From Park City to Prague: Travel Book July-August 2016

In June of 2016, Marietta and I were planning what to pack as we prepared to leave on our next vacation. The first part would be spent in Park City, looking across the pond on our patio at the Deer Valley ski run, Big Stick and watching the Osprey fish, the paddle boarders float past us, the muskrat swimming at dusk and the ducks herding their babies back and forth among the ponds. All this while I would be editing my novel and outlining a new psychology book.I also planned to read some about Nietzsche, Bonhoeffer, Wagner and Freud, preparing for our pilgrimage to Europe. We were going to Munich, Cesky-Krumlov, Vienna, and Prague. My purpose for this trip was to understand evil. I want to comprehend how fear and hurt transform into anger and hate and then become a mass movement of evil like the world saw in the first half of the twentieth century when over 100,000,000 people were killed.Some of the same forces seem to be at play now. As we prepare to leave, we are witnessing the emergence of Donald Trump as the Republican nominee for President and watching the British vote to leave the E.U. and a recent election in Austria where a radical anti-immigration, anti-Muslim, anti-sematic candidate came within a hair of winning the election for the Austrian Presidency; and in the Philippines where Duterte, a strong man with a history of using goon squads to get his way, won the Presidency by campaigning against democracy.The belief that evil is an inevitable force represented by Satan, created by God to have a cosmic battle against the forces of Good represented by the Archangel Gabriel died with the Enlightenment. The kind of evil that I am interested in for this trip is not merely an impulsive act of one person's murder of another, although that is certainly evil. It is the murder of millions of people ostensibly justified by a flag, a culture or a widely-held belief. Such beliefs would include misogyny, racism, nationalism, and any wholesale entitlement that values one human's life and an individual's sacred right to choose above another's.Before the eighteenth century and the Enlightenment, metaphysical versions of reality were sometimes used by various human cultures to subdue evil. But as often as not these constructions of God were used as justification for the perpetuation and the prosecution of evil. (See the wars that followed the Reformation, the Inquisition, and the Crusades).For many, science and the Enlightenment destroyed any metaphysical constraints, releasing humans from any reason to fear God. The Newtonian discovery of natural physical laws of nature suggested that there were also laws of human nature and that if we followed these laws in our behavior toward ourselves and others, we would develop a Utopia where evil would not exist. Before the Enlightenment people refrained from evil because of their fear of God. After the Enlightenment, many worried that there would be no reason for avoiding evil because there was no god to fear. Then some Enlightenment thinkers believed that if people conformed to Natural Human Laws that life would work better for them and everybody else. So instead of being afraid to do wrong, people would be naturally rewarded for doing right.These natural laws governing human conduct would be secular and very akin to a Confucian view of how society should operate. Diderot and others seemed to advocate for the science of human nature that would discover the proper prescriptions for human conduct, much as Confucius did centuries before in China.Rousseau and other Enlightenment thinkers and other philosophers to follow quickly rejected this idea because such a science would mechanize the human spirit. And such a mechanistic human science would leave unanswered the question of why there is evil in the world. In medieval times people believed God created and controlled the universe and this battle between good and evil somehow followed God's purpose. With Newton, evil seems unnecessary. The universe follows laws and so too, presumably, does human nature.By discovering that nature followed laws, science weakened morality.Without God, many thought that we are left with man's understanding and power. Once, evil was explained by Adam's fall and the inner depravity of man. If human nature does not create evil and if we can find our natural human laws, why is there evil in human life? From where does it come? If morals are part of natural law, why isn't man moral? Is it the flaw of human customs? Is the science of humanity a search for these natural rules that will eliminate evil?Surely logic is not the answer, Rousseau contended. Logical determinism will destroy freedom of choice, spontaneity, play, creativity and the joy of discovery. Logic negated instinct. We need a free and active morality.But moral relativity had to stop somewhere. We have to find something solid and beneficial that is absolute beyond question. The problem is how can we be pragmatic, experimental, creative, free and authentic and have an ordered life.Moral relativity can quickly become a justification for evil. We must have some standard by which we can know right from wrong.Diderot and others maintain that all humans contain an internal sense of right from wrong at birth. Recent studies of mammals demonstrate that infants are born with a clear sense of fairness and a desire for order. I contend that human science and common sense reveal some naturally innate human qualities that form paradoxical polarities, appearing to be opposite and yet both true at the same time. There is the selfish desire to have, consume, and collect. This includes the desire for power, fame, wealth and sex.On the other end of this polarity is the equally strong desire to contribute, to help, to provide, to rescue, to nurture. Self-esteem, in part, comes from our belief that we can make and have made valuable contributions to the well-being of others. Self-aggrandizement vs. contributing to others.Second polarity is the desire to tell the truth, to be ourselves and express our authentic selves.This desire to freely express ourselves is opposed by our desire to find an audience who can accept us and consequently we must be willing to conform and adapt to be accepted. Expression vs. conformity.Third is our desire to pretend, play and create; to have fun and to extend ourselves merely for the joy of playing together with others.Opposing this natural desire to play is the desire to have responsibility, to perform an important function, to extend ourselves by serving the needs of others. Play vs. duty.There are surely more of these natural paradoxical human polarities. All of us tend more toward one side than the other in each of them. As a species we need people with different personalities to play different roles.In my view, there is no perfect natural way for people to be. There is, however, the human imperative to find a place or role where we can use our particular strengths and play a role that contributes to the common good.Part of how I see evil right now is that it is the outcome of people and society failing to find a place where people’s talents are used and appreciated. When people can’t find a way to contribute to the good, they feel shame. Their character flaws become exposed. And they defend themselves with evil behavior to avoid shame.I felt I needed to talk with other people about evil. To prepare for my pilgrimage, I met with my colleague consultation group, which consists of Leslie, Paul, Steve, Don and Connie. They are all experienced clinicians who have a specialized interest in family therapy and systems theory. I have great respect for their knowledge and wisdom. At each meeting, one person has the responsibility for presenting a problem or issue for which she or he would appreciate consultation and advice. Our meetings cover personal and professional issues. We laugh and cry together. I trust them implicitly.We sit together in a square on the two love seats, facing one another, one couch and two chairs facing the couch. Greta, my dog, moves among us, sometimes lying next to one of us on a couch, or sitting staring at the person who brought supper with them. Tonight all of us have a sandwich or a salad from Newks and Greta is moving from one of us to the other in search of a sucker who will give her food. And on this once-a-month Wednesday night, I was up and I told the group my plan to study evil on my trip to Europe, and I wanted them to share with me how their thoughts on evil."I don't believe in evil as a constant," Paul said. "I don't believe ‘evil lurks in the hearts of man' or in original sin. I certainly don't think that evil is God's punishment of man because of Adam's fall from grace. I agree with Voltaire. God is dead." Greta moved to Paul in hopes that while talking he might drop some food."So, you can't look at the Holocaust," Steve said. "and say you don't think evil exists?""Oh, I believe it exists," Paul said. "I just don't believe it is planted innately in humans.""Then where does it come from?" Leslie asked and ate a bite of her salad."I think it comes from society and the way our leaders organize our culture," Paul said. "I agree with Rousseau that natural man, man and woman, left alone by the morals and conventions of religion and government, would love one another and nurture new life. I think love and cooperation are natural to humans, not evil.""So evil comes from the church?" Connie asked."Yes," Paul said, putting his fork in his plastic salad container, "and from other institutions like schools and girl scouts and the tax system that serve the rich while oppressing the poor. It is the myths that society creates and perpetuates to repress and contain humans that cause evil.""I agree with that," Don said. Greta moved to Don now and put her chin on his knee. "I don't believe evil would exist if our social infrastructure encouraged equality and freedom and if everybody had food, shelter and good sex. Diderot, another Enlightenment figure, believed in the discovery of natural law for humans. If science could discover a way to use the law of gravity to allow a flowing stream to grind wheat, then we could discover the proper prescriptions for human conduct. Confucius recommended a series of specific detailed human behaviors and conventions centuries before the enlightenment and this ushered in China’s great age of innovation."“But I don’t agree that we can prescribe detailed social conventions like Confucius or Diderot,” Connie said. Greta now moved to place her chin on Connie’s knee. “Okay, science has made the notion of God less relevant. Once evil was explained by God and his fight with the devil but with God dead, what will eliminate evil? “This brings me back to sex.” She put her sandwich in her lap and Greta moved her nose close to the sandwich. Connie pushed Greta away and continued, “Women have been sexually repressed and controlled for centuries. In pre-historic times, when our species depended on women's fertility and their ability to procreate, women ran things. Gods were all female. Men were not essential. It was like a herd of deer. The female does are much more critical to the continuation of the herd than the male buck. Bucks are dispensable. One of them can make a lot of babies with little effort. Does, however, have the task of carrying, delivering, and tending the young and without good mothers, a deer herd would die. The same was true of a tribe in prehistoric times." Connie picked up her sandwich and took a bite."So, what does this have to do with evil?" I asked.Connie quickly swallowed and answered, "Then women were encouraged to be sexually active. They were not repressed or considered the property of men. In a tribe, babies from one woman may have several fathers."Once humans began to develop tools that required physical strength, axes, spears, and shovels, men began to be more critical to the species' survival, and tribes transformed from matriarchies to patriarchies.""The human female, the most sexually powerful mammal on earth, who can be sexually active twenty-four hours a day, 365 days a year, began to threaten men. So men placed shame on sex and women for enjoying sex and women became sexually repressed."So I agree that sexual repression of women causes evil. If men did not place on women the burden of shame around sex, men would not be so sexually starved. It is only in this century that in some cultures women are emerging from their sexual oppression, and I predict that once women can freely express their sexual desires, that there will be much less pent-up rage in men. It is this pent-up anger in men that is the source of evil.""I agree with the men being the source of evil," Leslie said sticking her fork in a large piece of tomato and leaving it there. "I disagree with Paul. I think we humans have an innate instinct that is the origin of evil. You can see it in the male ape. They have the instinct sexually to own all of the females in the ape clan. They will kill any other male ape who tries to get some from one of the female apes who he thinks belongs to him."One male doesn't have to hoard all the women. I'm pretty sure that some of the female apes would prefer a different male as their mate. But male apes are innately greedy.” Greta, tired of begging and being denied, came and laid at my feet."And human males are the same. There is one reason that ISIS and the Taliban are at war with the West, and that is we are messing with their pussy, telling women they can be educated and equal to men. Muslims teach women that they must dress and avoid contact with men, lest they provoke a male erection. Some Muslims even operate on their daughter's vagina at puberty to prevent girls from feeling sexual desire. Muslim women belong to their fathers, then to their husbands, and they are expected to be sexually available to their husband whenever he wants some. It is their primary job to satisfy and obey the men in their families.” She put her salad on the table next to the couch and leaned forward, elbows on knees."And here we go, messing with their women, telling them that they can think and choose for themselves. That's the reason they are chopping off the heads of Westerners and exploding themselves to bomb western targets for 80 virgins in heaven., as if the 80 virgins were property to be given to a man.“I agree with Rousseau that All people, men and women, are equal. Like Rousseau I don’t want a bunch of rules governing my every action. That’s what the Taliban try to do and look who that serves. It serves men, not women. That is evil.“Schopenhauer and Nietzsche laughed at the notion of an ordered moral world. They celebrated the human urge to ignore social constraints and to pursue the natural human impulses to consume sex, food, and attain wealth and power as part of man's nature. This striving must not be denied.