Seeing Others As Instruments Is Easy, As People It Is More Complicated
Wishing the evil of others or hurting others is a reality that disgusts us. However, have you ever been tempted or seduced by that dark side? Treating others as instruments to achieve our purposes is much easier. If you want to be the best in the company, all you have to do is boycott the work of your colleagues. It is a much shorter way to achieve what you want and also the one that will give you satisfaction with less delay. Isn’t this part of what we always covet?
The human being always seeks the immediate satisfaction of what he wants. Returning to the previous example, it does not help us to give everything, make an effort and wait months until we honestly achieve our goal. If we can shorten this time, why not do it? This is how those who get carried away by what we consider to be wrong think. They stop treating others as people to start using them as instruments: obstacles or means to their ends.
The seduction mechanisms of evil
We have all met good people who ended up turning bad. Manipulative individuals, with a very bad character, who began to do what they previously suffered in their flesh. This is the first mechanism of seduction of evil. Feeling hurt by what they did to us. Noticing ourselves victims of circumstances, not deserving of all the gratuitous damage received. Tired of all adversities, endured one after another. In the end, resentment takes hold of us and we become who we did not want to be.
A battered person can become a batterer. Someone who is the target of criticism can take on the role of critic. After so much pain, one decides to stop “being stupid” and act as others have done with him. What we are not aware of is that the target of our wrongdoing is innocent people. A group to which we once belonged.
However, there is also another mechanism of seduction of evil that leads us to treat others as instruments and not as people. This is seeing how those around us reach power with their evil deeds. We hate them, we are jealous, they are so lucky and they are such bad people! All these negative emotions lead us to want to reproduce their actions, because our honesty does not provide us with the luck that they are having.
If we open our eyes, we will realize that we have allowed ourselves to be poisoned. It is as if we are in a fruit bowl surrounded by bad apples. By not having moved away from that situation, from those people, we also ended up infected. Contaminated by that seductive evil that makes us treat others as instruments to satisfy our needs or simply cause the pain that we once received.
Although treating others while ignoring their feelings may make us feel good for a moment, the truth is that in the long run it will make us bitter and sad. As human beings we look for the good because that makes us feel at peace. Although the bad benefits us in some way or allows us to obtain “justice”, the result will not be the same.
We are seduced by the power that evil gives us. . Treating others as objects can make us achieve what we set out to do, but it will take us away from balance, from peace, from happiness. Let’s not forget that for behaving like this there is always a price to pay: that of sacrificing our being to have. Worth?
Images courtesy of Catrin Welz Stein
