Yes, it’s a cruel world, but it is, nevertheless, your world. You already know that you might not get along with everyone, regardless of your good intentions. There are Claggarts and Iagos just about everywhere. Claggart, the Melville fictional character who persecutes Billy Budd for no apparent reason, is like Shakespeare’s character Iago who manipulates Othello to kill Desdemona. In Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s words, “motiveless malignity” defines Iago’s character, and the same seems to apply to Melville’s Claggart: Two characters committed to evil for an indiscernible cause.
You’ve run into it: Ostensibly motiveless malignity. “What’s your problem?” you ask, bewildered by mistreatment for no apparent reason. It happens almost everywhere and to almost everyone at some time. You recognize it when you are the victim.
But are you ever a Claggart or Iago? If YOU are, then there’s no hope for a peaceful world. If you have at any time been just a little bit cruel, then all of us are doomed to live in a cruel world. We need someone to break the cycle of motiveless malignity, and we are depending on you to be that person.
I'll assume that you have never been guilty of motiveless malignity. I'll also assume that the rest of us can depend on you to recognize such malignity when it affects those around you, to step between the Billy Budds and the Claggarts or between the Iagos and the Othellos of the world, and to do something, however small, to see a world already infused with so many motivated mallignities becomes a little less cruel by eliminating at the very least the motiveless malignities.
You’ve run into it: Ostensibly motiveless malignity. “What’s your problem?” you ask, bewildered by mistreatment for no apparent reason. It happens almost everywhere and to almost everyone at some time. You recognize it when you are the victim.
But are you ever a Claggart or Iago? If YOU are, then there’s no hope for a peaceful world. If you have at any time been just a little bit cruel, then all of us are doomed to live in a cruel world. We need someone to break the cycle of motiveless malignity, and we are depending on you to be that person.
I'll assume that you have never been guilty of motiveless malignity. I'll also assume that the rest of us can depend on you to recognize such malignity when it affects those around you, to step between the Billy Budds and the Claggarts or between the Iagos and the Othellos of the world, and to do something, however small, to see a world already infused with so many motivated mallignities becomes a little less cruel by eliminating at the very least the motiveless malignities.
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