Have you ever noticed that twinge in your gut - that split-second twitch of the shoulder that could drive you to snatch up that knife, that pistol, that iron bar and slice, slash, smash or blast the lights out of someone's existence? What I am asking is this. Have you ever asked yourself why you behaved in a certain way, a way that was outrageous and, perhaps, out of character? Presumably, your behaviour - this lack of control you had over yourself - betrays the existence of a different person lurking beneath your carefully constructed idea of who you are.
Does that mean we are all capable of anything given the right set of circumstances?
I am sure that most writers will be interested in the idea that most of us can do "anything" as long as the right pressures are placed upon them. More specifically, anything means: walking down the street with no clothes on, killing somebody, torturing somebody, having intercourse on a park bench or masturbating on a park bench. If I can do these things, what about my wife, my mother and father or my best friend? And what about this lady described below?
She lived in the US for 20 years and, sure enough, neighbours and friends described her as a very nice lady with a big heart. Well, these friends and neighbours must have been surprised when they found out that this nice lady with a big heart was found guilty of crimes during the Balkan war of the 1990s. According to the judge, she was responsible for particular cruelty to detainees of Bosnian-Croat forces.
This cruelty apparently included the torture of ethnic Serbs. Witnesses said she carved crosses into prisoners' foreheads, forced one man to drink petrol before setting fire to his hands and face, and forced others to crawl naked across broken glass. The most serious of her offences was, apparently, the killing of a prisoner whom she stabbed in the neck. Sounds awful, doesn't it? And yet, what about the very nice lady with a big heart? How can we reconcile her nice big heart with the atrocities she apparently carried out?
Could the answer be that we all have aspects of a personality that, in standard situations, we choose to reject and repress? In other words, instead of confronting the urge to violence, sex or rough sex with your best friend's wife, we allow our minds to pretend the urges do not exist. Other urges may include: aggressive desires, unacceptable mental images and needs, fears, unacceptable sexual desires and so on. They are rather like shadows within us, shadows that most of us have and which most of us find unacceptable. For the lady with the big heart, the lady convicted of cruelty, it was the war, perhaps, which provided the opportunity for darker aspects of her character to emerge.
This is all a shame if you are a person whose personal code of honour dictates whether you are being a good or a bad person. If you’re like most people, you probably think you have a decent idea about your own desires, values, beliefs, and opinions. After all, if there is any one thing you can know in this universe, surely it is who you are.
What if we are wrong? What if we are using belief to construct the idea of a person who does not exist? Perhaps, we are the last things on the planet we should believe in.
The world is full of people who, after many years of union, feel betrayed when their partner acts in a way that is, apparently, "out of character." But these situations are grist to the writer's mill.
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