“Nietzsche contended that humans developed beliefs to serve their purposes. All truth was relative. As Spinoza said, even the concept of evil is a human invention.“These Newtonian like standards of human conduct, if discovered, would demand conformity and condemn differentness."It is men's innate instinct to own and control as many women as they can, and that is evil and the source of wars. Sixty million refugees are displaced from their homes today because of this evil.""Leslie, you may have a point," Connie said wiping her mouth with her napkin, "but I don't like that word.""You mean ‘pussy,'" Leslie said picking up her salad from the table. "I've always had a gutter mouth, and that's the name crude, evil, stupid men use to refer to a vagina. That word doesn’t frighten me. Would you rather me use vagina?""Yes," Connie said. "If you must.""In a way, I agree with Leslie," Steve said putting his sandwich on the floor and taking a drink. "I think envy is the root of evil. And I also believe this is an innate human trait. Status, social class, the urge to be better-than, to want something someone else has, that’s where evil comes from."You might think that I am talking about competition or the competitive spirit. I'm not. Healthy competition motivates us to perform at our best. We can challenge one another to develop and improve a skill through competition.” Greta moved away from me toward Steve’s sandwich on the floor."Competition is a good thing so long as we celebrate one another's discovery of our best selves. But when we want what someone else has or to be someone else and have the honor, fame, status, wealth or prestige that they have, then we begin to plot to take away what they have, perhaps even destroy or kill them. That's evil.” Steve picked up his sandwich before Greta’s nose did more than sniff."This is the cause of war. The French and the Germans were fighting over the Alsace-Lorraine in Franco-Prussian War, World War I and World War II. Or more recently Russia invading Ukraine to control the Russian-speaking part of Ukraine. Or China threatening Japan and the U.S. over islands in the South China Sea. It's all envy.""Then how do you explain the Holocaust?" Leslie asked."It's the same,” Steve said taking another drink but keeping his sandwich in his lap this time. “The Europeans envied the extraordinary cultural achievements of the Jews. They envied their success, intelligence, and creativity. The Jews were dispersed all over Europe by the diaspora, and yet, they maintained their language, religion, and culture while, at the same time, adapting successfully to every new culture they encountered. Apparently, the Germans envied their wealth, their art, and their businesses, or else, they would not have stolen these things and murdered the Jews to eliminate them as competition.""Yes, yes," Don said. "I agree that envy causes evil, but I think competition is at the base of envy and evil. It is this constant comparing that we do with others. We do it unconsciously when we look at people's appearance or homes or cars. What does a new Mercedes Benz say or an 8,000-square foot MacMansion say, or an Armani suit say, or washboard abs say? They say the same thing. I am better than you.” Don stood, wadded his sandwich wrap and threw it into the wastebasket between the couch and the loveseat."This comparison and fear of being less-than frighten us, and we will do all kinds of evil as we compete to be superior. Wars are about our culture and proving that our way of life is better-than-yours. We judge other cultures and tell ourselves that we are doing them a favor by conquering, or "liberating" them."We may also be wanting their oil because, like Steve said, our competitive spirit becomes so toxic that we envy their oil reserves.""That makes some sense to me," Paul said. "I disagree that we have these ugly natural qualities in us that are the source of evil. Recent studies of mammals prove that mammals are social creatures who naturally promote the common good.” Greta sauntered over to the wastebasket and pulls out Don’s sandwich wrapper."What I resonate with that Steve and Don said, and Leslie too, has to do with scarcity. If we agree that sex is a commodity like food, as Leslie suggests, and that we all need our share of it, then I think the scarcity of sex and even more so food is the source of evil. I read an article in the New York Times that correlated war with famine and the point of the article was that hunger and the scarcity of food in some areas inevitably cause conflict over those scarce resources. And that where plenty of food exists, there is much less war and conflict.” The sounds of Greta’s licking and chewing the sandwich wrapper blended with Paul’s voice as he talked."There is nothing wrong with being hungry and wanting food. We can understand why someone would fight to feed their family. There is nothing wrong with wanting to share our passion and our bodies with another person. None of us have perfectly managed the desire that is essential to the survival of our species. When food or sex is scarce, we have trouble. Many see the problem as too many people and too few resources. There are many ways to solve the problem."There is something wrong with how we as a species distribute food and wealth that creates war. We produce enough food to feed all of us on the planet, but we allow cows to eat wheat so that people who want meat can have grain-fed beef. If we could all accept a vegetarian diet, the world would have plenty of food, and there would be no wars. It is simply a matter of changing habits.” Greta left the wrapped on the floor and returned to lay at my feet."Of if we could accept a taxation system that allowed a more equal distribution of wealth, we would not have war."Marx suggested this before me, and I think he's right.""That might work," Leslie said. "If people didn't lie. Now that I have given this more thought, I think mendacity is the source of evil. If we could live in a world where people were not afraid to tell the truth, there would be no evil. Repression, denial, sublimation all our defenses that we use to avoid just expressing what we feel and think. This distorts reality and denies us and others the ability to make informed choices."And I haven't even mentioned how our self-subterfuge distances us from healthy authentic self-expression. When we don't tell the truth because of fear or shame, we deny ourselves the chance to grow and learn. We don't get feedback about how we can develop aspects of ourselves that can contribute to our families and communities.”While Leslie talked, I stood, picked up Greta’s abandoned sandwich wrap and returned it to the wastebasket."Think about Tennessee William's play Cat on a Hot Tin Roof. Listen to Big Daddy yell, ‘Mendacity! I smell mendacity round here.’ And he did. Lies and deceit were everywhere around him. And he never knew that his homophobia was the cause of it all because his family was afraid to tell him."Or consider the lies and deception in Shakespeare's Othello and the misery that these lies created."To me, this is the source of evil.""In a way that makes sense to me too," Connie said. "The reason we lie is that we want to avoid shame. We lie because we are afraid of shame. Shame is toxic. It destroys self-esteem. Who wants to be authentic if it brings shame? To offer a gross example, there is nothing wrong with eating our own boogers. It is mucus that would have gone down our esophagus to our stomachs, that instead comes out our nose. An authentic person would have no trouble eating boogers, but most of us don't because doing that would bring us disapproval and shame. And shame hurts."Yes, lying is bad, perhaps the source of evil, but we all do it to avoid shame."And shame is an innate emotion. I think the story of Adam and Eve is a myth whose subject is shame. The original sin is to feel shame for who we are. If this feeling of shame is not innate in us, please tell me how I can purge shame.”“Now, you are grossing me out,” Leslie said. “talking about snot.”"Too much shame is toxic and evil," Paul said ignoring Leslie. "Shame piled on top of shame will drown us all and we will lie, cheat, steal and kill to avoid it. I agree with that. Shame itself is not the problem."It is how we process and use shame or don't use shame that's the problem. In my opinion, evil comes from avoiding shame. Facing shame and processing shame correctly is a great thing.” He combed his hand through his thick wavy hair."I believe shame is our best emotion. Yes, shame hurts. It gets our attention. It tells us that we must change, or we will continue to be hurt by shame. Shame gives us the motivation to learn, adapt and develop new skills. Shame is our teacher. It builds our soul and our character."Shame is also an essential element to love. What would love be if, when I hurt someone I love, I did not feel shame? I want to feel shame when I hurt my wife. I want to feel bad enough to find a better way to accomplish my desires without hurting her. That's part of love's definition."So, I don't think shame is the problem. I think too much shame is the problem and that avoiding shame's lessons is a problem. And I agree that lying to avoid shame can lead to much evil."Our conversation is too individually oriented for me,” I said, moving my feet and Greta moved toward Paul to avoid my feet, putting her chin on his knee as he ate his salad. “I understand how one individual may do harm and evil to another. What I don't get is how evil can be sold to masses of people. How is it that good people are persuaded to murder others whose only sin is that they have a different skin color or religious belief. How do individuals who become leaders convince people to put aside their consciences and become agents of evil? How do cultures and societies become so corrupt?"Hitler used the philosophies and ideas of Richard Wagner and Friedrich Nietzsche to justify and encourage the evils of the Third Reich. He was able to capture the hearts and minds of most Germans so that they became war mongers and prosecuted genocide on millions of people."I want to know what human character flaw he used to insinuate his evil ideas into the minds and hearts of good people, people like you and me."I want to know what ideas Freud offered. He was right in the center of the German-speaking world as Hitler came to power. Austria was Hitler's first victim. I want to know how Dietrich Bonhoeffer characterized the events that surrounded his adult life and culminated eventually in his death on Hitler's orders. I want to understand his take on evil and what was happening around him as the Third Reich emerged.”Paul offered Greta some lettuce. She rejected it and went to beg Connie, chin on her knee."That is my pilgrimage to Europe this year. I'm searching for answers to these questions.""But David, if evil doesn't start inside the soul of some one individual, where does it come from?" Connie asked."It does begin there," I agreed, "but in most communities when one person acts or proposes evil, other people stand up to oppose them.""So you do believe evil is innately inside all of us," Don said."Yes and no," I said. "Like Paul said, I think evil comes when we are out of balance. We have lots of instincts.""What are they?" Leslie asked."I don't know that I have a complete list," I said, "but I took notes on what Paul said are naturally innate human qualities that form paradoxical polarities, opposite and yet both true at the same time.” I picked up my notepad and began to read my list. “There is the selfish desire to have, consume and collect. This includes the desire for power, fame, wealth and sex."On the other end of this polarity is the equally strong desire to contribute, to help, to provide, to rescue, to nurture. Self-esteem, in part, comes from our belief that we have made valuable contributions to the well-being of others."Another polarity is the desire to tell the truth, to be and express our authentic selves creatively and playfully."This desire to freely express ourselves is opposed by our desire to find an audience who can accept us and our willingness to change and adapt to be accepted."Another is our desire to pretend, play and create; to have fun and to extend ourselves merely for the joy of playing with others.” I crossed my legs. To Greta that was a sign to play gotcha with my foot. She crouched in front of my extended leg waiting for me to kick so she could avoid my moving foot. I ignored her. She growled and wagged her tail."Opposing this natural desire to play and pretend is the desire to have responsibility, to perform an important function, to stress ourselves by serving the needs of others.""That's quite a list," Paul said. "It's about balance, isn't it, like Aristotle said? These innate instincts are in a sort of tension with one another, and we and our egos are in the center choosing which impulse to listen to next."I reached to pet Greta to calm her. She withdrew and went to Connie who was finishing her sandwich."Yes," I agreed, "and we only occasionally get in the zone with these instincts balanced.""It's like parenting a child," Leslie said. "A child needs two types of parents. One to whom they can retreat and who loves them no matter what and the other who trusts and believes in them, who challenges them to take a risk and who helps them learn from their failures. When a child is very young, the instincts of the unconditional love parent should be more dominant in parenting. But as the child grows older the "I believe in you girl; you can ride that bike; if you fall, I'll pick you up and you can try again; you'll get it girl," that parent should be more dominant in parenting as a child gets older. A child should always be somewhere in the midst of this parenting tension.""Don’t you see it like that, David," Connie said taking her last bit of her sandwich, wadding her wrapper and handing it to Greta rather than placing it in the wastebasket."Yes, that's it," I agreed. "We are always surrounded by a variety of innate impulses. As we mature, we learn how to choose among them and how to return to an emotional equilibrium. When we are balanced, we swim through our various impulses, using one feeling, one emotion then another. There is never really a polarity of opposites. Rather our impulses are like different colors that exist on a canvas. Only two colors can often appear to clash, each color making the other more ugly. But when you add a third color to the canvas, suddenly the best of the two colors comes into view. The same goes for two seemingly discordant notes. A third note can create a chord and bring harmony. One single impulse alone, isolated from our other innate instincts and overused exclusively can create evil in us. Even the nurturing impulse, if only used, can spoil a child." Again the noise of Greta’s licking and chewing the sandwich wrapper intruded on our conversation."It's a good thing that our instincts don't exist alone in a vacuum," Paul said. "They are like different instruments in a band