On Duality
“Would one not be justified in reckoning all great men among the wicked? This is not so easy to demonstrate in the case of individuals. They are so frequently capable of masterly dissimulation that they very often assume the airs and forms of great virtues. Often, too, they seriously reverence virtues, and in such a way as to be passionately hard towards themselves; but as the result of cruelty. Seen from a distance such things are liable to deceive. Many, on the other hand, misunderstand themselves; not infrequently, too, a great mission will call forth great qualities, e.g. justice. The essential fact is: the greatest men may also perhaps have great virtues, but then they also have the opposites of these virtues. I believe that it is precisely out of the presence of these opposites and of the feelings they suscitate, that the great man arises—for the great man is the broad arch which spans two banks lying far apart.”
Similar to On Transcendence Through Suffering, this is one of those topics where I’ve got decent words, but where far better words have already been printed by others. Still a win for the reader who gets my half-baked ideas paired with fully-baked ones from great minds that came before us. All I’ve got for you in these posts is brain food, my friend, sometimes in the form of answers, and sometimes just in the form of interesting questions for you to nibble on in your own time.
I was first put onto this idea by Jordan Peterson, who I would not define as a great mind and really isn’t someone I pay close attention to. Maybe it’s just his voice that annoys me. But on duality, here is the original idea in his words:
“A harmless man is not a good man. A good man is a very, very dangerous man who has that under voluntary control.”
He expands on this in a YouTube interview, transcribed below:
Peterson: “It's very helpful for people to hear that they should make themselves competent and dangerous and take their proper place in the world…because it's the alternative to being weak, and weak is not good.”
Interviewer: “By dangerous, that implies I should be ready to threaten someone? To hurt somebody?
Peterson: “No, you should be capable of it but that doesn't mean you should use it. Those who have swords and know how to use them but keep them sheathed will inherit the world. That's a way better way of thinking about it. There's nothing to you otherwise. Like, if you're not a formidable force, there's no morality in your self-control. If you're incapable of violence, not being violent isn't a virtue. Capacity for danger and the capacity for control is what brings about the virtue. Otherwise you confuse weakness with moral virtue — ‘I'm harmless, therefore I'm good’ — and that isn't how it works at all. If you're harmless, you're just weak, and if you're weak you're not going to be good. You can't be, because it takes strength to be good. It's very difficult to be good.”
The concept is well-stated there, but in terms of his originality of thought, like, Jung was there first, and before him was Nietzsche, and before Nietzsche our friend La Rochefoucauld put it on paper with characteristically-gorgeous brevity almost 400 years ago:
“No one should be praised for his goodness if he has not strength enough to be wicked. All other goodness is but too often an idleness or powerlessness of will.”
I spend a lot of time thinking about this whole idea, double-edged swords, vices masked as virtues, gifts and curses — a theme that runs throughout almost every chapter of Blind Spots — but it goes even farther when you start thinking about other individual men as Nietzsche’s broad arches spanning the banks of rivers. When you analyze each person that you’ve met over the years, one by one, it really does hold true. Put another way, I have never met a man where the arch wasn’t equidistant. The majority tend to be weak of will and incapable of either great deeds or great evil. The small arch gang. On the other end, you have natures that are incapable of doing anything small. All boats burnt, everything left on the field, no brakes and all gas at all times. But if you can’t keep that dangerous side of your nature under voluntary control, I can tell you firsthand that the consequences are severe, and you will get one of the same three outcomes every time: a hospital, a jail cell or a graveyard.
“If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.”
What tortures me the most is when you have men of this second nature, the broad arch, the ones who have the exceedingly-rare capacity for greatness, and they’ve taken a life path that has domesticated and castrated them. I think about some guys I knew from high school and college who were straight up lions, conquerors, warrior spirits, where their ceiling was limited only by their passion and their drive. Men who were blessed to be born with the capacity to change the world. Now, they’re all living in dreary suburbs, fat, whipped, lazy, working dull desk jobs that they hate to support a family that they don’t seem all that jazzed about. A prison without bars. From my perch, I just hate, hate, hate seeing someone mail it in on life and accept the fact that their game is over, and provide living proof to what Ben Franklin wrote: some people die at 25 and we don’t bury them until 75.
“Through all moral idiosyncrasies I see a fundamentally different valuation. Such absurd distinctions as ‘genius’ and the world of will, of morality and immorality, I know nothing about at all. The moral is a lower kind of animal than the immoral, he is also weaker; indeed—he is a type in regard to morality, but he is not a type of his own. He is a copy; at the best, a good copy—the standard of his worth lies without him. I value a man according to the quantum of power and fullness of his will: not according to the enfeeblement and moribund state thereof. I consider that a philosophy which teaches the denial of will is both defamatory and slanderous... I test the power of a will according to the amount of resistance it can offer and the amount of pain and torture it can endure and know how to turn to its own advantage.”
And so I leave you with questions, brother, rather than answers. Are you dangerous? Where do you fall on this spectrum, how strong is your will, are what you call your virtues really just vices disguised? Most of all, how comfortable are you embracing the wickedness that lurks within you, the Jungian shadow, or are you still lying to yourself that it doesn’t exist?
Never forget: the greater the sinner, the greater the saint.
GB
