Meaning making: "Harm is done from ignorance"

In his 1989 acceptance speech for the Nobel prize, the Dalai Lama, head of  Tibetan Buddhism made the statement above. 

So either people don't realise or care about the harm they are causing others because they focused on something else.

This was obviously pertinent to what happened to mum and me but it also reminded me of Plato expounding the Socratic doctrine: no one willingly does wrong:

If someone does what is bad or unjust, it is because they misjudge what is truly good, not because they clearly see the good and freely choose evil. Therefore, wrongdoing is ignorance, false belief, or distorted perspective, not deliberate malice.

It recurs through Plato's work.

In 'Meno' virtue is a form of knowledge with wrong action following from ignorance of the good; .

In 'Protagoras' Socrates argues against akrasia (weakness of will). People don’t knowingly choose worse over better; they miscalculate pleasure and harm.  (The ability to "measure" this difference well is a skill so this ability to choose well (virtue) is a form of knowledge/skill.)

In 'Gorgias' the claim is that tyrants and wrongdoers are more miserable than their victims because they act from ignorance of the good.

In the Buddhist doctrine, justification for wrong action is nothing but veiled ignorance.  

This part I could go along with: The abuser could have genuinely believed through persuading themselves in a misguided way that:e.g. 

-  he was entitled to take my parents money and overpay himself in "expenses" because of all his "effort" or because he "deserved" it.  The fact was we saw in the accounting there was a history of him going to dad for annual handouts to prop up his wife's redundancy or for house improvements and such like despite both living in a modest house and being middle class professional. 

- what in reality was a power grab and theft of information required to execute Power of Attorney could have been justified in his view as a burden placed upon him to administer mum's asset as the only "real responsible adult".   

Fraudsters and embezzlers often convince themselves that they deserve the things they take because of a sense of injustice or no one will notice or they can get away with it.  I was the only witness so I needed getting rid of.

- getting rid of me was also trying to minimize the "harm I was causing" so probably convinced himself it was actually virtuous.  Never mind the means of deliberately causing trauma, the end result was what was important. It's a kind of "I was the instrument of God's will" argument without God, or with him as God, which fits with the God complex characteristics that tyrants use self-justify. 

Ultimately anyway she "brought it on myself" is an even better, common justification in this kind of skewed logic.  That way the abuser can appear squeaky clean. They are just burdened by a problematic individual who, wait for it, they just tried to help. That would entirely in line with the warped reasoning of abusers who try to make the victim the problem.  

The US administration is doing the exact same right now.  The thousands of Minneapolis striking protestors and the local authority are mischaracterised as "left wing agitators".   Alex Pretti, nurse, nature lover, who minutes before he died at helped a stranger find a parking space, with his hands up had apparently pulled a gun on half a dozen armed ICE agents. And then lawyers had to file to stop ICE  destroying evidence. Anyone who opposes ICE tactics is apparently terrorist. They are arresting elderly members of churches just because they are protesting.  Many legal and law-abiding US citizens are afraid to leave their homes, not afraid of criminals, robbers and rapists, but afraid of being murdered by the State.

Someone who dominates and controls through force and intimidation and who distorts narrative by lying and manipulating facts is likely characterised in psychological terms as a malignant narcissist and are foundational in the dark triad personality construct. These are the terms on which Pigface operated.  If a state acts this way, as is happening just now in the US, its nearest definition would be totalitarian. 

Focusing on the individual behaviours described, all of this I could, at a pinch - and it took an effort - see as  "miscalculation" in the Socratic sense, or as mistaken/misguided in the Buddhist idea, driven by psychological reasons.

Plato approaches a more psychological explanation of a person or embodied soul later which we might leave for another time. 

Still, in the end I dismissed this Plato / Buddhist explanation of being "ignorant" or "misguided" as a "why" for the kind of relational abuse I experienced.  

First of all, he did know what he was doing.  He did know he was causing harm.  That was the point of it.  He wasn't ignorant.  He probably justified it as a "necessity" so as not to think of himself as a monster, but absolutely knew and he was probably also told by social services or his uncle who had been told by my husband that I was "claiming" I was traumatised. So he knew and he pressed on til he got what he wanted. At that point, I had forgotten about the "don't care" part.  Anyway, I had added that in.  The Dalai Lama was talking about ignorance and he did know what he was doing.

I also knew that there was part of the abuser that didn't just need or want the assets, power and control but enjoyed it and even enjoyed the distress that caused.  

I can't prove the enjoyment of the distress in any concrete way but I saw it with my own eyes as a child, the sadism in his when he engineered situations and lied just to get me into trouble for the sheer pleasure of watching it.  I had forgotten it but saw it again in his eyes and in his grin at me while he was manipulating mum, on my doorstep.  He refused to listen to her say she wanted to stay with us then using her dementia to try to coerce her to leave him "wouldn't you like to stay in your own bed in your own house tonight" (the one he'd moved her out of  and into the rothouse) and "he'd bring her back to us the next day if she really wanted" (no chance). He saw my horror at that manipulation of an ill, 85 year old woman, freezing cold and shaking, his mother and I could see he got the same pure delight from engineering and controlling that situation of pain.

So the Buddhist doctrine and Socrates were too simplistic. There are sadists in the world and I felt these doctrines just ignored that some people do know the harm they are causing and carry on anyway and even actively get pleasure causing what is bad.

I started to wonder if modern psychology or biology had better answers for why we do harm. That was the next question. 

I asked my son.  

- People don't realise they're doing harm, was his first answer.  Bang on Socratic answer! 

- Anything else? 

- An emotional response.

- What, like, crime of passion? 

He had other ideas and I realised there were plenty of psychological explanations for harm.  There was no need for "forces of good and evil" or "no explanation for great harm" or "they know not what they do" which had all been previous possibilities.

That felt like it could be a relief. Maybe there was a reason why he had done all these things that I could understand and then move on?  

I can hear at this point, and if you, reader, got this far, some part of you is probably also saying, Hmmm, not sure about that.

But it's a journey, right?