or different voices in a choir, played in rhythm, hitting the right notes at the right time, they can provide beauty. But played with no coordination, at the whim of strong uncontrolled impulse, ugliness, and evil result.""So our impulses need some guiding force," Leslie said. "Some coordinating purpose to serve. They need to accept some discipline to work together.""I suppose that's true," I said."Yes," Don said. "But to put them together in a way that produces beauty, we have to know each of our innate impulses. In each person, they are the same, perhaps. But they are distributed among us at different strengths. Some people are more sexual than others. Some have a stronger competitive gene. We cannot produce beauty in our behavior and our relationships unless we are aware of how these impulses operate in us.""It is far more complicated than the Id, Ego and Superego," Steve said. "The Id/Superego polarity is only one of many."Greta abandoned her sandwich wrap and went to Leslie to beg."I agree," I said."And yet it seems that there must be an organizing force or agent," Steve said, "acting more or less like Freud envisioned the ego.""I suppose that's right," I said reluctant to give Freud his due."It seems that organizing these innate instinctual impulses," Paul said, "and choosing among them would be a very complex task. There appears to be so much potential for missing a note or making a mistake. I could imagine that, at times, we could create what we think is a beautiful song, and yet it is all wrong, based on the false premises.""Yes," I said standing to clean up after Greta. "and this is what I think happens when people organize together to create evil. This is what occurred in the 1950s when Richard Nixon and Joseph McCarthy used American's fear of Communism to blacklist people, destroying lives and careers for no reason. Good people supported evil. They sang in harmony a song that was beautiful and seemed necessary and full of right to them, but was obviously sinister and evil once the light of history exposed its evil, senseless purposes.""That's why you are going to Europe to study evil and how people can be organized to bad ends," Steve said, "That seems silly to me when we have a history of genocide with the native Americans, not to speak of slavery or the internment of Japanese-Americans in World War II.""Of course, you are right, Steve," I said. "And I could study evil in Russia where the Communists killed 100,000,000 people during that same period or China where 70,000,000 were starved to death my Mao."I chose Europe because I think there is a clear intellectual path to follow. I think philosophers have helped Europe become culturally self-aware to what happened in the first half of the twentieth century, and I hope to trace that path and expose some universal human character flaws that enable a Hitler, a Trump, or a George Wallace to perpetrate their evil into a collective movement."MunichThe first destination on our trip was Munich. The flight was uneventful. I slept some. Marietta watched movies. We went by train from the airport and by taxi to the hotel. The hotel was not too far from our Air BNB apartment where we would stay the rest of the week.Exhausted, we tipped the bellman, put our bags on the luggage stands and fell asleep immediately when we entered our hotel room.My memory is a bit of a blur about Munich. It’s a beautiful city and it is the center of Hitler’s rise to power, his base of support came from Munich and the region of Bavaria. This color’s my view of Munich and dims my interest a bit.Southern Germany share many attitudes or prejudices found in the South in the U.S. I suppose Munich is to Germany in some ways as Atlanta is to the American South.The next day we exchanged the hotel for our apartment and began exploring the city. Street cars, sub-ways and buses were excellent here. The signage made sense and we were able to well navigate the city.While residing in Munich, we went to visit Dachau and Ludwig’s Neuschwanstein castle. We also took a walking tour of World War II historical sites in Munich.The general tourist sights are near the city center, Karlsplatz, Marienplatz and Max-Joseph-Platz. The Residency castle is adjacent to Marienplatz.Feldherrnhalle is in Odeonsplatz. That’s a war memorial building commissioned by Ludwig I to honor two military leaders who are generally considered inept, Johan Tilley, leader of the Bavarian army in The Thirty Years war and Karl Phillip von Wrede who led Bavaria’ fight against Napoleon.The famous Rathaus-Glockenspiel clock tower is in Marienplatz. Three times a day at 11:00 A.M., 12 P.M. and 5 P.M. in the summer on those hours the clock chimes. Thirty-two life sized figures twirl about serenaded by forty-three bells. It re-enacts two stories from the 1600s. It was built as part of the town hall in 1908. It can take fifteen minutes for the puppets to complete their dance and for the music to stop. A small golden rooster at the top of the Glockenspiel chimes three times to signal the end of the dance. I saw the dance, but I never heard the rooster.On the World War II tour, we saw bunkers and plain office buildings that housed the SS Headquarters in Munich and the Haus der Kunst. We walked and drove past this large neo-classical building built as a museum to showcase Hitler’s version of the best of German art. This building has been many things since World War II. It has housed a basketball court and a nightclub, but generally it has been used as a theater and exhibit hall.Over 90% of the buildings in Munich were damaged during WWII. Most of them have been rebuilt to resemble their former selves. It is hard to appreciate Munich’s beauty and its long history because the specter of Hitler and WWII are everywhere. The Hofbrauhaus is between Max-Joseph-Platz and Marienplatz. The Hitlers 1923 Beer Hall Putsch spilled out of the Hofbrauhaus into Marienplatz. Hitlers twenty-five points of the Nazi party were first promulgated there.The history of Nazism surrounded us in Munich.The First ConclaveOn our second day in Munich I conjured a meeting of my eminent experts on evil. Attending this meeting with me were the ghosts of Richard Wagner, Friedrich Nietzsche, Sigmund Freud, Dietrich Bonhoeffer, and the still living spirit of E.O. Wilson and myself.Our first meeting was in Munich in the public garden of the Residence Palace which now served as government offices and a museum. It was adjacent to the Max-Joseph-Platz square, the site of the Hitler-Ludendorff-Putsch (Beer Hall Putsch) led by Hitler in 1923. A pavilion sat in the center of the garden (see picture). At the edge in the shade of the pavilion, a sixty-eight-year-old man played a guitar. His tunes ranged from blues to Spanish dance music. He played flawlessly. Also on the edge of the pavilion circle was a family with young children. The children raced scooters out into the park and back again to their parents who sat in the shade at the pavilions edge.Our circle of imaginary colleagues gathered in the pavilion’s center serenaded by the guitar player and pleasantly distracted by the children playing."Welcome to our conclave on evil," I said.Each of them took their seats on wooden folding chairs arranged in a circle around a knee high wooden table set with German kuchen, a bowl of whipped cream and coffee mugs and two full coffee pots.E.O. Wilson sat next to me on my right. On my left, sat Dietrich Bonhoeffer. Next to him and across from Bonhoeffer sat Friedrich Nietzsche.Wagner, dressed in his red berretta, matching wide crimson cravat tied in a bow, and wearing a pink blouse and a black satin smoking jacket, spoke first."I'm not pleased to be here," he said. "I am surrounded by my enemies who all consider Hitler's heroic attempt to give the world a superior breed of man to be evil. And among us today is one of the kike's Hitler should have exterminated, Herr Freud.""I'm not so thrilled to be here either," a sickly Nietzsche replied, sitting with a blanket spread over his legs, wearing wire-rimmed glasses above his thick and full mustache. "I especially abhor the company of Mr. Wagner.""Once upon a time you loved me," Wagner said, snickering reaching into his jacket for his pipe. "What was it you said of me. Let's see, didn't you say that I was the liberator of humanity, the saint of the arts. Didn't you say of me that I resurrected an ideal Greek antiquity that gave the world a perfect vision of mankind? Didn't you agree with me that the Jews had corrupted German life and culture? You read my treatise on Music and the Jews, and you agreed with it. You told me yourself in Tribschen."Wagner took his pipe found a tobacco pouch in another coat pocket and confidently filled his pipe and lit it. "You called me a genius. You saw me as a profound spirit of a great spiritual philosophy of life, and you wrote, agreeing with me, that We Germans have lost this spirit through the arrogant behavior of the Jews. You wrote this in a letter to me. And you now have the nerve to call me anti-semantic. And here you are to pretend that your ideas had nothing to do with the concentration camps. Do you forget what you wrote in Birth of a Tragedy? You as much as declared war on international Jewry in that essay."Yes, I confess," Nietzsche said pouring himself a mug of coffee. "I was once deluded by you. Parts of what you wrote, I still admire. Yes, I thought you and your whore for a wife, Cosima, would one day come to see that I was the apocalyptic intellectual hero who you and Cosima should have anointed as hour intellectual heir, but you refused to see my genius. To you, I was no more than an errand boy." He sat up and pushed his blanket off his lap and took a sip of coffee. "You are really a Jew. You are not even a man. You are more female than male, using women to disguise your true nature. Look at your pink blouse and your French fashions."“What!" Wagner shouted, putting his pipe down on the table. "You are calling me a homosexual. You, who never married, who never could consummate a relationship with a woman, you who died of syphilis. You, a despicable queer who never fathered one child, while I fathered three children that I know of and I have no idea how many of my mistresses had my children.""And you don't care," Nietzsche said. "You ignored or abandoned your children. You tried to pass off Siegfried, your oldest, to me to raise and tutor, but I refused.""You two sound like your despicable disciples, fighting on your behalf after your deaths," I said."These two agree more than they disagree," Bonhoeffer said taking a bite from one of the pastries on the table.”"Well, I did and do admire Wagner for his musical and theatrical genius,” Nietzsche said. “He wrote the world's best operas. Who could write an opera that lasts six hours and has attracted audiences for over a century? For me music has always been an expression of the Dionysian, transcending all boundaries, blurring the distinctions between sexes and pulling the listeners into the vortex of divine ecstasy. For me, Wagner's music was like a drug!” The guitar played a soft slow version of Edelweiss while Nietzsche talked."I mistakenly thought that a master of art like Wagner must be a genius about everything related to humans.""What do you mean when you speak of the Dionysian?" I asked."Take it away, Richard," Nietzsche said. "This is your idea, and it is the one idea you have that I agree with.""Aeschylus and Pindar," Wagner said, "were two playwrights, who wrote some of the best plays in human history. They followed or outlined the formula for real art and human wisdom, and they personified the best of ancient Greece. Greece lost its way with Socrates and his insistence of logic over emotion and his advocacy for democracy."The plays of Aeschylus followed a pattern. It is the best and most followed path to human wisdom. Real knowledge comes from experience. In life, two forces always oppose one another. They are the forces represented by the God of order, morality, and righteousness – Apollo. Dionysius, the God of passion, emotion, spontaneity, creativity, chaos and dissolution − Dionysius opposes Apollo." Wagner picked up his pipe and relit it. A six-year-old boy sped around the circle on his scooter. "Plays and our lives should begin on the path of unpredictable emotion and desire. If we try to follow the rules of bourgeois morality forced on us by society and the church, we will die never having lived. Life's real lessons come from experience from the mistakes we make."I left God in my youth and my creative passions took me many places that sometimes were thrilling but more often caused me pain. I followed my lust for life, and I learned. As I learned, I eventually returned to Apollo. I found good reasons for morals, and they became the light to my path."Good theater follows the same path. It begins with a semblance of order; then chaos comes creating misery. For the rest of the play, the protagonist follows his desires, and they lead to his destruction. In the end, he comes to the Apollonian way. Order returns in his death. A plot that follows this typical life path will grab an audience because they know this is their path, life's authentic way."What about your protagonist?" I asked. "They are like mythic heroes.""That's right," Wagner said, leaning back in his chair, taking a pull on his pipe and puffing smoke. "A great man is not a good man. Julius Caesar, Alexander the Great, Napoleon, were ruthless men. They didn't follow a moral code. They followed their lust for power, and they became great. I wrote my plays hoping to inspire a great German hero, like Hitler. And I did just that, an Ubermensch, a Superman, above all others whose instincts were often brilliant, entitled to whatever the world had to offer. Such men live grand, great lives that produce lessons and legends for posterity.""We need men such as these. Don't you agree, Fritz?""Yes, I do," Nietzsche said. "And that is the last thing on which we agree."The guitar player stopped playing and began putting away his guitar. The boy’s parents called for him to come with them. They were leaving.