Also @Andrew this stuff does not need to be some removed intellectual looking either.
This stuff can be experienced in oneself directly, I remember Peter writing about how he experienced in himself what the thrill of killing someone would be like.
Not that he would be driven to kill someone cos he was hurt but the fact that there is something within ‘me’ that is intrinsically biased towards violence, towards power, towards destruction - kind of a lust for blood and power, this is ‘me’.
And I think it is unhelpful to miss out on these explorations by sticking a label over it all and saying - “oh its because I wasn’t happy”. Yes I guess when being malicious one is of course not at the same time being happy but it goes waaaaay deeper.
It’s interesting that you see this in the sense of an argument and I can see where you are coming from.
I was actually just observing this in myself and it is interesting. Because it seems that as feeling beings what we do, certainly what I do as I just noticed is that I am primarily interested in ensuring that the outcome of the discussion goes according to ‘my’ worldview.
Which is probably why with feeling beings it is so easy for discussions to devolve because it very soon becomes a very personal thing.
The discussion is actually not as much about the facts as it is about projecting and defending myself. And this happens on a very subtle level, so for example you might be saying the same thing I am saying but I am intent on it being presented the way I see it, because I am driven to affirm my very reality.
All of a sudden this makes a lot of sense -
Taken from Srinath’s report of becoming free :
“I thought about all the arguments that I had with the actually free pioneers in the past, all the arguments with other actualists and realised that conflict is my very nature. The main reason I was arguing about various things was for myself. I gave not a hoot about the issues themselves. I was locked in the paradigm of belief, because I needed to be reassured and backed up.”
Baboons are violent, scheming, hierarchial, and cause unnecessary mess. It happens in baboons societies that the dominant ones create ruckus, the lesser aggressive ones are the recipients of their man(key) handling. They in turn wield their power that are less powerful than them. So every baboon plays, “I piss you because you are less than me” game.
There’s a case study. A nearby tourist lodge started dumping its remains in a dump yard miles away from a baboons place. They found it. The most aggressive baboons went there, because only they can wrestle with baboons from the other group for food. They’d eat, sleep on the trees nearby rarely visiting their home group. This was going on for sometime. There was an outbreak of tuberculosis in the baboons living at the food dumpyard. It killed all of them living there in a short time.
After few years, the dynamics of the home group of the baboons, aggressive ones of which stayed at the dumpyard and died subsequently, changed remarkably. The group is now left with less aggressive ones. They started playing, grooming each other, with significant reduction in overall aggression, that has never been witnessed in any baboons’ troop.
Baboons are placard holders for malice. You can observe that in baboons, malice is transmitted, that is, malice breeds malice. Pain breeds pain.
Malice is remarkably reduced when the baboons are treated nicer. The newer baboons which joined adapted to the changed group’s dynamics.
So, Intergenerational trauma.
You might say, “Well, I had great parents and siblings.” That wouldn’t usually be the case upon deeper probing. The inhibitions, inability to share your emotional pain as a kid leading to suppression, shame tactics your teachers employed, parents making you feel abandoned, various punishments meted out to you in order to make you conform to their ways, unwittingly creating anxiety in your primitive brain by being unpredictable, resulting in you getting disconnected from yourself…so on and so forth.
Self-protective mechanisms you developed in order to cope with distress, feeling powerful via malice could also be one.
Why didn’t other kids exhibit the belligerence you did? (They were conditioned would be a simplistic answer)
What prompted you create unnecessary suffering when you didn’t get anything out of it?
How can you say the high you got was not you attempting for a compensation due to the sense of lack or a way to cope your suppression?
Malice for no reason rarely happens in animal world, where there is no police or justice and predators are free to kill their preys, atleast when they are easily available. But they don’t, usually.
I doubt intraspecies malice in pack animals happens in the animal world.
“Lust to kill” seems to be an importation from films.
So you don’t know whether malice is inborn, except what Peter might have said. It’s very easy to take defensive and cynical stands.
And what Peter said regarding sarcasm is blatantly incorrect, in my experience.
What you know is, malice happens as a result of existing unhappiness, which is also everybody’s experience. Keep aside how much of it is inborn.
Work on happiness and see where it leads.
