peace and hotep,
THE NEUROCHEMICAL BASIS FOR EVIL
The American philosopher William James has stated, “There is no doubt that healthy mindedness is inadequate as a philosophical doctrine, because the evil facts which it positively refuses to account for are a genuine portion of reality, and the may after all be the best key to life’s significance, and possibly the only openers of our eyes to the deepest level of truth”.
The Kabbalah, which literally means “tradition”, is the sum of Jewish mysticism, the tradition of things divine. The Book Bahir, an 1180 a.d. document on the Kabbalah concerning Satan, states,
It teaches that there is in God a principle that is called ‘Evil’, and it lies in the north of God, of it is written [Jer.I:14}: “Out of the north the evil shall break forth upon all the inhabitants of the land’, that is to say, all evil that comes upon all the inhabitants of the land breeds forth out of the north. And what principle is this? It is the form of the hand {one of the seven holy forms which represent God as the original man}, and it has many messengers, and all are named ‘Evil’…..And it is they that fling the world into guilt for the tobu is in the north, and the tobu means precisely the evil that confuses men until they sin, and it is the source of all man’s evil impulses.
In early Egyptian (African) tradition, evil was associated with Set, the brother of Osiris (“Lord of the perfect black”). Set eventually killed his brother Osiris and dismembered his body, which his sister/wife (Isis) helped restore to life. Osiris was the great Egyptian God figure. Set is considered the white brother.
In contrast, the early Christian religion and bible related evil to the fallen angel Lucifer, a word that means light and that can be construed to mean white. However, in the Middle Ages, for some Europeans, the devil took on an appearance of a Black man with a long phallus, which has been modified as the present red colored figure wit a long tail and a long fork.
In keeping with each of the above perspectives of evil, Webster’s Dictionary defines “evil” as : “ 1. morally bad or wrong; wicked, depraved, 2. causing pain or trouble; harmful; injurious, 3. threatening or bringing misfortune; unlucky; disastrous; unfortunate; as an evil hour, 4. resulting from or based on conduct regarded as immoral; as an evil reputation.”
The Cress Theory of Color Confrontation and Racism (White Supremacy), links whites’ unjust behavior towards people of color (black, brown, red and yellow) to whites’ inability to produce melanin skin pigment in the skin melanocyte. The whites’ numerical minority status in the world and , ultimately, their fear of global white genetic annihilation by the genetically dominant, skin melanin producing, non-white world majority are pointed out as additional reasons for white aggression towards people of color. This thesis helps to explain the evil “kill or be killed” behaviors of the global white collective in relation to non-white people.
In 1972, I presented a paper entitled, “Melanin: The Neurochemical Basis for Soul”, at the annual meeting of the National Medical Association Section on Neurology and Psychiatry. I theorized that the presence of melanin in high concentrations in Blacks accounted for some of the observable differences in behavior between Black and white People(I.e., religious responsiveness, rhythm, emotional responsiveness, sensitivity levels), noting the familiar saying amongst older Black people, “the blacker the berry, the sweeter the juice; if it ain’t got no soul, it ain’t got no use. Also, I emphasized the song by James Brown, “We Got More Soul.” Further, I pointed out that the most sensitive body areas are the areas most highly pigmented.
Fifteen years ago in a paper entitled, “Blacks, Hypertension and the Active Skin Melanocyte” (Journal of Urban Health, 1975), I posited melanin, among other things as a possible neurotransmitter and the skin melanocytes as the foundation of the sixth sense – the basis for knowledge of the unseen, including a deeper knowledge of “bad”. I explained that if the melanocytes were sense receptors and melanin was a neuro- transmitter, then the darker the skin, the higher the levels of hypertension found. Primarily, this is true because people with darker skins are more sensitive to the energy currents around them. If those energy currents are stressful, they will be more stressed, increasing levels of hypertension.
In 1987, at the first Melanin Conference, I discussed The Cress Theory on the George Washington Carver Phenomenon, suggesting that the skin melanocytes of this very Black-skinned scientist (high level concentration of melanin skin pigment) enabled him to communicate with the energy frequencies emanating from plants. Thus, he was able to learn their secrets and purposes.
Since my 1972 presentation on the neurochemical basis for soul, the neurochemical basis of evil has periodically come to my mind, begging that I outline my thoughts on evil as the anti-thesis of soul. I relate soul to order, spirituality and the affirmation of life. I equate evil with chaos and destruction, especially the destruction of life. (The word evil when spelled backward is, live.) The discussion of evil takes on even more significant proportions in light of the increasing number of persons in this society who openly are proclaiming themselves to be worshippers of the Devil – Devil being the arch doer of evil – in contrast to worshipping God. Reportedly, these persons participate in the ritual murder of human beings.
