How Can I really be that Wicked.
Being wicked is not, Dickens notes make being Good. The good sweeps people up in it whether they want to or no – but the wicked has a real problem about who one can be wicked to. Most people simply ignore or counter the move. One needs a strange mind, to pervert, or to t be wicked at. Strange because I is the oddest of things innocent. Anyone else would resist wickedness and its bland strictures. But then this creates a threefold problem:
Where does one find the innocent – how they made?
What is their in the innocent what allows one to corrupt them? That its what is as fit it were wicked already.
And finally
What is the cost to he wicked itself. Can it keep itself utterly dad as it act, or does the very weight of action impose a duty of goodness somewhere on the wicked (this is Spinoza’s idea but one that finds endless echoes in Dickens.)
What then is innocent? Where does one find the innocent.
The naïf answer is always the same – children
But then what makes a child innocent?
Whose innocence does it below to, clearly not the child, who is merely learning but rather the parent. If this is so how is the parent manufacturing that being innocent for the child?
This question is difficult.
Perhaps only a Podsnap can answer it.
Podsnap, who represent the ultimate product of society. He is a man who is utterly social., in the sense that he is society. He therefore feels himself, and himself alone to be adequate to the arts and the science – all of which must express the Podsnap way. He also no different to himself to be- but rather sweeps it away wit a wave of his hand. or perhaps (given he actually works in marine insurance and so needs other place which he cares not fo0, it might be more truthful o same he allows other in only as an aroma (de dines of aroma) – they are a smell which he battens on to feed himself just enough to continue and then which he sweep aside as a wafted of bad air.
A man therefore who was pushed the scream to be oneself to its logical conclusion. He has almost entirely competed the world within it.
As such he is rendered utterly callous. He is unable to allow or bend to even play with society (as the more flexible and tasteful Veneering can). He is merely presence, a Podsnap, a man whose own self consciousness has replaced the world and replace his personality or any hope of further thought.
The poor, have caused their poverty, an foreigner are fools for not speaking English (although he wants them their folly in that it allows to him a joy in being English).
The world is almost truly his – and people only tumble into it as they can allow his demand.
However there is I this a draw back or limit.
There is a point where things stop being this alone.
Or better he has a totem of what I his and yet external to him
He has a daughter.
That daughter he keeps deliberately innocent. He uses or rather creates a myth of innocence within her. His phrase is that nothing should ever causes a young person to blush. This phrase is a phrase be can use to devastate others. They can say something height disapprove of in himself, but feel it unappriorate that he does so, and out comes the phrase about innocence and the matter is swept away.
This defence of innocence on behalf of he callous, is therefore a curious affair. The innocence – the is the element pumped to of any ability to tackle or reflect or engage in the world on its own (or even to react to the world in anything more than embracement), is the lodestar of the callous mind (as tabloid know).
The Innocence not only makes good copy, but also in demanding that other hour the perfection of the innocent callousness (which actually cares for very little) replaces feelings in others is a sentimentality that is very akin o the callous. This the innocent as it is held up as a thing and held p as pure and special is itself reduce to nothing real. Every one according to and nods in the direction of this unreality (including the callous which invents the concept). Feeling in the entire system are therefore replaced with meaningless drivel, and the callous mind is content.
The innocent ideas therefore a levelling of by the callous. To keep other obsessing with the innocent is ensure real feelings are not to be herd. The problem of the poor or the starving are not real problem ass the people to are starving are not wholly innocent – they are not wholly blameless they are adults and cable for their won feelings_ they have therefore to a degree bought it on themselves (or we can suppose they have), and leave it to that.
A world which only allow the innocent- that is he viable recipient of flatten feeling to be good, and then demands that only such a good are to be helped, is callous indeed.
But then what of the innocent individual? In what sense that they remain innocent? How are they innocent?
Here Dickens is brutal. The innocent are only such because they have had all power scrapped of them.
The innocent seethes is useless hate.
They know their position, they know that then cannot answer back or respond in any way as he are hold down and chocked with the demand that they are innocent.
More than that their very innocent becomes as it were a trap n which they cannot define their own feeling. That is the seethe of hatred for… makes them unable to feel appropriately. They wish to kill, or to be miles away, and cannot find sensible places or outlets for their feelings. There feelings are too strong, and would threaten constantly to overwhelm is they could be allowed out.
Their feelings therefore become another trap. They cannot be expressed, not only because of the external oppressor who demand innocence in the breast of another, but also because that demand has created a mind to passionate, to full of strong feeling to be anything other than ashamed of itself.
It knows it feels what it should not, what it cannot not – it knows it wants something somewhere to die.
The feeling overwhelms, and the only thing it can kill it its own ability to socialize.
The Innocent therefore naturally withdraw, it become shy, it dos indeed become embarrassed easily.
