While It’s Easy To See Others As Instruments, It’s Harder To See Them As People
Desiring the harm of others or hurting others is a reality that loathes us. However, have you ever been tempted or seduced by this dark side? Treating others as instruments to achieve our goals is much easier. If you want to be the best in your business, all you have to do is boycott the work of your colleagues. It is a much shorter path to achieve your ends, and also to what will allow you to experience the fastest satisfaction. Isn’t that part of what we always covet?
Human beings always seek immediate satisfaction. To return to the previous example, there is no point in giving everything, making an effort and waiting months before honestly reaching our goal. If we can shorten this time, why not do it? This is how those who let themselves be carried away by what we consider to be wrong think. They stop treating others as people and start using them as instruments: obstacles or means to achieve their ends.
We have all known good people who ended up being bad. Manipulative individuals, of very bad temper, who started to do what they used to suffer from before. It is the first mechanism of seduction of evil. Feeling hurt by what we have been done. See yourself as victims of circumstances, not deserving of all the gratuitous wickedness received. Tired of all adversities, endured one after the other. Eventually, grudge takes hold of us and makes us people we didn’t want to be.
An abused person can become an abusive person. A person prone to criticism can become the critic. After so much suffering, we decide to stop being “stupid” to finally act like the others have done with us. We are well aware that the object of our evil deeds are innocent people. A group we once belonged to.
However, there is also another mechanism of seducing evil which leads us to treat others as instruments and not as people, and that is to see how those around us attain power through their evil deeds. We hate them, we watch them, they are so lucky and yet are such bad people! All of these negative emotions lead us to want to duplicate their actions, because our honesty does not bring us the luck they do.
If we open our eyes, we will realize that we have been poisoned. It is as if we were in a fruit basket surrounded by rotten apples. By not being away from this situation, from these people, we too end up being infected. Contaminated by this seductive evil that pushes us to treat others as instruments to satisfy our needs or simply to cause the suffering that we have once received and suffered.
In everything that has been mentioned so far, we have come in contact with resentment and that feeling of “feeling dumb” seeing others behave badly and achieve results that we would have liked to achieve. However, there is a powerful reason behind this as to why the dark side absorbs us and why we stop seeing people as such and start to see them as objects: that reason is power.
When we take control, automatically, it gives us power, just as when we submit, that we manipulate, that we lie, that we do evil … All of this, we does it intentionally, and on some occasions we don’t care if we completely destroy the other person if it allows us to benefit from it. Now, we are in control of the situation and this feeds our desire to go even further. We let ourselves be carried away. How far will we be able to go?
While treating others while ignoring their feelings may make us feel good for a while, what is certain is that in the long run it makes us bitter and saddens us. Like the human beings that we are, we seek the good because it makes us feel at peace. Even if the bad one benefits us in some other way or allows us to obtain “righteousness”, the result will not be the same.
The power to which evil gives us seduces us. This innocent flirtation that we can maintain at the start becomes something that can end up backfiring on us if we are not careful. Treating others as objects can make us achieve what we set out to do, but at the same time it will take us away from balance, peace, happiness. Let us not forget that to behave in this way, there will always be a price to pay: that of sacrificing our being in order to have. Is it really worth it?
Images by Catrin Welz Stein