The concept of evil is not at all unusual in religious and philosophical discourse. Also, evil has been a frequent subject for literary exploration. (The novel Moby Dick by Herman Melville is an example of the symbolic discussion of evil in classical American literature.) Evil is approached less often in the natural sciences, including modern medicine. However, psychiatry is the one branch of modern medicine that has major antecedents in both religion and philosophy and thus, the topic of evil has found discussants who consider themselves scientists and scientific.
The role of the psychiatric-physician or physician-scientist is to attempt to comprehend, bringing greater clarity and insight, the total spectrum of human behavior, which would include the special category of behavioral phenomena recognized as evil. Further, I believe that the challenge of modern psychiatry, like the challenge of modern physics, is to approach, if possible, a view of the “unified field”.
Modern physics, since Albert Einstein, has sought to unite the spectrum of forces – gravity, electromagnetism, weak and strong forces – in a unified field, viewing these separate forces as outgrowths from or manifestations of a whole (a unified force field). Likewise, modern psychiatry should seek to discover if there is a united behavioral force field that can explain evil as well as other dominant behavioral phenomena.
For the ant, the greatest evil consists of killing ants. For the human being, the greatest evil consists of the obsessional degrading and killing of other human beings. All lesser evils are simply added to this (ie., destruction of other life forms, destruction of the planet and destruction that extends beyond planet Earth). With evil so defined, clearly there is that extends beyond planet Earth). With evil so defined, clearly there is an overwhelming atmosphere of evil in the world. In fact, the entire planet exists in an atmosphere of degradation and murder. To ignore this evidence of evil, this obsession with mass killing and death, is only to participate in the establishment and the maintenance of its reality – in effect, to participate in evil. On the other hand, to address this obsession with mass death and the degradation of human life in hopes on countering it is to affirm the dignity of human beings and the universe.
Ernest Becker, in his book Escape From Evil, had the following to say about evil: “All organisms want to perpetuate themselves, continue to experience and to live…For all organisms, then, opposing and obliterating power is evil – it threatens to stop experience.” He continues, “So we see that as an organism man is fated to perpetuate himself and as a conscious organism he is fated to identify evil as the threat to that perpetuation. And what then would be the highest development and use of those [man’s] talents? To contribute to the struggle against evil.”
However, before there can be effective struggle against evil, the following questions must be answered: 1) What are the dynamic conditions in a society or culture that would stimulate such activity as announced as devil worship? 2) What are they dynamics in a society and culture wherein increasing numbers of Black males are being killed daily/yearly at epidemic levels? 3) What are the exact causation dynamics in a society and culture wherein the greatest percentage of its resources are used in the development and production of instruments of death and destruction? 4) What are the exact dynamic conditions in a power system or culture wherein 50 million people can be destroyed in the course of slave trade, as on the continent of Africa? 5) What are the exact dynamic conditions in a power system or culture wherein six million Semites of the Jewish religion can be destroyed deliberately or 20 million people killed in the course of a war, such as the Soviet Union during World War II? 6) What are the dynamics in a society and culture in which hundreds of thousands, possibly millions, are doomed to die of infection with a virus that increasing numbers are concluding was deliberately man-made?
These are questions that the psychiatrist should be motivated to answer in the context of understanding the issue of evil, especially, when it is recalled, as stated by Thomas Mecton in his Raids on the Unspeakable that,
One of the most disturbing facts that came out in the [Adolph] Eichman trial was that
Psychiatrist examined him and pronounced him perfectly sane. We equate sanity with
a sense of justice, with humaneness, with prudence, with the capacity to love and
understand other people. We rely on the sane people of the world to preserve it from
barbarism, madness, destruction. And now it begins to dawn on us that is it precisely
that sane ones who are the most dangerous. It is the sane one, the well adapted one,
who can without qualms and without nausea aim the missiles and press the buttons
that will initiate the great festival of destruction that they, the sane ones, have
prepared.
Psychiatrist M. Scott, in his nationwide best selling book, People of the Lie, The Hope for Healing Human Evil, contends, “Science has also steered clear of the problem of evil because of the immensity of the mystery involved…we do not yet have a body of scientific knowledge of human evil deserving of being called a psychology.” He also states,
Those of us who are Caucasians seem to have fewer compunctions about killing
Blacks or Indians or Orientals than we do in killing our fellow white men. It is easier
For a white man to lynch a “nigger” than a “redneck”…The matter of the racial
Aspects of intra-species killing is yet another one deserving significant scientific
investigation.
