Tactical, Vigilante and Succubus...

Ok, if that’s how it lays that’s how it plays. This is a battle, and I’ll no more retreat from evil in my world than in my self.  To retreat is to give evil the victory unchallenged, an act of cowardice and treason.  Seems I recall a quote, not sure from whom, that goes “the only thing needed for evil to win is for good men to do nothing.”  Or words to that effect. Maybe Winnie?  No matter.  Sitting idly by while something eats the foundations out of your world is not a wise thing to do, not when things truly evil attack your chance to live with joy.

Now most will think of battles as between two major powers fighting it out in the physical realm: who has the biggest army, the best killing machines, the advantage of terrain or weather or line of supply.  This isn't that sort of a fight, even though it does share many of the same modes of thought.  This is a conflict between empowered lies and neglected truths, between the realms of ego inflamed and compassion revived, ultimately between the realms of love and hate, and each and every one of us is a battlefield of one sort or another.  Each and every one of us is under attack, and we all must mount some form of defense of self lest in the end we have no self left to defend.

There’s three things you absolutely must know to mount a successful defense. You need to know what it is you’re contesting, you need to know why you have the right to deny it existence, and you need to know what victory will look like.  Those are the strategic things you need.  Now in matters tactical of course it’s helpful to know who and where and how, of course that’s pretty valuable intel as well.  But not as critical as the first three.  There's a great many things I might say spinning off this paragraph, there's a veritable tome of thought this paragraph might serve as preamble for.  But those are not what I'm going to be writing about. 

I'm going to write about one of the enemy's main weapons, a tactical consideration.  This isn't intel comfortably come by, but a full understanding is vital to victory.  The enemy isn't going to lay down just to be accommodating, the enemy is going to continue its' campaign of aggression because bottom line is evil can not support itself in any other manner.  Evil is the inverse of life, it can not exist on its own, one way or another it has to have new victims to consume or it will die.

Control of memories, be they full or fragmentary, is one asset evil greatly desires.  Evil thrives on manipulating memories, calling them back into a false frame of reference to suit the evils' needs.  Why?  Because our memories can be used to influence our emotional environment of the moment in ways that serve evil in that moment.  It is a common tactic, a very common tactic, and a very effective one.

Take me for example.  All my life evil has used one person or another working my memories of the times I was physically abused in the name of love or falsely accused in the name of justice to transform justified anger into a blinding blood lust rage. I have to be continuously and acutely vigilant to deny evil access to my life by that road because should I slip up that rage displaces reality and disables any access to my ethical self.  In those moments I am more than capable of killing, I go vigilante and want to kill, and it isn't hard to imagine how evil could turn untimely recollection of old injuries into the headwaters of an entire river of new misery and injustice for evil to feed from for generations to come. 

In my case it is anger that evil attempts to remold to serve its' needs, but anger isn't the only emotion that can be transformed using distorted non-sequitur memories for a mold.  The insecurities that serve as the foundations for greed work very nicely, the middle monkey syndromes of cruelty are made to order, the scalding lust of misused sexuality has seen heavy service across history, even the seemingly benign live and let live attitudes currently held up as the apogee of civil behavior can be pressed into service when what evil needs is camouflage to allow some deep perversion of slow growth time to spread tentacle roots into many lives in many places rotting out the foundations of a society. 

Beware this most versatile weapon of the enemy, challenge your own memories and your own responses to those memories in the context of enforcing a sanctioned blockade on what evil needs to continue in our world.  Like I said, evil can not exist on its own, we can starve it out of existence if we've the inner courage to disable its' way of life.