Life and purpose of evil

Psychological structures created when we grow up can be enormously powerful in influencing how we lead our lives. Some so-called deep psychotherapy approaches claim to be able to help but don't really care to provide any reasonably trustworthy forecast about when that is supposed to happen. And yet there's a huge number of people involved in an equally huge business and amounts of money for making people feel better. Service providers obviously get paid, whether relief comes or not. My first hand experience with psychotherapy has been consistent with all these techniques shortcomings. Process was extremely slow, totally unpredictable and in fact it has never brought any real relief whatsoever. 

This is anachronic and I personally feel this situation is similar hiring a late 19th century army with non automatic guns for fighting a contemporary war (this is period in history was actually when these clinical psychology theories were created anyways). Sure they can make some real damage. But only until the first plane starts launching a storm of bombs, and killing the whole infantry division in seconds.

Drugs on the other hand may be far more effective, but since they don't act on the underlying causes of the problem (which psychiatrists can't really establish yet), we still don't have an ideal treatment for so called mental illnesses at our disposal as of today.

My personal experience is kind of crazy and maybe someone else could jump in and shed some real light on the issue some day. Personally I know meditation has been fundamental for me. It's probably the best tool I've ever come across for changing myself meaningfully for the better in a very reasonable timeframe. But the other key ingredient for that to happen was not very orthodox: gallons of unsolicited evil in the form of abuse.

For the longest time I've suffered a lot with the fact my life has become increasingly discrepant from what I've expected it to be and what I've hoped to experience as I grew up. Maybe I've had somehow unique life circumstances from the start. But today I truly believe I've been another victim of a very contemporary form of captivity: excess of choice. It is the real post-modern western developed country version of captivity, and without knowing I was its ideal target.

As a prisoner in these conditions, one can't see any chains attached to their ankles or evident physical abuse scars. Maybe that's why this type of captivity is much more powerful in terms of disabling resistance to it. People will embrace it instead of fighting it.

My life has been a perfect analogical example of this phenomenon. My enemies have very rarely been clearly visible to me. Therefore I'd often feel like having the duty to beat myself up for not being good enough at making choices and enjoying all this supposedly postmodern freedom. In addition, most people around me have been usually really nice, which made it even more difficult for me to identify my true enemies, especially real close ones.

However, at 30 something I've finally met real evil. Kind of late I have to say. It definitely didn't look like it. It was in disguise, and for a long time I couldn't tell the difference from it and all the other difficulties I had come across in life until that moment.

But differently from what my mother always have taught me, we don't need to do anything bad to anyone to be treated badly. Understanding this illogical rule of life has deeply changed mine. Forever.
In order to grasp evil around me, and protect from it, I was forced to truly identify with huge certainty this same harmful substance within the depths of myself. Once I did that, two things have naturally occurred:

1- I've concluded dealing with evil people doesn't imply any self-guilt. Evil can indeed be done to me without the need for any previous practical offensive action from my end (or anybody else's). In this sense, I'm afraid, traditional morality is essentially flawed. But that wasn't all.

2- Once I've recognized harassment from this true evil nature on the outside world, my inner devils did not have any safe spot to hide in my subconscious anymore. From then on, the evil I've used to do to myself has become too visible and naturally unsustainable. As opposed to what usually happens with lack of freedom disguised as excess choice, evil has finally become evident like all the otherwise active forms of violence.

Finally there could be a fight that didn't target myself as a whole entity as the opponent.  Now focus is on what really needs to change, inside and out. This is the description of a rather heterodox healing and maturing process. I'm quite confident about how all these factors have interacted to get me to a whole new level of subjective well-being and awareness. 

On the other hand, I'm not crazy enough for advocating for physical or emotional abuse as therapy. I'm not going to justify wrong doing by people in power because it can lead to unintended benefits to victims. Abusers must face hard punishment, preferentially a very visible one because their conduct always relies on what's hidden. But personally I've finally worked the magic of making something useful from nasty experience. And that ability seems to be the evolutionary root of our biased perception of reality. Because bad people and situations have been there since the beginning of times. It's how we frame experience in interacting with these external factors what really determines the subjective quality of our lives.

A word on parents

Maybe I'll just state the obvious here. Still, the obvious must be said more often than not.