This is a note to myself as well. I gladly welcome any suggestions.
I think this whole aggression vs malice is a side-track. The problem is the root of it, the aggression itself, not the malice (as the words are being used here).
Actual freedom is not where you still have aggression but no malice. Aggression itself is eradicated as well.
So what ya and @Kiman gonna do about that instinctual aggression, Mssrs. I’m-Not-Necessarily-Malicious?
If someone insulted you and you don’t get hurt, would you be malicious?
So identify what gets hurt and if there’s sincerity in becoming happy, that part of identity will be dropped.
If I am already happy, will I chase pleasures(including the pleasure that comes from dominating others, and sarcasm is one form of it)? Pleasure is a poor substitute for happiness and it fades away in no time.
So focusing on inducing PCEs is what I do.
I wonder if a lot of this discussion is coming from this statement:
“With nothing to defend I have no need to attack.”
This statement is as true at the absolute level of someone that’s actually free (no self whatsoever = no self that always wants defending) as it is true at the relative level of beliefs. If I don’t believe in some individual thing, there’s no need to defend it.
I think there’s room for sense in both sides of this discussion. Every individual is malice & aggression. Many have learned to be extra-sneaky about it, but it’s there. And it’s also true that some have become conditioned or learned to be especially malicious.
I don’t think it’s controversial to say that it’s possible to become happier & more harmless, & ‘more harmless’ means less malicious. The underlying aggressive drive is there, but it’s not as dominating as it once was.
It reminds me of something that Peter wrote that ‘I’ am a passionate defender of absolutely nothing at all. Nevertheless though the self is this very sense of an entity/presence trying to sustain itself, protect itself, assert itself, propagate itself etc that is the programming. The instinctual passion of aggression then is just one of the facets of this programming in action, of this ‘passionate defender’ doing its thing.
Perhaps much of this debate stems from you distinguishing harmfulness as different from unhappiness, generally tending to associate harm with action, and overlooking harm as a feeling in the form of malice or sorrow.
Maybe this is because Peter’s original quote suggests a change in one’s behavior, as in to cease expressing cynicism in the form of sarcasm. If that’s the case (that you see harm as associated with expression exclusively, and not associated with feelings), then it makes sense why you would think that:
Because you perhaps see it as a moralistic management of behavior. But from an actualist standpoint, one is harmful by both doing harm and being harm. Per Richard:
The most harmful action…operated twenty-four hours of the day: involuntarily radiating affective vibes and transmitting psychic currents
Which is to say, regardless of whether you express your ‘hurt’, simply by being hurt in the form of malice or sorrow, you are being harmful.
What stands out to me is how you write about malice. You seem to, again, classify it as an action stemming from one’s feelings and fail to see it as a feeling itself. Which perplexes me because it’s mentioned countless times on the website as an impediment to happiness. That is to say, to feel unhappy is to be feeling malicious and/or sorrowful.
Malice is indeed inborn in the form of aggression and desire. Again, what actual freedom is on about, over-and-over again, is that malice and sorrow are inborn in the form of instinctual passions:
The genetically inherited passions (such as fear and aggression and nurture and desire) give rise to malice and sorrow. Malice and sorrow are intrinsically connected and, being based in the instinctual passions, are the primary cause of all the wars and murders and rapes and tortures and domestic violence and child abuse and suicides and the such-like.
and
This entails finding the source of ‘myself’ … and ‘I’ discover that a ‘being’ arises out of the instinctual passions that blind nature endows all sentient beings with at birth. This ‘being’ – the rudimentary self – is the root cause of all the malice and sorrow that besets humankind, and to eliminate malice and sorrow ‘I’ have to eliminate the fear and aggression and nurture and desire that this ‘being’ is made up of … the instinctual passions. But as this ‘being’ is the instinctual passions – there is no differentiation betwixt the two – then the elimination of one is the elimination of the other. In fact, with the elimination of these passions, ‘I’ cease to exist as ‘me’, a ‘being’ in the body, period.
and
You have malice because you are a human being. Blind nature endowed you – like all sentient beings – with fear and aggression and nurture and desire as survival instincts. These instincts are affective … that is they are passionate feelings and emotions.
and
You do not have to bring about malice … the passionate survival instinct endowed per favour of genetic inheritance sees to that.