“That’s all the time we have for today,” I said. “Our next conversation will be in Neuschwanstein Castle an hour south of here.”Neuschwanstein CastleTwo days later Marietta and I traveled to Neuschwanstein Castle nestled in the Alps south of Munich. It is difficult to imagine such a place. It was the third castle that King Ludwig built trying to emulate King Louis XIV of France, his hero. The general shallow take of Ludwig is that he was crazy and that shortly after this castle was complete, he killed himself.A longer version is that he was gay and that he despised himself for this, making up for his feminine qualities by believing that he was Wagner’s and Nietzsche’s ubermensch born in a time when his absolute authority was restricted by parliaments.Ludwig II was King of Bavaria. His mother was concerned that he was a poor fit for public life because he was so fanciful and introverted. Bavarian ministers of the state and the royal court concurred. But his handsome physique and his whimsical generosity with farmers and laborers he met in this travels through the countryside made him a popular monarch.He avoided attending government functions and the court in Munich. He spent his personal vast income and wealth on artistic enterprises and his castles. His main interests were art, architecture and music. One of his first acts as King was to summon Wagner to his court, where Wagner praised him as Bavaria’s ubermensch. Wagner said of Ludwig: “Alas, he is also so handsome and wise, soulful and lovely, that I fear his life must melt away in this vulgar world like a fleeting dream of gods.”Ludwig provided a residence for Wagner in Switzerland and later Wagner’s operatic theatrical compound in Bayreuth.Ludwig’s profligate, expensive lifestyle made him a debtor to Prussia and risked the stability of his government. His cabinet tried to reign in his expenses. Ludwig considered disbanding his cabinet, but they had him declared insane and placed his uncle on the throne in his stead. Later he and his doctor were found shot while taking a walk for his health. His death was declared a suicide.Neuschwanstein was one of three castles he built, the smallest. He spent over 31,000,000 German marks on them in his time. I have no idea what that translates into at today’s values.Neuschwanstein was to be his own personal home. The plan was that no one but him and his twenty plus servants would reside there. The construction began in 1878 and was not complete until after his death. He never spent one night in his palace retreat in the mountains.When we arrived at the castle, we were grouped into groups of twenty for the tour. We were first led into the entry foyer of the castle, a high-ceilinged circular room about twenty-five feet in diameter organized around a floor mosaic of a sun with giant painting of Louis XIV of France on the front wall. We continued on our tour listening to the guide tell stories of Ludwig, the construction of the castle, the money spent on the construction and the fine art objects that adorned each room.(If you are interested in how the inside of the castle looks google Neuschwanstein Castle and search for pictures.)Our Second ConclaveOnce we reached Ludwig’s salon, I knew that was the place. Magically the floor opened. A table filled with breads, cheeses, fruit, wine, plates and wine glasses moved up from below. Six chairs slide around about the table and our group reconvened. The table was rectangular. I sat at one end and Friedrich Nietzsche the other. Richard Wagner sat on Nietzsche’s right. Bonhoeffer next to him. Sigmund Freud sat to my right across from Bonhoeffer and E.O. Wilson sat next to him.I addressed this celebrated group. “Welcome,” I said, “to Neuschwanstein Castle, the small home of Ludwig II.” Richard Wagner reached for an open bottle of wine and poured himself a glass. “We are reconvening to try to understand how a culture, society or a nation of what most consider to be good people could be convinced to support or allow their government institutions to be perverted to evil purposes such as the holocaust.“Yesterday I visited the Nuremburg concentration camp, probably the most benign of Hitler’s extermination prisons and I cannot describe my disgust and horror at what I only tangentially witnessed. Hitler was a crazy man. How did he convince people to allow his tormented genius for cruelty to rule?”“Hitler was a genius, an ubermensch, what you call a superman,” Wagner said. “For the good of the Aryan race and the fatherland, the inferior had to be erased. It was an ugly business that had to be done just like a farmer must shoot an egg-sucking dog.”“You can really say that?” Wilson said glaring at Wagner.“Yes, I can,” Wagner replied. “Calm down, E.O. Let me pour you a glass of wine.” He poured wine into a glass and handed it to Wilson. “And how is that different from your country’s genocide of Native Americans or worse than the lynching’s and rape of Negroes in the South?”“It’s not,” Wilson replied, throwing the wine in Wagner’s face. “All of those things are disgustingly evil and can never be condoned.“My that was not very polite or respectful,” Wagner said taking a napkin and wiping his face, coat and shirt. “Good thing it was white wine. Tell them Friedrich,” Wagner said. “Great men like Hitler, Ludwig here, the Sun King and America’s Donald Trump shouldn’t follow bourgeois convention. To accomplish great things, you must break the rules.”"Nietzsche, you promoted the notion of an Ubermensch, didn't you?" I asked."Yes, I did," he agreed. "I never thought that the rules of my time were really part of the natural order. There is no God in heaven. God is dead. He was a myth man used to help them deal with their fear of death and the chaos of life. Life is a tragedy, like Buddha said. Life is about suffering and confusion. There are no rules that will produce happiness. Live, love, laugh, cry and die.” He reached for a win bottled and poured himself a glass. “That's the best life can give. It takes a superior man to see this and rise above his culture and return to the Greek ideal of Aeschylus, where a man's love of man is the highest form of love. Women are mostly a waste of time, good for making babies, but they are not strong enough to overcome cultures, morals and break repressive taboos.” He sipped his wine, tore off a piece of bread from a loaf, and asked, "You agree with me, don't you, Sigmund."Freud perked up. He pulled a cigar from inside his coat pocket, struck a match and lit it. He was dressed in his usual tweed suit with a watch in the suits watch pocket, hanging from a suit button by a gold chain. "Generally, yes, I do," he said. "I've never been a religious man. I was raised a Jew, but I never thought of myself as a Jew. I think of myself as a man of science, like Mr. Wilson here," he pointed to E.O. Wilson. "I think of myself as a student of the science of man."The ninety-year-old Wilson looked out of the window, then at Freud with a scowl on his face. He squirmed in his chair and said, "I don't consider myself as only a seeker to understand man, I am searching for the truths of nature and of this planet. And I believe that natural laws govern us all." He reached for a knife, and a loaf of bread. He cut a slice of bread, then a slice of cheese and took a bite."Yes, I do too," Freud said reaching for a grape and popping it into his mouth. "And my religion is the science of man. I see society as repressing vital natural urges, just as Mr. Nietzsche said and yes, I hope to help people throw off the yoke of civilization and be free to express their real feelings and desires. And yes, I don't think logic or society's order does a man much good. We should follow our libido, our passion in the sense that Mr. Wagner and Mr. Nietzsche suggest. You agree with that, David. In your last book, you said emotion precedes thought and that we should follow our feelings into action. That's the purpose of feelings, you said.""Not exactly," I said swallowing the bite of apple. "Yes, our brain experiences an emotion before it thinks. And I agree that it is better to express our feelings in words rather than repress or deny them. But we have come a long way in understanding our feelings and our brains since 1930. There are constructive ways to process our feelings that make us proud and bring us honor and there are destructive ways that can hurt our souls and destroy our self-esteem and character and hurt other people.""Like what," Freud said reaching for a banana. "I think you should follow your passion, just as Nietzsche suggests. The bourgeois rules and morals simply lead to shame and repression. We should ignore these moral conventions. Sex, for example, is good in all its forms, so long as you have two consenting adults. Sexual feelings should be spoken and acted on, not repressed." He peeled the banana and took a bite and then a puff from his cigar."And it's a good thing then to have sex with your sister-in-law," Bonhoeffer said."Why would you say such a thing?" Sigmund asked."And you wanted to be the most famous psychiatrist in the history of the world, which by the way, you are, and you didn't think historians would discover your affair with Minna Barneys, your wife's sister. Jung told about the time that Minna confessed your affair to him." Bonhoeffer reached for the wine bottle and poured himself a new glass."Oh, that's just professional jealousy.""Did you really think that no one would notice that you registered at a famous hotel in Majola, Switzerland with Minna as Dr. Freud and Frau. You were forty-two. She thirty-three. It was August 13, 1898. The worn hotel ledger records your signature as Dr. Sigm Freud and Frau.” Bonhoeffer sipped his wine. “You had always admitted that she was your closest confidante, that after having seven children by you, your wife cut you off. Franz Maciejewski discovered your signature in 2006. You also wrote that marriage destroys passion and that obstacles enhance it. Your hero, like Fritz's here, was Julius Caesar. You didn't care about Hitler and the Jews. You didn't even consider yourself a Jew. You were above the war, too important to bother. You knew that your international friends would find a way to keep you and your family safe, and they did.""You don't know the truth about my private life," Freud said pushing the lit end of a cigar firmly on his discarded banana peel in the ash tray on the table. The red char sizzled in the banana peel. "What if my wife, Martha, was told by her physician that another pregnancy might kill her? What if she brought her sister into our home to be my mistress? What if she, her sister Minna, and I were happy with this arrangement? You don't know the truth of that. My private affairs are none of your business.""Oh yes, they are our business," Wagner said, leaning forward, taking a knife, slicing the bread, cutting himself a piece. He also cut himself a slice of cheese. "You borrowed many great ideas from Rousseau. He first wrote that early childhood trauma shaped our character. He was brutally honest about himself and the sins of his personal life. He valued and tried to serve the truth. But you hide from your truth. You, who hold yourself out as the wise guru who knows what psychological health is and isn't!""History shouldn't judge me by these private matters such as my sex life or how I raised my children," Freud said sitting back in his chair folding his arms. "I should be judged by the contributions I made to the science of man.""History is not that kind," Wagner said, "Historians are voracious truth seekers, and we, the famous, are their special targets."The truth," Nietzsche pronounced pouring himself a glass of wine. "What is the truth? You talk like there is such a thing. The truth is what the victor in war says it is. David, how much do your American History books focus on the American Indians or the Trail of Tears? How much credit do the slaves and their ancestors get for their contribution to America and their fight for freedom? Who were the Sherpas who led Sir Edmund Hillary to the top of Mount Everest? All truth is relative. Everybody has a different version of truth. That's why trying to do good or right is so absurd. There is no good or right, because what is good for one person is bad for another. Leave Sigmund alone. In some cultures, it is a fine thing to have two wives. Madame Pompadour shepherded over one hundred mistresses for Louis the Fifteenth. No one seems to begrudge Louis a mistress. Why are you giving Sigmund hell for this?""Because," Bonhoeffer replied, sitting up, elbows on his knees, dressed in his minister’s tan sports jacket, a starched white shirt, and ministerial collar. "He developed a whole theory of neurosis around family dynamics, called the Oedipus complex. Like you, Richard, and you, Fritz, Sigmund thought all wisdom originated in Greece. He was obsessed with Greek mythology and antiquities. While the two of you were disciples of Aeschylus, Sigmund found his wisdom in Sophocles, and he built his theory around the play, Oedipus, the King, and his own personal history of how his mother created family dysfunction by rejecting his father and adoring him." He reached into his pleated brown trousers pulled out a package of cigarettes, thumped the pack to release one cigarette. He retrieved and lit it. "And if he's going to make such a big deal about how a mother loving her son can destroy a family and create a narcissistic son, what damage do you think it would do to a family for a father to take his wife's sister as his mistress and not explore the implications of that and why was it, that out of seven Freud children, only Anna, the baby, amounted to much?"Sigmund, wouldn't Anna be an excellent case study?""Perhaps," he said, "but in some things, I have taken great pains to maintain my privacy. Obviously, I failed.""The truth comes out," I said. "Your colleague Jung.""I never considered him my colleague," Freud interrupted. "He was my student, who betrayed me.""Well, he considered you his colleague. And he said that there were treasures in our repressed dark side and that the sun eventually found its way to expose these parts and when it did, the sun transformed feces into fertilizer.""Yes," Freud answered, sitting back in his chair, and pulling out another cigar. This one, he didn't light. He just put it in his mouth and chewed on its end."I agree that we shouldn't glorify truth-telling," Bonhoeffer said, taking off his wire-rimmed glasses, and using his handkerchief to clean the lenses. "Evil persons distort reality to suit their purposes. We should not consider rewarding the evil person on the few occasions when they tell the truth. Moral principles just become tools of the evil. Fanatics have principles. We must make exceptions to general rules that often seem just. We must ignore reputation, conscience, facts and anything else that justifies an evil status quo. We must act against evil. In any given context, there is a right thing to do, a way to oppose evil. That action may not seem right to those who follow social conventions but if it stands against evil, it is right. We must use evil as our organizing force. Our compass, our North Star is whatever selfless action opposes evil. Serving ‘the truth,' whatever that is, may simply be another tool of evil.""Evil may be your North Star, Dietrich," a tall, thin E.O. Wilson said. Like Freud, Bonhoeffer and Nietzsche, he wore wire-rimmed glasses. He was the only one among the five guests, who did not have a tobacco habit. He was dressed in an academic frumpy, wrinkled, gray suit and loose tie, around a light blue shirt, with the top button unbuttoned. "But my moral North Star is the truth, and I think I'm the only one of us who believes in absolute truth. I’m surprised Dietrich doesn't. I'm not a religious man. Oh, I come from Alabama, and we have