative potency in his or her own unique way.
When such opportunities are denied then there are riots, wars, and natural catastrophes.
A sense of power is any creatures’ right.
I speak here again of power as the ability to act creatively and with some effectiveness.
A dog chained too long often becomes vicious.
A man who believes his actions have no value seeks out situations in which he uses his power to act, yet often without worrying about whether the action will have a constructive or negative effect.
You cannot act positively if you cannot act.
You do not understand the nature, then, of your own energy or your ability to direct it.
Storms, say, or tornadoes, are brought about by angry men precisely as wars are. They are simply versions of the same phenomena.”9
Soldiers & War
“Many who unexpectedly commit great crimes, sudden murders, even bringing about mass death, have a history of docility and conventional attitudes, and were considered models, in fact, of deportment.
All natural aggressive elements were denied in their natures, and any evidence of momentary hatred was considered evil and wrong.
As a result such individuals find it difficult, finally, to express the most normal denial, or to go against their given code of conventionality and respect.
They cannot communicate as, say, even animals can, with their fellow men as far as the expression of a disagreement is concerned.
Psychologically, only a massive explosion can free them.
They feel so powerless that this adds to their difficulties – so they try to liberate themselves by showing great power in terms of violence.
Some such individuals, model sons, for example, who seldom even spoke back to their parents, were suddenly sent to war and given carte Blanche to release all such feelings in combat; and I am referring particularly to the Korean and Vietnam War, and not World War II.
In these wars aggressions could be released and codes still followed.
The individuals were faced, however, with the horror of their violently released, pent-up hatreds and aggressions.
Seeing these bloody results, they became even more frightened, more awed by what they thought of as this terrible energy that sometimes seemed to drive them to kill.
On their return home the code of behavior changed back to one suited to civilian life, and they clamped down upon themselves again as hard as they could.
Many would appear as super conventional.
The “luxury” of expressing emotion even in exaggerated form was suddenly denied them, and the sense of powerlessness grew by contrast.
It is a sense of powerlessness that also causes nations to initiate wars.
This has little to do with their “actual” world situation or with the power that others might assign to them, but to an overall sense of powerlessness – even, sometimes, regardless of world dominance.
World War II was a result of a sense of powerlessness which then erupted into a mass blood bath on a grand scale.
The same course was followed privately in the cases of such individuals as just mentioned.
In the United States strong national efforts were made after World War II to divert the serviceman’s energies into other areas on their return home.
Many who entered that were feeling powerless were given advantages after it was over – incentives, education, benefits they did not have before it.
They were given the means to power in their own eyes.
They were also accepted home as heroes, and while many certainly were disillusioned, in the whole framework of the country’s mood the veterans were welcomed.
There were certainly exceptions in other wars, yet most of the men involved in WWII learned something from their experiences.
They turned against the idea of violence and each in his own way recognized the personal psychological ambiguities of their feelings during combat.
They were told by politicians that it was to be the last war, and the irony is that most of those in uniform believed it.
The lie did not become truth but it became more nearly so, for despite their failures the ex-servicemen managed to bring up children who would not go to war willingly, who would question its premise.
In an odd way this made it even more difficult for those who did go into the next two, less extensive wars, for the country was not behind either one.
Any sense of powerlessness on the part of individual fighting men was given expression as before, this time in a more local blood bath, but the code itself had become shaky.
This release was not accepted as it had been before, even within the ranks.
By the time of the war in Vietnam, the country was as much against it as for it, and the men’s feelings of powerlessness were reinforced after it was over.
This is the reason for the incidents of violence on the part of returning servicemen.”10
We will end this article now with a message from Buddha.
“The Buddha declared twenty-five hundred years ago: ‘One man may conquer in battle a thousand times a thousand men; but if another conquers himself, he is the greatest of conquerors.’ All the disturbances in the physical plane are due to chaos and confusion existing in the mind. Therefore to conquer the mind is the key to real success and the consequent harmony and peace in the individual and the world…The true soldier is he who fights not the external but the internal foes.”11
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- Roberts, Jane, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1981
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- ibid.
- ibid.
- Roberts, Jane, The Individual and the Nature of Mass Events, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1981
- Easwaran, Eknath, The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol I, Nilgiri Press, 1975
- Roberts, Jane, The Nature of Personal Reality, Amber-Allen Publishing, 1974
- ibid.
- Easwaran, Eknath, The End of Sorrow: The Bhagavad Gita for Daily Living, Vol I, Nilgiri Press, 1975
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