Unhappiness is the presence of malice/sorrow. If one is unhappy, one is feeling malicious or sorrowful. You seem to differentiate between unhappiness and sorrow/malice. They might as well be the same thing.
I think considering malice as an action one does to another human being, while overlooking it’s affective nature, is to miss the point. Instead you tend to opt for a general term of “hurt” and “unhappiness” without acknowledging that to feel hurt, or to feel unhappy, is to be feeling either malicious or sorrowful in it’s various forms.
Malice is fundamentally an instinctual issue. Taking offense is an identity issue. Without instinctual passions, there is no malice. Aggression is malicious. It’s…obvious. To feel aggressive, is malicious. One is certainly not feeling benign.
To be an “already hurt identity” is to be either sorrowful, or malicious. The sorrow and malice is the hurt. And to be sorrowful or malicious is harmful to both oneself and others.
Thus to be harmless as per actualism lingo (being free of malice) is beneficial both to oneself – plus it feels unpleasant (hedonically) to feel malicious (affectively) anyway – as well to others due to being unable to induce suffering either in oneself or another, via affective vibes and psychic currents, and vice versa.
I truly don’t know what website y’all have been reading. Not to mention it is easy to look inside oneself and realize at times one feels:
“desire to inflict injury, harm, or suffering on another”
Doesn’t that seem aggressive or desirous? Perhaps…both?
A bit from Peter:
A study of the animal world quickly alerts one to instinctual fear and aggression operating, and an honest appraisal will admit to it operating in humans as well. As is evidenced in such tests as those carried out by Milgram and others, humans have an active instinct for malice and aggression that requires the point of a gun or severe moral constraint to hopefully keep them in check…The acknowledgement of malice within one’s own bosom is an essential prerequisite to begin to eliminate it…The third alternative is to rid oneself of all of the instinctual passions – an actual extinction, thus freeing oneself from the shackles of moral constraint or the delusion of transcendence.
Yes.
To get back to Peter’s original quote, the act of expressing sarcasm is at the least an expression one’s own suffering, but additionally it’s often a psychic jab at another’s being. It is a form of vibe violence, and in attacking another’s psyche, it would seem to reinforce the reality of one’s own. Perhaps a potent step in eliminating one’s own hurt, is to cease the habitual behavior that gives it credence.
And then this, possibly the most important ingredient for his success, might be found in the statement:
For anyone who is sincere about peace on earth it is essential to put becoming harmless first
I think this was a big deal for Peter. His own personal happiness wasn’t enough. He really wanted peace on earth - something much bigger than oneself. This desire is echoed in various forms in other reports of becoming actually free. It’s a big deal.
To me, being harmless is the essential ingredient that is oft overlooked in happiness. It’s a paradigm shift that sets the goal apart from the happiness we are most familiar with, which is conditional.
One thing I’d add is simply that although it’s true you can’t be harmless without being happy, it’s equally true you can’t be happy without being harmless. So if one finds themselves focusing on just one version of it and not the other, it is a clear sign one is missing something, and perhaps willfully ignoring part of what is written so that one can take away some meaning other than what is truly intended.
Malice is intent to hurt that involves scheming and plotting in order to hurt. Cognition is a part of malice, alongwith emotion.
Whereas aggression is instinctive intent to hurt, where cognition is not involved.
Aggression for no good reason is rarely seen in animal world.
Which is why, we use “malicious” to describe activities in human world far more liberally than in animal world.
Would you use “malicious” to describe a lion hunting down a deer?
Now, malice can’t happen when there are no instinctual passions, of course. That’s the whole premise of actualism–no instinctual passions, no feelings. However, is the intent to harm others for no good reason(malice) inborn, an instinctual passion? Like, beating up a disabled person to feel a high? Why doesn’t it happen in the animal world, then?
See the reason: “to feel high”.
When do people typically want to feel high?
The more people feel low, the more they want to feel the high. Just like, the more one is starved, the more they desire to be satiated.
What makes people addicted? The more they suffer, the more they are prone to addictions.
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Sarcasm is an outlet or a temporary relief or have a standout good feeling on a large canvas of bad feelings. Like a quick drizzle on a barren land.