our gods in Alabama. They are football quarterbacks, large breasts, Jack Daniels and Jesus. I traded in Jesus for science and the study of nature. I suppose I'm a lot like a tribal shaman from prehistoric times. They were trying to explain nature and how nature acted on man. They used metaphysical gods to do that. Now science has proven that God does not exist in the heavens, that nature has laws, which if we understand them, we can manipulate and create various forms of matter and energy.” He reached for an orange and began to peel it as he spoke."I study nature in the form of insects, and I find that there are laws of how creatures act in communities. These are natural laws. They are the absolute truth when we discover them. But the problem with absolute truth is that the universe is expanding. Reality is always changing. In Nature, old species are dying, and new ones are being born. Every absolute truth we discover begins to change the moment we discover it. Penicillin killed germs in 1960, but it doesn’t so much today."And when we do discover some new truth, new questions we don't understand present themselves to us. Our search is endless.” He put the orange peel in the ash tray next to Freud’s banana peel and cigar and put an orange section in his mouth."I am trying to be a prophet for a new religion and that religion is the science of nature, particularly earth's nature. We humans do what all of earth's creatures do. We rearrange our habitats to suit us. And we are on the verge of selfishly destroying the habitat of other species vital to our survival."Oh, I'm not worried about Nature or Earth because Nature always wins in our struggle against it. If we continue on this current path, Nature will allow us to explode atomic bombs and destroy humanity. Nature will allow us to pollute the atmosphere and water so that we all die from our own pollution. Then we will be gone like the dinosaurs and so many other of earth's species. Our planet won't care. It will continue creating new species that can adapt to live on earth until it spins into an orbit that cannot sustain life.” Wagner reached for an apple and took a loud crunching bite as Wilson talked."We humans are blessed to be on this blue planet. Our religion could and should be understanding its nature and its rules. Species that live successfully on earth exist in communities. Those, who seem to survive best, follow certain community standards, laws of nature, absolute truths, at least for a while."We can learn about these laws, just as Newton and physical sciences are learning about the laws of energy and matter. This search for Nature's truth is an exciting, enthralling, adventure. I want to blow the trumpet and be one of those who sounds the call inviting all humans to join this search.” Nietzsche put his cigarette out in the ashtray and shook his head disagreeing Wilson continued. "I believe that as we search for nature's rules and laws that we will also discover the true science of man, as you, Fritz and you, Sigmund, have tried to do. I think many of human science's truths that we learn will be reflected in Jesus, Buddha, Confucius, Mohammad and pantheism."I expect these truths will be like David suggests. They will be paradoxes, polar opposite truths that can be combined and eventually seen as both true when we discover the oil that can reduce the friction between the two seemingly contradictory truths. David says a third position works magically to help opposites fit together as truth.” Wagner leaned back in his chair, laughed and took another loud crunch from his apple."The Bible tells one story after another. Each story represents a truth that opposes another truth revealed in another story. Do humans need rules of conduct? Yes, is the answer. And do humans need to ignore rules of conduct and use love and compassion to guide human behavior rather than rules? If you listen to Dietrich over here,” he nodded toward Bonhoeffer as Bonhoeffer ate another slice of his orange, “he seems to find a way in which these polarities are both real. In Genesis, there are two entirely different mythical versions of how we were created. One says we were created good in the image of God. The other says that we all have an inherent defect. Could they both be true? Is paradox the real nature of a human truth? Perhaps so.”"What does this have to do with evil?" Bonhoeffer asked.I had been taking notes. I put down my pen and pad and said, "Wilson, here makes the point that there is absolute truth; that truth can be relative and also absolute. That also seems to be what you are saying, Dietrich. Yes, it is wrong to take the life on another, except when it is not, like in your plot to kill Hitler. And it is wrong to rape a comatose woman unless she is our species last fertile female and she can become pregnant and bear a child. Generally, Wilson is saying we can know the truth and build a consensus reality around it. That is what science does. Abstract mathematical formulas have predicted physical reality.""That's Quatsch," Nietzsche said reaching for another cigarette."What is Quatsch?" Wilson asked."It is the German term for what you say is B.S.""What part of what I said is Quatsch? By the way, I like that word." I picked up my pen and pad and wrote it down."Because all ideas serve their creator in some way. You, David, developed a theory of sense of community because you were from a small town and you felt alienated in the city, so you tried to define the essential elements of the love and sense of community you knew in Arkadelphia, Arkansas.” He lit his cigarette, took a puff, and continued, “You wanted to see if you could reproduce those elements in a city, and even though you identified the elements, you have never accomplished your purpose. When you are so invested personally in your theory, how can we depend on it to be true? It is your truth because you want it to be so.""No, I didn't want it to be so," I said. Wagner laughed again and I continued talking ignoring him. "I wanted to know if it was or was not so. I didn't care what the answer was. I posed a question, and I used science to answer the question. Some of my ideas were wrong. I stupidly thought that shared values did not relate to cohesion in a community. I posed the question, used the scientific method, reduced responses to numbers and the numbers told me that I was wrong about that. I had to accept what the numbers said as the truth. That's science."Many of your social science colleagues," Nietzsche said tapping his cigarette ash in the ashtray, "quote Foucault who more recently picked up my flag of relative truth and waved it. They agree with him that there is no such thing in the human sciences as absolute truth because everyone is different and, people create their own individual truth relative to their circumstances, relative to who they are and how their egos need defending.""Yes, and I think they are wrong," I said putting my elbows on the table. "If all truth is relative and there is no universal truth, then we have no reason to condemn or fight Hitler when he slaughtered the Jews, or Idi Amin, or Stalin, or Donald Trump. If the truth is relative, then they were not wrong to do and say what they did and said. There is no basis to dispute their relative truths."This idea that truth is relative, and that societal truth is created by the strong makes Hitler possible.” I pushed back my chair, stood and pointed, “You, Sigmund and you, Richard and you, Fritz admire men like Julius Caesar who ruthlessly seize power like Hitler, Lenin, and Mussolini. You eschew morals with the term ‘bourgeois' and ridicule religious values as serving the status quo. You think that change requires a heroic, strong man who calculatingly manipulates others to seize power. The relativity of truth allows this because there is no absolute truth to oppose it."This,” I said sitting back down, “is one of the conditions I was searching for, that I think leads to mass evil. It is the suspension of the truth as a force, the censoring of the press, the elimination of contrary voices and opinions that come when we have a leader who spins the truth so that a lie looks like the truth and it becomes the truth of a whole people, their relative truth. Yes, Aryan Germans would benefit from the elimination of the Jews. It was good for them. Their egos need a scapegoat after their abysmal failure in WWI. And the Jews were easy targets because truth was relative.""This is confusing me," Freud said. "Sometimes truth is relative, and sometimes truth is absolute? How can that be?"“Gentlemen,” I said. “And I use the term loosely, as confusing as the truth may be, our time here is at an end.” I pushed my chair back from the table. “I haven’t said much about my visit to Nuremburg, because I don’t have the words to describe my experience there. I have a similar feeling about this place. Somehow the extravagance of Neuschwanstein Castle seems a part of the evil we are studying. This place also testifies to the extremes of human inequality. The fact that millions of people are fascinated by death camps and castles, that they pay millions in entry fees to the German government also seems somehow to be a part of this evil. All of this was built for the pleasure of one man, a chronically depressed man trying to buy his way into contentment at the expense of a nation.”“Ludwig, was an ubermensch,” Wagner said. “You will never understand.”“You are right. I won’t. At any rate, we take our leave of this place. We will reconvene in Cesky- Krumlov in Castle Gardens.”With these words, the table began to slowly disappear below the floor, replaced by a new floor.Cesky-KrumlovWhy Cesky-Krumlov in the Czech Republic? The answer is that it is a direct beneficiary of a deal with the devil.It was called Czechoslovakia prior to World War II. In the 19th century it was the industrial center of Europe. Next to Germany, it had Europe’s largest army. Hitler had always planned to expand eastward. He had never wished to create a western front. His plan was to conquer Eastern Europe and Russia exterminating all non-Germans just as the U.S. had exterminated the Native Americans. This plan was his version of Manifest Destiny. Czechoslovakia was his first target.He lined his troops on the border ready to attack. His pretext was that german-speaking people living in Sudetenland, a part of Czechoslovakia boarding Germany, were being persecuted and he had to defend them.Edvard Benés, the President of the Czechoslovakia government, could have put up a good fight. His troops were well-armed and the natural mountains gave them a distinct advantage, but he knew the German Luftwaffe would destroy Czechoslovakia’s beautiful towns and cities, Prague especially and Cesky-Krumlov as well, the small city that had maintained its historical buildings and beauty dating back to 1300s.He decided to preserve this historical architecture and spare his people the many deaths and great hardships that would come with war.Hitler’s troops moved quickly into Czechoslovakia, and took over the Czech industrial machine. Here Hitler built most of his tanks and airplanes. Prague, Cesky-Krumlov and the rest of Czechoslovakia were never victimized by German bombings.Cesky-Krumlov is a medieval town on the upper Volga River. The river runs through its middle. Several arched Romanesque bridges cross the river. Much of the town is a pedestrian only area. Few native Czech people live in the town. Most of the residences have been transformed into hotels or tourist rental apartments. Workers live outside of the town and commute to work.If one could eliminate the gawking tourists with cameras, one can imagine being hundreds of years back in time walking on the small cobblestone streets.Here the Volga River was a small stream. It was late summer. Rafting companies and beer halls dotted the river. Large eight-person rubber rafts filled with tourists holding paddles formed ribbons laughing convoys floating in the river. Each convoy has rafts of the same color, blue, red or orange. They floated the river, stopped for beer or burgers and fries and returned to their rafts and floated until they were too sunburned, too tired or too drunk to continue on. There were many pick-up spots where raft companies had buses to pick up the tourists and trucks with trailers to ferry the rafts back to their home base.Marietta and I were there to attend a wedding. We stayed in a tourist apartment complex containing five apartments. The wedding party had three of these five. The apartments were newly renovated. Every inch of the building was utilized. We were in an attic apartment. It was impossible to get into our king-sized bed on the roof’s side because of the roof’s slant. The sinks, toilets and tile were all new. And many buildings around us were being renovated.The wedding had the promise of producing many dramas. Both sets of parents, the Czech brides’ and the American groom’s parents were divorced. The Czech father and mother did not speak. The American parents spoke, but there were undertones of resentment beneath their forced smiles.Marietta and I have a persistent conflict about packing for a trip. I want to pack light, and she wants to pack the whole closet.“Be sure to pack nice shoes for the wedding,” she said as I was packing.I had some very light woven leather shoes that I thought would not take up much space in the bad and would do for the wedding. Marietta approved them. The shoes’ soles were crepe rubber, light-weight.The wedding was a mile from our apartment. Walking was our only option. As I walked, I noticed the rubber soles of my shoes were separating from the leather uppers. By the time we got to the park, the wedding venue, my shoes made a flopping sound as I walked.Sitting through the wedding was no problem but getting to the reception, another mile walk would be difficult.The reception was two hours after the wedding at 4:30. Marietta stayed in the park after the wedding and I attempted a trek back to the apartment to change shoes. I got half way there before my shoes completely separated from their soles and I was walking with leather uppers and sock feet on cobblestones.My feet were not happy. I sat down on a bench and luckily Marietta walked by on her way to the reception. I showed her my shoes.“I can’t walk another step,” I said. “Will you go get me my other pair of shoes back at the apartment?”