He concludes, “ war today is at least as much a matter of national pride as of racial pride.”
Even though Peck suggests that science has steered clear of the subject of evil because of the “immense mystery involved, “Herman Melville, the 19th century novelist, perhaps subconsciously, went directly to the subject of evil. He approached “evil” through the symbolism of the white whale, Moby Dick, and the crippled white ship captain who pursued him. Ahab (who is often compared to Satan). Melville uses an entire chapter of his book to discourse on “The Whiteness of the Whale.” He begins,
What the White whale was to Ahab, has been hinted, what, at times, he was to me, as
yet remains unsaid. Aside from those more obvious considerations touching Moby
Dick, which could not but occasionally awaken in any man’s soul some alarm, there
was another thought, or rather vague, nameless horror concerning him, which at times
by its intensity completely overpowered all the rest; and yet so mystical and well nigh
ineffable was it, that I almost despair of putting it in a comprehensible form. It was
the whiteness of the what that above all things appalled me. But how can I hope to
explain myself here; and yet, in some dim, random way, explain myself I must, else
all these chapters might be naught.
Melville proceeds to detail many positive associations with whiteness:” and though this pre-eminence in it [whiteness] applies to the human race itself, giving the white man ideal mastership over every dusky tribe.” He continues,
…yet for all these accumulated associations, with whatever is sweet, and honorable,
And sublime, there yet lurks and elusive something in the innermost idea of this hue,
which strikes more of panic to the soul than that redness which affrights in blood…
That ghastly whiteness it is which imparts such an abhorrent mildness even more
loathsome than terrific, to the dumb gloating of their aspect. So that not the fierce-
fanged tiger in his heraldic coat can so stagger courage as the white-shrouded bear or
shark.
Further on, Melville contemplates,
What is that in the Albino man so peculiarly repels and often shocks the eye, as that
Sometimes he is loathed by his own kith and kin! It is that whiteness which invests
Him, a thing expressed by the name he bears, The Albino is as well made as other men
- has no substantive deformity – and yet this mere aspect of all-pervading whiteness
makes him more strangely hideous than the ugliest abortion. Why should this be so?
Again referring to whiteness, Melville writes, “..it is at once the most meaning symbol of spiritual things, nay, the very veil of the Christian’s deity; and yet should be as it is, the intensifying agent in things the most appalling to mankind.
Melville’s Captain Ahab sees the white whale as all evil of which he is in pursuit. In a letter to Nathaniel Hawthorne, Melville referred to Moby Dick as a “wicked book”. My own interpretation of the symbolism in this novel, which has been regarded as the greatest of all American novels is, that the crippled white Captain Ahab represents the mutant (global) white population, afflicted with albinism (whiteness). The white whale is symbolic of racism (white supremacy), the major pursuit of the global white collective – the evil destructive goal of the global white collective. This furious, evil pursuit in Moby Dick ends in a disaster for all: a deadly end in which the white ship captain and all of his crew, whites and non-whites alike are destroyed. Yet, one survived to tell the tale, foretelling the end of white supremacy as a specified power dynamic.
It is not surprising that this novel containing the symbolism of albinism and white supremacy was written prior to the great bloody conflict (The American Civil War) that had so much to do with the relationships between white (albino) and Black people. This conflict ended the power of the share holders as well as the formal enslavement of Black people by whites.
Melville’s linkage of evil and dread with the condition of albinism parallels my own thesis that the absence of the neuropeptide melanin-the absence of this black pigment in the skin and other aspects of the nervous system – critically impairs the depth sensitivity of the nervous system and the ability to tune in to the total spectrum of energy frequencies in the universe. This deficiency of sensory awareness sets the stage for the absence of harmony (the chaos and destruction), which is evil. Thus, the injustice and evil of white supremacy not only has its foundation in the numerical minority status of the global white population and its genetically recessive status in terms of melanin pigment production, but the very absence of melanin in the nervous system in significant degrees (decreasing sensory input and thus sensitivity) is an additional contributing factor in the problem of white supremacist injustice. White supremacy is the greatest known evil on Earth. Likewise, racism (white supremacy) is the unified force field that encompasses all of the lesser evils we now recognize. Indeed, if the absence of melanin obstructs the nervous system’s ability to tune in to the total spectrum of frequencies in the universe, rendering those lacking melanin incapable of acting in harmony with those frequencies, then it becomes incumbent upon those possessing melanin to counteract the evil.
The Isis Papers: The Keys To The Colors; chapt.19,
THE NEUROCHEMICAL BASIS FOR EVIL
by Dr Frances Cress Welsing
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