Stopping being sarcastic, which Peter said, only stops the expression of unhappiness, but how can it stop unhappiness itself?
You can stretch unhappiness to be an outcome of instinctual passion.
What can you do to instinctual passions in order to not be sarcastic, organically? I have no answer for that. Do you?
You can say HAIETMOBA, which is panacea for everything. But that’s quite a jump and doesn’t address the immediate cause to the need to feel a high. The proximal cause is unhappiness and the ultimate cause is instinctual passions.
What can you do to unhappiness in order to feel happy so that you won’t have the need to be sarcastic?
See what parts of identity are hurt, try dropping them, see what causes resistance, what feeling is causing resistance for me to drop the part of identity that hurt me, what it is trying to protect from getting hurt…
This is your definition of malice, not the way the word is being used on for example the AFT site. So when you read about malice you’re understanding something totally different than what is intended. You’re reading into things that aren’t there.
Here’s a good common definition for malice: “desire to cause pain, injury, or distress to another” (from merriam-webster).
Again this is just your distinction. The way malice is used in the normal sense it doesn’t matter whether it’s instinctual or learned, an in-the-moment passion or a long drawn-out revenge plot. Both are malicious.
This is an empty statement cause any example someone gives you can say that there really is a ‘good reason’ for it. So you’re just attempting to make another variant of the failed argument that humans are distinct from animals in that humans are especially ‘bad’, while animals are only innocently ‘bad’. It comes down to morals yet again – animals can’t be held to moral standards cause they “don’t know any better”. So any bad thing animals do that humans do as well, in animals it’s innocent ‘aggression’ while in humans it becomes evil ‘malice’.
Some food for thought: " ‘Stone-cold serial killers’: Domestic cats slaughter billions upon billions of animals in US every year" (link). The gist is housecats kill animals even when fully fed, they don’t do it for food, just for fun.
As the lion is intending to cause harm to the deer, then, yes.
Given this is new information for you, does this cause you to pause and rethink the meaning of what you’ve read on the AFT site? Maybe some things are worth a re-read now?
Again your “no good reason” is a catch-all such that you can infinitely defend against anything one might say. But just because it is infinitely defensible doesn’t make it sensible.
The salient point is that the intent to harm others, in and of itself, is inborn, an instinctual passion. This is what everyone here is talking about when they use the word “malice”.
Just because some humans take that inborn desire to harm, and then do it just for the fun of it, in various exaggerated forms (like beating up disabled people for fun, or killing random strangers for fun (as serial killers do)), doesn’t change the fact or the point which is that we are all born with this intent-to-harm.
It does (see cat example above).
Since the premise (that it doesn’t happen in the animal world) is false, the rest doesn’t follow either.
That being said, you seem to be making the point that happy people don’t intend to do harm to others for no good reason. Which may be true but I’ll just quote what I said earlier:
You seem to have very strong opinions about these topics, and for example that happiness is the important part and harmlessness is secondary. This is in contradiction to what others such as Peter wrote which is that harmlessness is primary. Now just because Peter said it doesn’t mean it’s right, but given that Peter succeeded in becoming actually free, it would indicate he might know what he was talking about. So I’m curious, what do you base your confidence in that you’re right and Peter, for example, is wrong?
I could not put a name to it before but it clicked now, this separation of malice into only those things done intelligently and aggression in animals/young children being somehow exempt is this myth of ‘fall from grace’, a myth rooted in spiritual belief.
Human malice is simply more sophisticated due to intelligence eg sarcasm, it all comes from the very same place tho - the instinctual package of fear, aggression, nurture and desire.
“Intent to harm others”. The operative word is “intent”.
The intent for animals, which is instinctual, is different from the intent by humans to hurt the other identity . This is important to grok, for the case at hand is “sarcasm”.
My focus was on hurt identity, not instinctual passions. Hurt identities are unhappy. If they are more happy and get hurt less, their desire to hurt other people will correspondingly decrease in order to feel the high from one-upmanship. Primary psychopaths are an example. Awakened people are another(There are different strains of them, the focus is on egolessness or diminished ego. No need to debate that). Most importantly, it’s also everybody’s experience.