“No,” she answered. “I’m in high heels and I can’t walk on these cobblestones either. I’ll look around. We are in the middle of town. Maybe we can buy you some shoes. You stay here. Let me see what I can find.”She returned with a pair of cheap imitation Birkenstock sandals. Her foot is the same length as mine so she knew they would fit.I made it the rest of the day and into the night comfortably in my new sandals.The most clearly Czech part of this wedding was the traditional Czech ritual of the bride breaking a plate. Between the main meal and desert, people were asked to gather and observe. The maid of honor handed the bride a plate. She raised it above her head and threw it hard on the stone floor. It disintegrated. The best man gave the groom a broom and a dustpan. He swept the pieces of the broken plate into a pile and bent down to sweep the pile into the dustpan. As he did, his wife put her foot on his head. Then she bent down to help. Everyone clapped and laughed. This ceremony seemed to be an antidote to the potential male arrogance of the Czech men. In the Czech culture, men are active in housekeeping work. They are expected to help cook and clean.Several people, men, women, friends and family of both the bride and groom made many toasts throughout the evening. The bride and groom separately worked the room and by the end of the night had managed to greet and speak with all 100 or so guests.I began this wedding discussion looking for possible family dramas. I was disappointed. The spirit of this event couldn’t have been happier or more loving and accepting. The wedding party went on into the morning.Our Third ConclaveNow to the next day and the convocation of minds focused on evil. Six white wooden folding chairs were arranged in a circle under a giant European Elm tree on flat terrain in Castle Gardens above the castle at Czesky-Krumlov. We were behind and above the grassy area where the wedding was the day before.As I took my seat in the circle the others were seated, Wagner to my left, E.O. Wilson to my right, Freud, next to him, Nietzsche next to Freud, then Bonhoeffer completing our six sitting between Wagner and Freud.As I sat down Wagner said, “What no food or drink for us? You couldn’t even get the wedding leftovers?”“Sorry about that Richard,” I said.“And people strolling about everywhere,” Nietzsche queried.“Yes, I am afraid so,” I said. “We are not in Neuschwanstein Castle anymore. We are simply people among other people.”“I like that,” Bonhoeffer said.“I don’t,” Wagner said.“So we left off with Sigmund being confused about the truth,” I said looking at my notes.“Enough about the truth,” Bonhoeffer said. “I want Sigmund to explain his life force’s Eros’ opposition to his death force, Thanatos. How can the superego and the id both be motivating forces at the same time?""Thanatos," I said, leaning back into my chair and looking up into the tree limbs. "This was Sigmund's attempt to explain the death of 100,000,000 people in the first half of the twentieth century. It was not because of evil. For Sigmund, it was a species event, balanced by an offsetting species event of significant increase in birthrate. It happens in coyotes and wolves. When their population is significantly reduced, and their survival in their territory is threatened, the number of pups per litter increases. It is the same in horticulture, isn't it, Wilson? Pruning is good for roses. Perhaps, Thanatos or the death instinct is our species' attempt to prune itself.""That's right," Freud said taking out a cigar from his vest pocket. "It has little to do with religion, right or wrong. It is another of our instincts, and I like how you juxtapose our instincts in a paradox, David. Eros is on a polarity with Thanatos.""Sigmund, when are you going to grow some gonads?" Bonhoeffer said picking up a small stick from the ground and tossing it at Freud. "There is evil. Evil slaughtered millions of your tribe. And you say it is instinct.""Yes, I do," Freud said, ducking away from the flying stick. "You and others proclaim you know the truth and what is right for the world. When I see this, I get sick. I don't trust your self-serving pronouncements of right and wrong or the truth. Such clerical moral judgments have oppressed humankind for much too long. I aim to avoid this topic of good and evil. I think this idea of morals is a culture’s attempt to repress self-expression. I don't trust righteous people who say they know the truth for others.""You mean you don't like it when someone judges you for humping your wife's sister," Wagner said laughing."You all are being too hard on Sigmund," Wilson said leaning forward on his elbows, "especially you, Dietrich. Before Freud discovered and advocated talking therapy, people, usually women, were confined in mental asylums in cells, sometimes chained to their beds or the wall simply because they were sad and anxious. Freud labeled them hysterical, and he believed that they suffered from this form of what he called “neurosis” because of sexual urges they could not express and if given time and an empathetic ear, they would disclose their forbidden urges, and when they did, they would be cured. And he had some success. He carefully recorded notes of his sessions documenting his work. His talking therapy was a significant advance in the treatment of psychological problems in his time. We own him a great debt.""Thank you, E.O.," Freud said lighting his cigar and taking a puff. "I like to think I made a contribution to human science.""And you have," Wilson said. "Brain research is proving that lots of the brain's work to control heart rate, for example, or to regulate body temperature is done unconsciously. While we have no evidence yet of the unconscious working as you described, we do have considerable evidence that there is an unconscious part of our brains.” Wilson picked up a stick from the ground and began scratching a star of David in the ground."And you offer a theory of human dysfunction that is very relevant to our conversation on evil. You showed how early trauma could and does skew a child's worldview; how it can mentally cripple us for life, filling us with unnecessary ego defenses that become aggressive, mean actions that hurt others and alienate and isolate ourselves."Your idea of how the conscience becomes an over-developed, what you call ‘superego,' is something that you contend develops in early childhood to avoid the anxiety associated with punishment from our parents. We use it to reassure our parents that we will punish ourselves, so they needn't bother. As children, you said, that to please our parents, we sacrificed broader options for action in the interest of keeping our parents happy. This becomes a rigid way of thinking that limits us in adult life.” Wagner put his foot on Wilson’s star and rubbed it out. Wilson ignored him and continued speaking."You were a student of humans. You used Darwin's ideas, and you said instinct was the mainspring of our behavior. You were looking for the truth of human life, the order that we all share, a more or less basic human nature. You placed evil inside our instincts, despairing that we cannot change ourselves. You believe that we are not the malleable creatures described by enlightenment thinkers; that our conflict with society is inevitable, as Nietzsche suggests.” Nietzsche nods and pulls a cigarette from an open pack in his coat pocket."Like Rousseau, you see us as born with the great potential to use our instincts in a healthy, creative life, but we become socialized, inevitably, into objects used by society, rigid beings who neurotically defend ourselves by repressing our healthy instincts. This is your way of explaining how evil can happen in individuals and for you, the individual is where social evil begins. It starts in some personal imbalance that society can manipulate into mass evil. Is that next?“Yes, you have summarized a version of what I think,” Freud said. “All this is very relevant to our discussion."“Wilson,” Nietzsche said, “you haven’t opined on evil yet. Where do you think it comes from?”“I think evil comes from ignorance and the fear of the quest,” Wilson said. “Many of us want to know. We want to believe we have mastery over our world.”“While that is well and good, we must also admit that we don’t know and that whatever mastery we have is limited.”“I don’t believe in a god. I believe in an ordered universe that operates lawfully. If I had a god, it would be our planet earth and my mission in the service of my god would be to understand and protect this planet from the damage of humankind. It is my constant quest to learn more about nature. Remember, I believe we can know the truth and that the truth is absolute. Knowing the truth doesn’t stop the quest for truth because each truth we discover creates more questions. Every discovery opens doors for another search. And the universe is constantly expanding. This means that as the universe expands, more truths are being created and old truths changed.“We humans are privileged to have the brain power to understand much of what is happening. We are fortunate to be able to watch and learn as the universe unfolds itself.“But many of us refuse this invitation from the universe. We pretend we know. We long for certainty so much that we create myths that provide a façade made of false truths and half-truths. We use our myth as a defense against our ignorance.“Our internal quest to know ourselves is just as important as the external quest. Truths about ourselves are just like the truths of the universe. One discovery creates more questions. For most of us we begin life believing we know everything about ourselves and we end life believing that we know so little and there is so much more to learn about ourselves.“All of us know that we have limits, but we want to believe that there are some special people among us who have the answers. We are excited and awed by people who proclaim that they are the experts; they have the answers. They are our savior. They can bring back glory or can discover the way to the promise land.“Instead of joining the human quest for knowledge, instead of acknowledging that no one of us knows the way, we look for gurus and heroes to give us a shortcut, to do the work for us and give us the answers, the truth that is certain and never changes.“This desire for certainty and fear of the quest and of the unknown is what makes so many of us vulnerable to narcissistic people who use our fear to control and manipulate us to do evil in their name, using their authority to justify wrong, the authority we give them because they are our hero.“Thank you, Wilson,” I said. “We are here today in part to honor you. We are on a hill outside of Czesky-Krumlov. We happen to be in the Czech Republic, but we could be anywhere that people use land to grow things. We sit on a rolling pasture on the ground in a corner where trees on the fence line offer shade. Notice how E. O.’s gaze is often on the ground watching the ants, etymologist that he is.”“Thank you,” Wilson said. “But if this is my turn to lead the discussion on evil you have put me at a great disadvantage by placing me outside. I will be so easily distracted by all the life around me. I’s so curious.”“Didn’t you say that ignorance, like Richard’s here, is the source of evil?” Freud asked.“That’s part of what I said,” Wilson agreed.“If that’s true,” Freud said, “then universal education should be the answer, but it’s not. Richard here, can read and write. Fritz is brilliant and earned a Ph.D. and we can see to what his Ubermensch idea led.“Horace Mann started this education movement in hopes that wiping out ignorance through education would protect society from evil and that clearly didn’t work.”“The problem is not with education,” Wilson said. “The problem is with people like you, Sigmund, who believed they are right and many of your theories are right. But it is the certainty that your theories are right; it is the certainty that you know that creates evil. You can educate someone to read and write. They may be brilliant, like Fritz and say they are so smart that they have memorized the Bible and they believe it is, no they know it is the word of God, infallible. They are educated, but they remain ignorant because they believe they know. They are so desperate for certainty and clarity about life that they take the beautiful stories of the Bible and they insist on knowing and demanding that we agree with them that these stories are not stories at all, but the absolute truth.“That is where evil comes from and Sigmund, you believe that you gave the world the truth about human nature, don’t you?”“Yes, I do,” Sigmund confessed. “And so do millions of mental health professionals and scholars all over the world.”“Sigmund, you are so deluded,” Wilson said. “Women have been trying to tell you that you are half-right only and maybe not even that. Your theories are about thrusting your instinct into the world. They are about penetrating and seed-planting, like I said earlier.“That’s one part of creativity. I’ll give you that, but look at this ant marching back to his family underground carrying this bit of a leaf.” Wilson pointed to a large black ant with a piece of leaf captured by its pinscher. “Why is the ant doing that? It’s to nurture its tribe.“When women have tried to tell you to restrain your enthusiasm for seed-planting and pick up a towel and wash a dish, you call them castrating They are only asking you to help with the tending/nurturing side of creativity.“When women have ambition, and want to offer ideas and theories and project their desires into the world, you accuse them of penis envy.“That’s ignorance, Sigmund, and it quickly becomes oppressive and evil.”“Wilson, how can you say that we should search for truth, that there is absolute truth and then you say when we find it and proclaim it with certainty, we are evil?” Nietzsche said.“I’ve tried to explain this before, but you don’t want to hear this. Life is full of ambiguity. The fact that we search for clarity in clouds of ambiguity does not make the ambiguity disappear and clarity appear. Ambiguity will always be there. And that’s a great thing because it always gives us a reason to question and search. It is the fear of the ambiguous that’s evil.“Most of us now realize that difference is not the foundation of a social hierarchy and that if it is, that is evil. Now we are confronted by people who embrace their ambiguity calling themselves neither male nor female, but “trans” people, ambiguous. Some of us are threatened by them peeing in the same toilet as we do. What are we afraid of?“I confess; I want to know that when I place my foot in front of me there will ‘certainly’ be ground under my foot. I am frightened when this certainty disappears. But sometimes it does.“When that happens and ambiguity replaces certainty, we are all afraid, at first. We all want to make the ambiguity go away and make the certainty return. As I said before, sometimes we become so frightened of ambiguity and so desperate for certainty that we invent certainty in our minds when ambiguity has not yet been resolved with information and knowledge.“We can’t abide ambiguity any longer so we create a fictional certainty and if we can’t do that we look desperately for someone who can. We follow anyone who can convince us that they know and can simplify life for us.