...is always a disappointment.
Baudelaire was right. Evil is a flower,
the symbol of a stunted fruit born premature.
That is why Hannah Arendt had to say in the end that evil cannot be banal.
What's banal is the 'bad', and life's inertia is ignoring the bad (life goes on etc)
They even made it into a religion, this avoidance of evil, this banality of the white surface's constant scrubbing.
Those annoying monkeys that Gandhi, famously possessionless, possessed.
Evil necessitates the antechamber of awareness of the bad as bad.
It is a prerequisite of taming it (and growing from this experience)...
But also of becoming ensnared by it; not only seeing the bad but taking pleasure in it.
Nietzsche interjects: If it's cruelty - because cruelty isn't necessarily always evil - then it's a cruelty that knows itself as bad, a death-drive, the pleasure of going down, the insanity of the mass killer, the mad laughter of the lachend zu Grunde gehen.
And so being secure from evil (cura-care; having no care for evil) becomes the Sklavenmoral of those that want to keep (ignoring) the bad, for fear of change, for fear of worse.
But as a failure to contend with a defined bad - the flower, the instance of evil - is also a mark of an opportunity that had opened.
My favorite poet once wrote (I'm free-translating Hebrew, don't bother looking it up) that:
the one who collapses on the threshold is the strongest support for those who follow.
So I guess #Nietzsche #Baudelaire
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