Your saying, “well, it all fundamentally comes from instinctual passions” is going on a tangent.
I used the word “malice” to make a particular point.
To recap, my point is that people who are hurt tend to hurt others. Why? It gives them a pleasure. Now, look at why you get hurt and get less and less hurt, then the desire to hurt by any means, including sarcasm, will go down.
What malice means in actualism is totally besides the point in this discussion.
I said what I meant by “malice” thrice including the previous post and previously in the beginning when Henry asked whether I make a distinction between malice and aggression. The distinction is critical in order to communicate the point. Whether I use “malice” or a different word is besides the point. I still think “malice” fits best to what I meant to communicate by that word.
There could be confusion given how it’s used in actualism, I get it, and I explained it thereon, thrice. Even then, no idea what to make of being told ““malice” is differently in AFT, so I better read it”
My point is, the desire to hurt others just to feel a high is not innate. It’s an outcome of an identity. That’s the only point of contention here in that it’s innate. And it doesn’t help to debate whether it’s innate or acquired later. I gave examples of Baboon’s study, addictions etc., anyway.
I said it happens, rarely:
And you come up with a domesticated cat proof. It happens in the wild too, but never with the intention to hurt the way humans intend to hurt–for it’s an egoic game and animals don’t have required intelligence.
Identity is an outcome of instinctual passions, yes. It’s the ultimate reason. I don’t get what the point that is being made by repeatedly invoking instinctual passions here. What is the advise to become free from sarcasm?
I agree from experience with this. However, there can be a layer of morality which circumvents it.
What I felt very acutely today, was that there was a version of me that did exist which was wayway less jaded and malicious, sorrowful and sad than the version of the last 4 decades.
This is the main, and most useful point: there is potentially a naive feeling that still exists in each of the 8 billion people on the planet. Probably not all, but a good majority.
If this were not the case, Richard would never have discovered what he did.
Malicious and sorrowful feelings grow with time. To assert to me, someone who has watched my own children grow, that malice and sorrow are there at birth, essentially fully formed, is pissing into the wind. There is nothing like first hand experience which negates any need to believe otherwise.
Without the innate naivete inherent in childhood there would be no possibility of actual freedom.
As Richard said to Justine many years ago (paraphrasing); "the universe was waiting for someone sufficiently naive for actual freedom to happen ".
As a veteran of “original sin”, I reject the idea that anyone has an essentially malicious and sorrowful identity at birth. Absolute rubbish. Please consider just were we would be if that were correct.
It is precisely because that is not true that we have actual freedom.
Just to add a little context from the AFT to this discussion:
RICHARD: No, as a broad generalised categorisation, the word ‘malice’ (the desire to hurt another person; active ill will, spite or hatred; a deep resentment) is used here as a ‘catch-all’ word for what one does to others (resentment, anger, hatred, rage, sadism and so on through all the variations such as abhorrence; acerbity; acrimony; aggression; anger; animosity; antagonism; antipathy; aversion; bad blood; temper; bellicosity; belligerence; bile; bitchiness; bitterness; cantankerousness; cattiness; crabbiness; crossness; defamation; despisal; detestation; disgust; dislike; dissatisfaction; enmity; envy; evil; execration; grievance; grudge; grudgingness; hard feelings; harm; hate; hatred; hostility; ill feeling; ill will; ill-nature; ill-temper; inimicalness; irascibility; irritability; loathing; malevolence; malignance; malignity; militancy; moodiness; murder; opposition; peevishness; petulance; pique; querulousness; rancour; repulsion; repugnance; resentment; snideness; spite; spitefulness; spleen; spoiling; stifling; sullenness; testiness; touchiness; umbrage; unfriendliness; unkindness; vengefulness; venom; vindictiveness; warlikeness; wrath).
Sorrow exists because of the existence of “being”. I experimented with an infant, my nephew. Fear and desire for security are evidently there. As long as they are there, sorrow exists. Although i can’t know an infant’s experience directly, the circumstantial evidence makes it abundantly clear for me.
They do not have a sorrowful/malicious identity yet because it has not formed fully, however they have all the wiring in-place and this will and does become so with each and every human, hence the need for morals etc.
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