Arquivo para January 17th, 2025
Evil and our minds
17
Jan
I don’t like the horror genre, but I still went
to see the Argentinian film “O mal que nos habita”, directed by Demián Rugna (Aterrorizados, The Last Gateway) and it made me reflect on the evil that can be found in regions and places where people notice something wrong and go in search of explanations, in the case of the film, after finding a mutilated body.
There are many contemporary mutilations: drugs, drunkenness, cheap pornography, theft and everything that accompanies a society in crisis. In the case of the film, they end up discovering a man with a body infected by the devil and who is about to give birth to a real demon.
It’s not worth discussing the reality of this entity’s existence here, I personally believe it, but the interesting thing about the film is that the community comes together in the face of chaos to try to fight it, and time doesn’t seem to be in their favor.
The metaphor I see is not only wars, but also various thoughts and evils that are already in place and the population searching for this evil “entity” but unable to find it. We are on a dangerous civilizational threshold and the worst thing is what imprisons the mind and soul.
Absence of forgiveness, closure in concentric groups, more than bubbles, are misguided cultural currents where one group seeks to eliminate the other without any possibility of truce and if we could call this “evil” it would be what Freud called “civilizational malaise”, in the case of the film, not eliminating, but treating that infected “man”.
Exclusion and fighting the “other side” seem the most obvious responses, but they only lead us towards a greater evil: war, exclusion and its consequences.
Acknowledging our mistakes is the first step, but it must be complemented with forgiveness for those who have harmed or offended us for some reason. The third step is to verify the origin of the social evil, which is the most difficult because most people, without the necessary wisdom, prefer exclusion.
It’s not about tolerating evil, or even being innocent in the face of it, it’s about bearing witness by living the hope of a fresh start for ourselves, for those around us and for society. We can see this difficult step in the case of Israel’s peace agreement, because spirits are still armed, and yesterday Israel was bombed again.
The world is waiting for peace, but there won’t be any with armed spirits, incapable of taking the first step, because somehow we are all infected by a climate of hostility.
