A Serious Question

Guest post by Yasuhiko Genku Kimura.

Question: A serious question! Why do humans in general apparently have so much energy and enthusiasm for destruction? From games to movies to memes or from play to creativity to war, there seems to be an underlying motivation, or at least an unintentional side effect, for destruction - just for fun?

Response: There is “destruction” and then there is “creative destruction”. In the cosmic scale, all destruction can be viewed as creative destruction, because all creation involves uncreation or decreation—i.e., destruction.

In the human scale, creative destruction is destruction in the context of some creative process. Hence destruction is an essential part of the creative process, which involves the destruction or the uncreation of the old for the creation of the new.

Thus, destructive destruction, destruction for the sake of destruction, is destruction without a creative context. The same creative energy and impulse become misdirected without a creative context.

Psychologically there are a number of factors involved, some or all of which play into destructive human actions. Two major psychological factors I see:

(1) Destructive destruction as self-hatred externally projected and directed.

There exists in the common human psyche this deep-seated frustration for not knowing, and not being able to be, one’s authentic self. Under the weight of societal expectations and demands, people feel that they are compelled or even condemned to live as socially conditioned and programmed inauthentic self (“false ego”) in order to be accepted by others and in order to prove their self-worth to society (to compensate for the sense of erosive self-unworthiness).

This deep frustration is experienced as anger and resentment against society and self-hatred and self-rage against one’s lot that is one’s inauthentic selfhood. This frustration, this resentment, this self-hatred, expresses itself as destructive action either towards oneself or towards others or both.

In this age of social media, people often verbally engage in the act of destructive destruction, which the media has always been doing. Out of jealousy (a species of greed) or envy (a species of hatred), they malign, vilify, and cast aspersions on those who represent their “ideal self” whom deep down they want to be (like) but do not believe they can be.

They hate themselves because they sense that they are not who they truly are and hate the individual who represents the actualization or the fulfillment of their ideal true self which they believe has been denied to them of being.

(2) On the more primordial level, emotion is what motivates human evolution.

There is nothing more emotionally arousing than the theater of violence, kinetic and verbal, and all that accompanies violence.

Until humanity in general becomes more evolved and the experience of beauty and truth becomes the primary means for emotional arousal and evolutionary aspiration, the innate evolutionary impulse will continue to move humans to destruction and violence for emotional arousal.

Therefore, from the cosmic evolutionary perspective, violence and destruction are the manifestation of the creative evolutionary impulse that is consistent and consonant with the general level and state of human consciousness. Thus, if we ever want to decrease or eliminate violence and destruction from our world, we must elevate the general level and state of human consciousness.

First and foremost, we need to develop an educational culture and system that allows our children to grow into their authentic self and to be exposed to the beauty of nature and culture from the beginning of their lives. Also, as self-responsible adults, we need to work on ourselves to eradicate any trace of self-hatred left from our own psyche by being our own true authentic self. This self-work involves forgiveness.

To “forgive” means to “give before (fore-give)”. You give to yourself the new future, the new you, the new life, the new reality in your imagination before it becomes an actual fact in the objective external reality. In the act of forgiving, the future is created and the past is uncreated. The imagination not only can create but also can uncreate what it has created. The creation and the uncreation simultaneously occur in the eternal moment as the telic momentum of eternity. Therefore, an infinite abyss separates any two moments of time in which forgiveness as an act of creative transformation takes place.

Humanity is a single Being in spite of its billions of different manifest forms and figures. We appear all asunder, as every being is the Self uniquely made visible. You have given to yourself every individual as an image in your world, and therefore you alone know what he or she represents. For you who are self-forgiven and self-transformed, every other human being comes to represent an aspect of you, and you realize that humanity is, in truth and in reality, human-unity.

Yasuhiko Genku Kimura. ©2024. All Rights Reserved.