“If we can find real faith patience, so that in the face of not knowing, when we are surrounded by ambiguity, we can patiently search and build certainty carefully bit by bit; and further if we can see ambiguity as an invitation to and adventure, to an investigation into an unknown cave, we will find ourselves intrigued rather than frightened. “This intrigue, this wonder, this curiosity is the antidote to ignorance and evil.”“None of you have addressed the current popular theory about evil,” I said.“What’s that?” Wagner asked.“It is that evil is caused by alienation,” I said. “The idea comes from Karl Marx. He said that our society is sick because we create a social infrastructure that marginalizes others. He contends that all people should have a significant place in society and share its wealth. And that our society is sick and will always be out of balance when some people are inside and safe and others are so alienated from society that they don’t belong or matter.“That makes sense,” Bonhoeffer said. “If Hitler had been accepted to the Vienna Art Academy when he had applied, we would not have had WWII. He was rejected, angry and alienated, looking for someone to blame. He blamed the Jews. What if he had been accepted? How many people can’t find a way to play in society and are marginalized and discounted. This was one source of Hitler’s hate and he was just one of millions of unemployed, marginalized alienated Germans after WWI, looking for a scapegoat and a road forward to success. This was a recipe for hate.“And in the United States today,” Wilson said, “Many white male workers have lost their job to automation and globalization. They blame the loss of their good jobs on immigrants and or on trade policies that allow cheap goods to be produced outside the U.S. and sold inside.“This is only two of several factors that have threatened the white male. Others include women moving into areas that were once predominantly male professions and white men pridefully refusing to go back to school to be re-educated for more technically advance jobs. Consequently U. S. corporations must import educated immigrant employees for jobs that these white males could apply for if they would be willing to be retrained. This makes for an alienated segment of the U.S. populations who are looking for a hero to rescue them and protect them from their enemies.”“This is just the beginning,” I said. “What will happen when trucks, trains, and cars drive themselves? Millions of people will lose their jobs. Technology will displace desk clerks in hotels, bank tellers in banks, research specialists in law firms and people everywhere will lose their jobs. Unemployment will be endemic everywhere.”“What do you propose?” Wagner asked.“I propose that we use the New Deal approach to jobs. We can create jobs that serve the public, jobs to build roads and bridges, jobs to care for our national parks, jobs to create public art.“What if we paid one parent in every family to tend children below the age of six? What if our schools had smaller classes and teachers were better paid?“There would be zero unemployment. The wealthy few would be heavily taxes to pay for this.”“But David,” Nietzsche said, “you are forgetting about how insatiable people’s appetites are and how creative people can be in stimulating human desire. People pay so much for services and things they don’t need, but that advertisers and social climbers convince us that we need. Wanting is the economy’s engine. We have thought technology would put people out of work for over two hundred years and it hasn’t happened yet. The reason is because people want. And other people titillate their wants and other people work to satisfy these wants. As people have more free time, they want more. As they want more, more jobs are created.“David, you are an impatient fear monger creating answers for people. You are asking for a hero to save others, protect them from danger that may not exist just as you accuse me and Richard of doing. Face the ambiguity, the unknown of the future. Don’t give an answer to a problem that isn’t there yet. Trust the invisible hand of the market. Let desire do its job. Be patient.“What we need from government are regulations that create equal opportunity and level the playing field. Yes, we need a progressive tax structure in which the wealthy pay a larger percentage of their income than the poor or middle class. Yes, we need for government to spend money on infrastructure so that goods, and people can move and trade and expand. Yes, we need public art to tell our collective story. And yes, we need to pay for the nurture and care of our next generation. But we don’t need the government to rescue us. We need them to empower us.”“David, this is boring,” Wagner said. “And I know from boring. I’m not here to discuss the merits of capitalism and socialism.”“Yes, I agree,” Wilson said. “You should stop here. You could go on forever. There are more reasons for evil than we can know. We have added to the discussion. The more we learned, the more we saw a new point of view. For me, I think we have done what we can.”“Yes, I agree,” Bonhoeffer said.“How about you, Sigmund and you Fritz?” I asked.“I’m ready to give it up,” Freud said.“Me too,” Nietzsche agreed.“So let me summarize,” I said.“No,” Wagner said. “I’ve had enough of this evil talk. The spirit world is calling us back. We only have so much time to be here. We are leaving.”ViennaAfter the convocation, we left Cesky-Krumlov in a car with Henry (the stepfather of the groom) and Susan, the groom’s mother. We drove in the rented Audi on a variety of roads from small highways to large eight-lane autobahns, through rolling hills bordered by forests and farms. We noticed that when we crossed the Czech/Austrian border that the roads improved.We stayed in a tourist apartment just off Vienna’s Ringstrasse. The “Ring” is a road that encompasses Vienna’s center where its major historic palaces, cathedrals, museums and universities are located. This is another UNESCO World Heritage Site.The buildings appeared to me to all be some version of Greco-Roman architecture, but my knowledge of architecture is limited. Brochures say that several styles are represented here, neo-romantic, neo-attic, Flemish Gothic, neo-renaissance and neo-baroque. I’m sure I left out a neo-style, but all were faced with granite, most had columns and statues carved into them.The building courtyards were now public parks landscaped with flowers, trees and grass. Every aspect of the buildings and parks were clean and well-tended.The buildings are grand but the Ringstrasse was amazing. It was a wide boulevard with a park in the middle. Outside the ring was another large street paralleling the ring’s circle. It was for mass transit vehicles and industrial delivery vehicles.All of this was built around the same time Ludwig was indulging himself building castles in Bavaria.The Ring was built on what had been the Vienna city wall moat and berm fortification over 500 meters wide. When Emperor Franz Joseph ordered the construction of the Ringstrasse in 1857, it was to be a remodeling of Vienna much like Napoleon’s rebuilding of Paris.Our apartment was a street off the Ring. It came with two bicycles. We didn’t know it when we rented it, but these bicycles were the apartment’s best asset. Vienna is very bicycle-friendly. It is mostly flat. The park in the middle of the Ringstrasse had bicycle paths. We went everywhere on these bikes. And when we needed to get somewhere quickly we loved using Vienna’s subway system.Vienna has taken advantage of the now locked and dammed Danube River that runs through the cities business district. They have expanded Vienna University to what once was a Danube flood plain. The University’s buildings are cutting edge architecture designed by architects from all over the world.The parks in and around the Ringstrasse have statues of notables, Goethe, Schiller, Maria Theresa, Prince Eugene, Richard Strauss among others.One of Vienna’s greatest citizens is striking by the absence of his statue, Freud. In fact, it was not until the 1970’s when Austria’s ambassador to the U.S. heard from so many people about their interest in Freud, that Vienna began to make plans for a Freud museum at Berggasse 19, Freud’s residence for forty-seven years. The Father of Psychoanalysis was not even awarded full professorship in the University until seventeen years after he applied.London gladly helped Anna Freud establish a Freud museum there long before the one in Vienna. Because of this Viennese snub, Anna only allowed a few of Freud’s possessions to be housed at Berggasse 19.I went there to visit. The address is on a hill slopping toward the river. The entrance is unremarkable. I entered the front door and saw a line of people formed on the stairs to the second floor. I waited my turn. When it came, I paid my ten Euros and was allowed inside this sparsely decorated space of mostly empty walls and floors, only a few bits of furniture. There was a small theatre room with wooden benches. Inside, a movie-loop played a twenty-minute film documentary of Freud’s life and family.I left disappointed, walked up the street to find a tiny park, about two acres with a barely visible sign engraved in a large granite boulder with the words Freud Park. It is adjacent to a much bigger, much better-known park, Votivpark. I would imagine that most Viennese don’t know Freud Park exists. I guess Freud should not feel too slighted by Austria because they inscribed his likeness on paper currency in the 1980s worth than about $4.50, today about $10.00.As I mentioned earlier two of the best aspects of Vienna are the prolific flat bike paths and the Danube (yes, its blue) River. We took a bike ride alongside the river some five miles and were greeted with some of the most beautiful public art/graffiti I had ever seen. These giant paintings adorned walls and bridge abutments. Metal sculptures dotted the path. We had lunch on a boat/restaurant and biked home taking photos of some of this amazing art.Our Fourth ConclaveOur illustrious convocation of minds reconvened under a small grove of about six trees in Freud Park. No light came to the ground among these trees, so the ground was bare. Six wooden folding chairs formed a circle. We sat as before, Wagner and Wilson on either side of me, Nietzsche opposite me with Freud between him and Wilson and Bonhoeffer between Wagner and Nietzsche.“Our accommodations keep going downhill,” Wagner observed.“Yes, they do,” I agreed. “But this is a great step above where we will meet next time, in Prague.”“I want to thank you, David, for bringing us here,” Freud said. “This spot used to be a hotel. My wife and I stayed there when we moved to Vienna looking for a home. And I want to thank you for acknowledging my contribution to the study of human nature.”“I like these light aluminum tall-backed plastic mesh chairs you have for us, David,” Bonhoeffer said. “We didn’t have such chairs in my day.”“Well, I should hope that science would add comfort with time,” Wagner said, his eyes drawn to a young boy playing a guitar and singing, an empty hat resting on the ground in front of him, and with his girlfriend sitting next to him staring adoringly at him and thanking passers-by who left coins in his hat.“That could be you in your next life, Richard,” Nietzsche said. “He sings and plays as badly as you did.”“But I would never sing someone else’s songs,” Wagner replied. “My music would gain fame wherever it was heard.”A police car, sirens blaring, drove by the park.“Your bombastic music would be noticed like the sound of that police car.”“Enough bickering,” I said. “We are here today to hear what Sigmund has to say about how the contagion of evil spreads. He wrote a book called Civilization and Its Discontents. Surely he has something to say on the subject.”“Actually, I don’t have much to say in that book on evil,” Sigmund said. “That book was about how the natural instincts of individuals collide with the needs of the community. I pose a dialectic tension between the individual and the collective that is never resolved. Sometimes, when the community requires individuals to repress their impulses to conform to the needs of others, these individuals develop neuroses.”A frisbee, followed by a golden retriever, fell a few feet from our circle. The dog pounced, picked it up and returned to his handler in the green grass of the adjacent park.“Come on Sigmund, can’t you say it simpler than that?” Nietzsche said. “What you mean is that when people want to fuck and nobody will fuck them, they eventually go crazy. Isn’t that what you mean?”“Yes, that is what I meant at first,” Freud said, pulling a cigar from inside his coat. “But I now think that our instinct extends beyond sexual reproduction. It has to do with the desire to create and that is opposed by another instinctive drive, the desire to destroy. How else, other than this instinctive desire to destroy, do you explain World Wars I and II?”“So you think evil lies in the heart of man,” Bonhoeffer said, “but you would rather call it instinct because you are a man of science. Is that your best shot?”“Well, I’m an atheist. Is that why you are attacking me, Dietrich?” Freud said lighting his cigar and blowing smoke.“No, it’s because you are a Jew,” Wagner said, “who has no right to speak about such important matters.”“Yes, he does,” I said. “Sigmund had had more influence on the world of ideas and literature than any of us here. Your hatred, Richard, is evil and I understand that you are infected by this disease. You are a prime example of how early childhood trauma can create a character disorder as a defense. Guilt and other neurotic defenses such as repression of instincts are the price we pay to live in society with others. When the price is too high, we become bitter, mean and angry. You could argue that the moral oppression of the Victorian era created the evil of the world wars.“Religion is a tool of society to force repression and guilt on individuals in order to curb our innate impulses. Sigmund says life’s purpose is to pursue pleasure. There is no higher purpose. And we will always be thwarted in this endeavor by the fact that we get sick and die. Nature destroys and erodes whatever we build and others won’t tolerate our lascivious desires.”“In other words, life sucks,” Nietzsche said, pulling, pulling his blanket up around his chin.“Yes,” Bonhoeffer said. “Life does suck if all its about is pleasing yourself. And yes, I agree with both you, Fritz and Sigmund, that the pursuit of personal happiness and self-satisfaction will inevitably bring misery.” He pulled off his glasses and began to clean them with his shirt. “Sigmund, look at your affair with Mina, your sister-in-law, and Richard, did all your acclaim and success bring you happiness? No, you simply wanted more. And Cosmina, the wife you stole from your best friend, became your tormentor, not the refuge and muse you had hoped for.“I agree happiness is an illusion and a life chasing it is misery. But what about meaning, participating in something that transcends all of us.”