I've come a long way in understanding who I'm today in the light of my own history. It took more than 30 years for that to happen, so by no means I´m talking about something easy or simple to do.

The current life I have is the concrete base for every possible criticism I may have on educating disabled children. But this is done as a means to spread knowledge, not for condemning the actions or the intentions of my parents, which I´m absolutely positive, were the best of the best when struggling to do the right thing during all these years.

I want whoever reads these texts to find reasoning and insight. Emotions I often share are here only for the sake of illustration. Raising kids is hard. Raising disabled kids is even harder and I´d have to be very naive or ill-intentioned not to recognize that and give my parents the due credit.

My experience provided me with great learnings about that education issue. Most importantly, and I feel I have the duty to echo it, is this extra hardship is not contained in disabled people or their parents. The issue at hand is just another form of social injustice and exclusion with a medical twist. Medical conditions are often confused with or taken as a reason for social exclusion. But there's currently little doubt exclusion is predominantly an exogenous phenomenon.

Thus, as with all the other forms of social exclusion, there has to be a collective fight against it. Disabled people and their parents don't have any interest in being inspiration to others. They want and deserve everything everybody else wants and deserves.

Furthermore, inspired able-bodied people can even be more harmful than those openly prejudicial because they undermine disabled people motivation to fight back.

Appalling and common, hidden faces of abuse against disabled people

While openly defending discrimination against disabled people is getting less common, I think it's important to draw the attention to the invisible, hidden and disguised here. For doing that I'll briefly introduce a conceptual framework, and then show its connection with the matter concerning disability related abuse in the workplace.

In economics information asymmetry is a very important concept.  It's something that permeates both the most sophisticated negotiation forums, and really prosaic situations like buying a used car. And it got increasingly important with the separation of management and ownership that resulted from enterprises getting larger and more complex as capitalism evolved.

Different parties in any interaction have different levels of access to relevant information for making a decision about a transaction. Regarding the used car example, the seller knows exactly what kind of fuel he/she usually put in the tank, if maintenance has been made at the right time with the right components and parts, his/her driving style (which can really influence the vehicle condition), etc. On the other hand, the buyer cannot really verify this history, so he/she needs to rely on the seller as the primary info source.

But the buyer isn't stupid. He/she knows exactly that, although this info could really influence the value of the car (because of its conditions), it's in the best interest of the seller to lie, since there's no way he/she will get caught before it's too late. At first sight this can look unfair to the buyer side. But in the end, since asymmetry is an expected issue, it ends up lowering the price of all the used cars, even those that have been treated with great care and discipline. This creates even less incentives for sellers to take good care of the car prior to selling it, further reinforcing the bad market characteristic.

While this is a classic example of information asymmetry, some degree of this phenomenon can be found in almost every human interaction, and I here want to draw the attention to the corporate power settings.

As per what happens in the used car example, relationships within a corporation (or any other social organization) also greatly rely on trust to function in several situations in which there's information asymmetry. People managers are trusted by the company owners to allocate and guide their other human resources (also paid by the owners) in the most effective way, maximizing return over investment.

When managers get a fixed salary, regardless of how well the firm does in terms of return over the investment, there's an incentive to minimize efforts made. Why? Because manager influence over the firm results isn't directly observable. Therefore there's a space in which the manager can do less without being punished with income reduction, thus maximizing his/her own return on effort level.

This situation is the standard in agency relations. But in order to scale up a business, the owners don't have much choice but to delegate authority to managers. They wouldn't possibly be able to handle all the aspects of complex enterprises by themselves. Trust is good for everyone. Owners get more money for their money, and managers get jobs, power and some money too.

Information asymmetry also occurs between hierarchical management levels. More so when these different levels are located in different countries. So the upper management will also trust middle management to act on their behalf concerning the ones further down in the command chain.

If middle management is the primary point of contact for upper managers to get info about what happens in a given market, this lower leadership layer ends up getting too much power over the future of people under their direct authority. Abuse may occur, and since this person gets to be the only interface with the upper direction layer, and as long as the issues created won't affect the bigger picture, middle manager won't get busted. Abuse can go on for as long as it pleases her/him.