The embarrassment is not of course ether symptom of the innocent so much as the accord of the inappropriate and violent feeling, and accord which cannot be expressed or made real. And accord that can therefore only be allowed for in withdrawing oneself from society.
On is therefore forced to reflect the demands to be innocent back on the demander.
One is as they say embarrassed very very easily.
One is as they say shy, and quiet.: on is a genuine young person.
The demand that another is as innocence is the demand that they castrate their on ability to be alive- or are forced to castrate it constantly. The innocent is infused with a double think. It I a demand made of another and responded be that other – a demands for constant abortion and constant self0abuse. A demand the other can be forced to make, and yet at the price that they lose the ability to pull out their own feelings. They are reduced then to a husk of shyness, and an ability to run away from encounters (and nothing more).
There loose therefore the ability to resolve their mind a(in a Leibnizian sense), that is to focus their own feelings: there become the felling white light of innocence. A light that might continue very other feeling and passion, and yet will not split and let them out.
I is on this duality the duality of the wicked falls
The Wicked it needs o be remembered itself has two aspect.
It is a violent bully, with demonic expression, and it is a intuitive coaxer.
It needs to be as both.
Or better it needs to operate as a system. The former drives it onwards, and ensure collective self interest. That is it ensures that the latter is not lost within its changes
The former, the bully, looks then at Podsnap hand his callousness was wishes to puncture its power. He wishes therefore its destruction, and feels that he owes it a bad turns, and is prepared to do anything to do so-so long of cause as that anything allows its own wealth also to be).
The Bully therefore looks at the innocent and dream of her corruption as a part of his own desire.
She becomes therefore a mere pawn in his game against the father.
In doing so, he essentially takes up the callousness dimension of Podsnap himself, and forces that callousness to dance to another tune.
Miss Podsnap is critical at this point as she represent the meeting out of a Podsnap and everyone else. As they are forced to accord to her innocence they are forced into his callus world. if that innocence is then devoured or exploited in a different way, Podsnap's ability to be callous in this way world of course be lost(and he will need to destroy the daughter).
A such it callous would be expanded beyond the bunds the podsnap mansion and become something brutal and horrific Or to put it slightly differently, the innocence is the totem of the callous the point that marks where it starts being callous from. It is not absolutely horrid; podsnap’s very limited existence ensures that. H might be unpleasant in himself and yet what he dos and how he reacts is utterly finite and he dos not try to expand that finitude. H merely through the myth of the innocent demand that others agree to and for it.
She is the point he tats a. the point he becomes podsnap from,
The wicked therefore is destroying that pointer of innocence frees up the true of the callous mind and allows it new horror. A horror that of course accords the malevolence of this new Mestopheles,
That is the bully mr Lammel in a sense wants to puncture the very innocence of Mr Podsnap. He is innocent horrid. That is he it utterly blinker, and demands that other allow for an accord with that blinker. I is this innocent breast, an innocence which operates is ignoring or sweeping aside everything it do not like (and so defined itself), that the bully is after.
To Be Wicked in this is therefore to puncture that innocence which keeps a world at bay, and to do so through a single powerful passion held in such a mind – that is to use that mind that Podsnap’s very callousness to destroy it and its world.
In doing so it ruptures not only thought he Pods mind (which might be no very wicked ac), but also the mind world of Mss Podsnap.
The bully dos not tell these two element a part. He does not distinguish the innocence f the one (which is founded on callousness) with the enforced innocence of the other. In doing s, in allowing the alter their relation to the former, even as he undermines that former, his demonic nature is revaluated.
That is it is always wicked to attack another through oneself attacking that which that other must always innocently oppress n some way; the wicked is that which lows out this oppression, and destroying the oppressed, hit and hurts the oppressor..
But then how can one get at the oppressed?
The Bully clearly cannot reach her.
It is therefore the task of the intuitive coaxing and corrupting side of the wicked to reach into her world and allow it an articulation.
However at this point the wicked of course comes under a new and deep strain of its own: it is caught in the paradox or gamble of corruption.
To really corrupt another one must meet with tem and understand them in some sense on does not corrupt from outside.
Bt then if a part of the mind is really reaching in, and really reacting and relating to the other then how can it be at that point corrupting the other?
The corruption is only felt in the path behind hat point, as is it sure that it will lured that path. Might it lead to an another. The very act of tempting opens out then this other- this desire perhaps to doing good or at least do allows for more than the corruption itself would allows for.
The Wicked cannot corrupt then the truly innocent without risking the corruption of itself.
It can remain therefore only wicked as elsewhere the Bully has another corruption in mind, or better another destruction. He knows what he wants to do, and keeps the coaxing side on the innocent apparently online and onside- for a while t least.
However this strain ns a real one.
To corrupt to be wicked is always as one is effective (and not merely a bully), to open oneself to the possibility of becoming unwilling good.
The Devil’s Dilemma.