quote from Marx?

[Chris Burford]

At 20:48 09/02/00 -0500, you wrote:
>Dace wrote:
>
>>There's a very good definition of evil, put forth by a political scientist
>>named C. Fred Alford, that starts with this principle.  What makes people
>>evil is that, in order to contain their anguish, they're willing to expell
>>it onto others.  Evil is powered by dread, and what distinguishes it from
>>mental illness (where the two categories don't overlap) is the absence of
>>empathy.
>
>Of course, we blinkered bigots under the sway of the medieval 
>doctrines of psychoanalysis might say that people take pleasure in 
>doing "evil." Normally, social sanction and internalized mechanisms 
>of guilt inhibit us from running riot, but when normality is 
>suspended - as during war - we can go wild. Thanks to TV, we can 
>indulge this pleasure by watching images of bombing - someone else is 
>doing it in the name of right and justice and morality, and that 
>relieves us of feeling guilt over our pleasure in it.
>
>Doug

There is something mediaeval in the concept of evil, but psychoanalysis
belongs to a different era.

We should not counterpose the personal experience in all its dialectical
complexity, to the wider political framework We should look to the
inter-relationship between the individual and the "social life process".
Television is now one of the important ways this is mediated.

Perhaps e-mail lists are another !

Chris Burford

London