But what does this have to do with disability anyways? A lot. Disability creates an extra layer of asymmetry. Some conduct types that wouldn't be considered abusive if the employee doesn't have a disability, will clearly be characterized as inappropriate if disability is part of the scenario. For example, it's not abusive to request employees to use public transportation when traveling with heavy luggage. Making and enforcing such a request to someone with a physical disability is clearly a whole different situation. But there are two complications here:

1- Companies won't establish different rules of conduct, depending on who is involved. And by doing that (which one could argue is treating people equally) the company is paradoxically promoting discrimination. However, since this specific case is not described in the code of conduct, abuser will get away without any punishment.

2- Even if this situation is added to the code of conduct, there's still the matter of information asymmetry since middle manager is the one (and sometimes only) in direct contact with the actual daily situations in the locale, and there's no external third party to evaluate her/his conduct. Therefore, if middle manager has personal reasons for abusing power (for the pure pleasure of it, or even to draw some personal advantage from somebody else's work), she/he can do it without worrying about external judgement and punishment.  

For these reasons, it's fundamental that disabled people are very aware of that more likely possibility, and fight for creating effective mechanisms to avoid abuse. Especially because it's very common to blame the more vulnerable party on a power struggle for not being adequately adapted, prepared, qualified, etc (even when CV proves otherwise).

In conclusion, my point is that trust is great, and can make the world a better place for everyone. However, only hoping for it to be kept is clearly not enough in most situations, especially the ones involving disabilities. Although diversity has proven positive effects on businesses, once you increase differences in people working together, there has to be an active and consistent effort to minimize hidden disadvantages. Especially when they aren't easy to detect by the very nature of human power relationships and organization.

Doesn't really matter

The more rational you try to be with this world, the less it makes any sense. All around you see worthless bad character people being promoted and praised by their well deserved success. I used to think this was obscene and so unfair. But sometimes I'd hear wise people saying "son, it doesn't matter". And that would usually make me particularly angry and upset as if they were also validating this pointless reality. I'd think the world was so screwed that I wanted it to blow up in a huge atomic explosion. Then some signs those wise people were right would come up every now and then.

There's a wonderful girl in my office. She must be 10 years younger than me and yet she has such an amazing feline gaze which is so intense it commands respect even from the most spoiled and obnoxious corporate people. She won't do that aggressively. She's beautiful, and kind and polite. Always on the run to make us experience this surreally perfect office environment that Google is famous for.

Her dedication is astonishing and her efficiency is truly remarkable. If you look her in the eyes while she's taking care of her work you'll have the impression she's on the most important mission ever. That makes her look impeccably elegant as a black panther, no matter what she wears. Of course she's ridiculously attractive. And I always like to meditate about this natural effortless magnetism some people have. I think about all the odds in the Universe and I keep asking the same question: why?

This is the same "why" that comes to mind when you see the sunset at the beach, or the snow flakes falling for the first time. Like a 4 year old child discovering the world and trying to make sense of it by asking why, over and over. But also like you ask yourself when driving by a bunch of people smoking crack at 8 am ostensively, everyday. Just across the street from another million dollars apartment building in this crazy city.

It can be really tempting to explain all that with morals on Facebook. It's the most common approach to reality ever. So crack smokers are bad, and ugly and worthless people. But bankers are great, high achieving fantastic human beings in their brand new german coupés. Especially the ones really high in the corporate ladder.

Today that beautiful girl came to me, at the perfectly prepared office happy-hour and pointing to the other kitchen employees, usually hidden somewhere in the back, she proudly said, with such dignity and deference it made me speechless for a moment: you see, you don't see them, but these are the people that prepare your food everyday. She said that with that 20 something years old smile on her face, as someone that reveals a secret magic trick, just for me. And although these folks in the back are poor, as it's the case with most kitchen workers everywhere, I was the one truly humbled. I wanted to thank them both for invisibly and yet tenderly caring for me every single day. And I wanted to thank the young panther for gently making me see that with a playful sincere smile on her face, so I could put a red carpet in my imagination for all these kitchen workers to walk by.

I was just looking at them in thankful silence. Then my mind wondered about nasty people getting promoted and rewarded and accumulating stuff they don't really need while praising themselves with worldly merits, implying their luck and privilege is really something they deserve and the kitchen folks don't.

In fact I still feel that doesn't really make any sense. However, in my mind I heard a loud and clear voice saying: son, it doesn't matter indeed.