To Fight Darkness, First You Need to Understand It

Outrage and rejection are natural responses in the face of greed, injustice and cruelty. But can we truly stand up for Good, without first understanding (while not condoning) Evil?

During my longer-than-usual break from work and the relentless news cycle in December and January, I went on a fantasy reading binge that did wonders for my mental health. The irony of escaping the real-world battle of good and evil into a fictional version of the same is not lost on me. In-midst of that escape, however, I did find some wisdom gems to help me deal with the realities of the complex world I’ve returned to. There’s one in particular that I’d love to share with you, as it may be of use for navigating your own struggles.

I came across this little story in a book series called “Fae Isles” by Lysette Marshall (overall an easy holiday read - a comforting mix of love, war and magic). The heroine, Emelin, is attempting to take on an evil, corrupted, cruel queen who has been terrorising fae and humans alike for centuries. The queen is so unspeakably powerful that she is virtually untouchable. She has managed to bind the power of every magical being in the realm, so nobody could oppose her. Every being except Emelin, but her power is too small to confront the queen alone, lest she receives divine help. Literally. So our heroine manages to track down a long-ago lost goddess whom she hopes to convince to bestow upon her the ability to free everyone in the realm from their bindings, so the people can finally rise together and defeat the Evil which had oppressed them for so long.

To her utter dismay, Emelin is faced with a blunt refusal. The Goddess will not grant her the power she seeks because, as she puts it: “The magic you need to destroy bindings is the same magic that would enable you to create them”.

In other words, she refuses to bestow upon the messenger of Good the power that would enable them, if abused, to do Evil. It’s a reminder that power itself is a neutral force - how we use it makes the difference. It’s also a reminder that nobody is morally insulated from the lure of unchecked power. And that is a very hard truth to swallow for the passionate heroine of this particular story.

She had sacrificed so much for the cause she was fighting for. She had risked her life and that of the people she loved most. She was convinced she had proved her worthiness. And her belief in the rightness of her cause and the wrongness of the darkness she sought to defeat was unwavering. Emelin believed in true Good and true Evil and that was a liability.

Emelin tries in vain to assure the Goddess that she would never abuse that power and that the only thing she wants is to help free the world from its oppressor. The Goddess keeps reminding her that every tyrant, including the one she was aiming to destroy, had started off convinced they were doing good, and ended up corrupted by their own power. Emelin has a hard time understanding that idea, or imagining that she could ever use her power to hurt people when all she wanted to do was save them. So she sets out to prove herself to the Goddess.

She notices that the Goddess keeps carrying around a hugely heavy bag, which, she learns, contains all the world’s grief. The bag is cumbersome, and the Goddess’ pain whenever she lifts it is obvious. But she refuses to go anywhere without it because, she explains, every time she lifts that bag, even for a moment, the pain of all beings in the world eases for a little bit and that bit matters immensely. The Goddess explains that by carrying the bag she forces herself to maintain her empathy as a way to “keep my darkness in check” because “it’s hard to mercilessly destroy people you understand, even when you don’t agree with them”.

So Emelin figures that she might convince the Goddess of her worthiness as a messenger of Good if she managed to lift that bag herself. She tries with all her might, over and over again. The bag seems to be made of solid rock - completely immovable. She rallies all her sadness, love, and anger at the state of the world, all her hopes and dreams to make a difference, and all her passion for saving people from their unjust fates. The bag doesn’t budge.

Then, after a long time, she realises that she’s been making it all about herself - her anger, her grief, her activism. She needed to understand others’ grief instead.

She starts by connecting to the wounds of people she loves - all their messy histories that have made them who they are. She feels their fears, their hopelessness, their unworthiness as if they were her own. And, while painful, this empathy comes easily. Her love allows her to understand. The bag remains immovable, but no longer seems as rigid as a rock. There is a tiny bit of movement, enough to give her strength to continue.

So she seeks to understand people she doesn’t like, people who had criticised her, who had proven stubborn, difficult and hard to work with. Not enemies exactly, just unpleasant to deal with. She taps into their losses, their fears, and the tragedies that have shaped them and experiences their pain as if it were her own. She feels almost crushed under the weight of it. The bag shifts an inch but still feels as heavy as a mountain, impossible to lift.

Finally, she gathers her last bits of energy and casts her mind towards her enemies. The evil queen herself and her cronies. Cruel. Deceitful. Merciless. Everything Emelin was not. And yet… She taps into the evil queen’s unspeakable grief at having lost her only son to her enemy’s revenge and her blind obsession with retribution as a way to heal a wound that would never go away. She feels the righteous anger and the unspeakable emptiness in the queen’s heart, a void that no amount of power and glory would ever fill. Emelin is inundated by an ocean of grief so vast that her mind and body crumble under the weight of it. In-midst of it she realises she has finally lifted the bag off the ground but is only able to hold it for a few moments before she nearly dies under the heaviness of the pain inside of it.

Those few moments were enough. She is finally able to understand what the Goddess had tried to tell her. You can only truly fight injustice when you understand its roots, when you connect your own humanity to that of the people you abhor. You can push back against a tyrant without becoming one only when you can viscerally understand the pain that caused them to become who they are. And that effort might just kill you - metaphorically if not literally.

This little story touched me deeply. It made me seek out to understand a bit more and notice how hard it is. It made me aware of how much easier it is to simply be outraged, to ‘other’ instead of ‘connect’.

I’ve started learning more about that which scares me. I’m now reading two fascinating books - “The Psycopath Inside” and “Before Evil” - both dealing with the roots of human evil. To understand doesn’t mean to condone. It simply means to acknowledge that the evil we’re fighting is part of the full spectrum of our messy humanity and it is, whether we acknowledge it or not, part of us too.

That acknowledgement has helped me temper some of my outrage and find energy to renew my efforts to take small action. It’s motivating me to use my voice to incite reflection, not feed polarisation, and stay honest with myself in the process.

This is not a fight between Good and Evil - it’s a struggle to define how we choose to live as human beings and which aspects of our nature should inform our day-to-day actions. It’s ultimately a struggle to define who we want to be - individually and collectively. I hope we can make those choices with our eyes open, having earnestly attempted to hold and lift that bag of grief so we can first understand to then become free to choose how to respond.

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