“But there is no God,” Nietzsche said.“That’s what you believe,” Bonhoeffer said, “and I cannot prove otherwise, but emotions are contagious. Human beings can share a spirit. We can pursue a goal together to bring peace, justice and freedom to humankind. We don’t have to keep chasing the tail of personal happiness.”“Sigmund, I went to your old home in Vienna today, Berggasse 19,” I said. “You would like what they are doing with the place. It costs ten euros to get in. When I arrived twenty people stood on the stairs to the second floor waiting for the door to Apartment #5 to open. When it did, the docent invited five people inside. The rest remained reverently standing on the stairs in silence. It was as if we were waiting to get to go inside the tomb of Jesus.“Once inside and ten euros paid, I entered rooms empty of furniture with, and you won’t believe this Sigmund, with exhibits of women who were supposedly empowered and inspired by you and the psychoanalytic movement. In addition to these exhibits, someone drew a timeline on the wall up the stairs depicting the women’s rights movement and the particular women who were part of the inner circle of psychoanalysis.“Can you believe that? You, a liberator of women. You, who accused women of being inferior to men and of suffering from penis envy and having a desire to castrate men, you are a hero of women’s liberation.“Anyway, that’s how they portray you at the museum. Oh, they play some of your home movies. The thing I like most about you, Sigmund, is that you loved your dogs. They were mostly chows. When you moved to London, you may remember, the British quarantined Lün, your lost dog, for six months and you visited her in quarantine every chance you had. That’s what I admire most about you.“Back to Berggasse 19, the Austrian Prime Minister in the 1970’s was criticized for not giving you the recognition that you deserved. When he returned home, he sponsored legislation for the state to buy your old home and create the museum. Now they are making a fortune on pilgrims who came to see your home and office. I went on a Tuesday. I would guess a thousand people a day visit. And there is nothing really there. All your artifacts are in a museum in London, not here. But people still come. That is how powerful your legend remains.“And here we are in a park named for you, three blocks from your house and one block from a subway stop and still no grand statue, and you are much more important to world history and culture than Goethe and Schiller.”“David,” Wagner said, “sorry to interrupt your praise of this Jew, but as I listened to you I get the sense that you dislike dichotomies.”"Yes, I get that too," Nietzsche said pulling out his cigarette and lighting one. "But I think simple polarities like the Dionysian vs. the Apollonian are very illustrative and are useful in describing and persuading.""You have some theory that you developed with J. R. Newbrough about the third position that relates to dichotomies, don't you?” Wilson asked."Yes, I do," I said. I was nervous now that I was the focus. I stood and folded my arms feeling the need to back away. "And I think that using simplistic dualities is one of the best persuasive weapons of a demagogue. When we have two opposites, we tend to compare them looking for which one is the better of the two. We place them into our minds in an artificial competition, and we declare one side the winner. Should we choose Sparta and the order of that Apollonian world over Athens and its chaotic, emotional, Dionysian world?"Do we have to choose?” I stepped behind Wagner and looked at Freud. “Sigmund, your contemporary, Carl Jung, came up with this idea in his study of Heraclitus law. Heraclitus observed that when you put your foot in the water it displaced the water, but when you pulled out your foot, the water returned as if your foot had never been there. From this, he concluded that every proposition attracts its opposite. Your foot is the proposition, but it does not create a space in the water it displaces. When you lift it out, the opposing water or idea returns.”Nietzsche pushed a stick into the dirt and pulled it out leaving a hole in the dirt. He said, “It doesn’t work with terra firma.”“No,” I said. “This metaphor requires liquid.”“That’s one interpretation of Heraclitus Law,” Nietzsche said. “Another is that change is constant. Nothing is permanent.”“Give him a break,” Freud said. “He can spin his theory if he wants. You’ve spun yours and I have mine.”"The point is every idea attracts a ‘yes, but’,” I said. “And the debate between the dichotomous propositions is never resolved because both are true. And truth always contains both ideas. Thus, truth is a paradox."Demagogues, who want to perpetuate evil, create a dichotomy of ‘us’ and ‘them.' The ‘us,’ in this polarity, is always better than the ‘them.' Because they are better than, superior to, they must protect themselves from the invasion or the corruption that the ‘them' can do to the ‘us.’”Wagner interrupted and said, “Would you move somewhere else. I hate you talking to my back.”I moved behind my empty chair and continued, “Dichotomies draw a straightforward and definitive picture of a false reality. Reality is not simple, and it is rarely clear. Reality is complicated, and it always contains more than two parts. The ‘them' for the Nazis included, of course, Jews, but also the gypsies, the homosexuals, the mentally ill, mentally retarded and the non-white.”"They were purifying the race to create society for the ‘Ubermensch' and the super race,” Wagner said."Yes, they were trying to make everyone alike. The reality is that there are differences among us. There always will be. And yes, races may have some innate differences in addition to skin color. Certainly, men and women are different, and we can see how this dichotomy has been used to discriminate against women.”“Viva la difference,” Wagner said raising his pipe.I ignored him and continued, "And the reality is that individuals within race and color transcend the norms of race and sex. No one conforms to a stereotype, even one that has some validity. Differences exist inside commonalities."Why would Hitler not meet with Jessie Owens, the Negro Olympic medalist who defeated all comers of all races in the Munich Olympiad of 1936?”“Because he was inferior,” Wagner shouted taking a pull from his pipe.I ignored him again. "Owens proved that Hitler's dichotomy of ‘us' and ‘them' was false. Reality was more complicated than the Nazi version he sold to Germany. And what about the yellow people, the Japanese who were Hitler's allies? Another inconsistent fly in his simple ointment.”“Given time, he would have dealt with them too,” Wagner said.I continued my habit of ignoring him and said, "The use of dichotomies to simplify reality can be a very useful polemic tool. All dichotomies illustrate is that one thing is different than the other."My sister, Betsy, was born with Downs syndrome. I secretly sometimes wished she hadn't been born. I judged her life as a burden to me, my family and society. I didn't see how she contributed to me and the world, until her funeral. I thought I knew all of the significant people in her life, and I didn't expect her funeral to draw much of an audience. But I was surprised by the number of people who came that I didn't know, and by the people who spontaneously took the pulpit to eulogize her and speak of the contributions she gave to their lives.” As I listened tears came to my eyes."Betsy contributed to my life in ways I didn't, and perhaps still, don't understand. She taught me (or failed to teach me) patience. The burden I felt from my role as her caretaker was really more like a stabilizing anchor that kept me grounded. I felt a sense of pride from tending to her. And at her funeral, others described how she had contributed to their lives."She was different from me. That's all.” I said almost shouting. “Not better than or less than. The better than/less than temptation exists instinctively in all of us. It is our status gene that motivates us to improve and get better. But it is easily corrupted and manipulated. And when it is, it is a door for evil.""But what about the superior man?" Nietzsche asked, leaning forward in his chair, elbows on his knees, lighted cigarette in his hand. "You must see him in your Jessie Owens, Steve Jobs, Abraham Lincoln, Franklin Roosevelt, Martin Luther King, Lao Tzu, Nelson Mandela…I could go on. You must admit that they exist and that all of them accepted and exploited their entitlements. One of the differences between them and Hitler was that they won, and he lost. All of them were ambitious. All of them, with perhaps the exception of Mandela, exploited their advantages for their benefit. And I expect Mandela did too; I just don't know that much about him. Historians haven't dug into his dirt much because he just died."What about them? Don't we need them? Don't we want them to have their mansions and their women? Don't they deserve their rewards Don't we want to raise more great men like them?""I notice you don't mention women?" Wilson said, scooting his chair back and away from Nietzsche."Yeah, you got me there. I never thought much of them. Okay, this is 2016, we should raise great women too.""Now, you are touching upon how I think demagogues sell evil to the masses," I said."I believe that they combine one more element," I said. "We've already talked about the Ubermensch promote inequality, then there’s how exclusively relative truth promotes evil. And we have shown how dichotomous thinking can become corrupted and simplify reality so that evil seems logical.""Yes," Wagner agreed. "Get to your point. What is the two other things that you believe are so bad?"“I will have to speak to that next time. We have to go now. Our next and last meeting place will be in the basement of Karel Boromesky Church, an Eastern Orthodox church dedicated to St. Cyril Methodius in Prague. This was the place where the Germans slaughtered the Czech resistance fighters who assassinated Reinhard Heydrich. Heydrich was the Hitler’s architect of the plan to exterminate the Jews. Because Czech workers were slowing their work pace as a silent protest against the German occupation, Heydrich was sent to govern Czechoslovakia. He ordered workers to increase their productivity and killed those who did not. He was called “Hangman Heydrich” and the “Butcher of Prague.”“Operation Anthropoid was launched from England to assassinate Heydrich and establish listening posts inside Czechoslovakia. Joseph Gabrick and Jan Kubis carried out his mission. By luck and accident, they accomplished Heydrich’s death, helped along by incompetent medical care.“Hitler ordered his SS troops to wade in blood to find Heydrich’s killers. Gabcik and Kubis were betrayed by one of their fellow paratroopers. They hid in this basement of St. Cyril’s Church and eventually were discovered, one killed and the other committed suicide. Hitler ordered the massacre of everyone, all 173 men in the village of Lidice and 52 women. He imprisoned 5,000 others.“When we meet there, you will see the bullet marks on the wall if you look carefully. There, we will witness the extraordinary legacy that came from these two men fighting evil and the horror that evil can create. We are adjourned.”PragueMarietta and I rode a TVC train from Vienna to Prague. It was a pleasant, comfortable ride. We left on time and arrived on time. Supposedly we were traveling at speeds of up to 150 MPH. That was not true all of the time. We could see the countryside passing by and in an August, that had more rain than usual. It was verdant and lush. Trees, wild daises and cow pastures were much of our view.We arrived in Prague and Rick Sieves Prague book warned us of taxi driver scams. He told us to walk two blocks from the station and there, we could expect a reasonable taxi driver who would offer a reasonable fare to our hotel.He was right. Just outside the station a driver asked if we needed a cab and quoted us a fare four times the fare Sieves had quoted. We went another block, found a taxi who charged us the correct fare. We were also warned about the Romas, a politically correct term for gypsies. They had been placed in Czechoslovakia in WWII by Hitler. He was planning to exterminate them but he never got to all of them. Sieve warned us to keep our eyes open for children creating distractions. We never saw any evidence of chicanery other than the expensive taxi driver.Prague is touted as the most beautiful city in Europe. It is definitely the city of towers. Vienna and Munich have as much public art and statues as Prague, but Prague’s urban architecture has some interesting post-modern buildings.Prague was not as easy to navigate as Munich or Vienna. The signage for the subways was often confusing to us. We couldn’t ride bicycles because the city was too hilly and cobblestoned. The food was surprisingly good. We had our best European meal in Prague, one clear night in a restaurant overlooking the city.Remember the small Volga River in Cesky-Krumlov, a bigger version of the same river was here. At Prague, there were river locks to aid industrial trade. Most boats we saw were tourist’s boats allowing visitors a different perspective on the city.Prague also considered itself the, or one of the, cultural centers of Europe. We went to an opera there, Aida. I wanted to have some version of an opera experience because I wanted to understand the genius of Wagner better. I got through the second act. The rest was so predictable. The woman in the role of Aida was too old to make her believable.We went to the Jewish cemetery and museum. This was the most visited museum in Prague. Hundreds of people milled about like ants. Again, people seemed fascinated by the consequences of oppression.This is the place where the protestant reformation started long before Martin Luther. Jon Hus (1395-1415) was the inspiration for the Hussite Rebellion also knowns as the Bohemian Reformation. John Hus and his followers believed that God’s forgiveness came through repentance, not by paying money to the church; that the sacrament of communion might be administered by laity as well as clergy. Clergy did not speak for God, and the Pope had no right to take up the sword in the name of Christ.The Pope condemned him and eventually tricked him, captured and executed him. The Hussite Wars followed from 1419-1434. The followers of Jon Hus won and were allowed to worship their version of the Christian faith in peace. They defeated all of the crusaders against them.A statue of Hus stands in the middle of the city.Our hotel was up a hill about a block and a half from Prague Castle, the largest ancient castle in the world. It attracts more than 1.8 million visitors per year and it is the home and place of business of the Czech President. Inside the confines of the castle grounds, there are four Cathedrals.Among the reasons people come here is to see the Czech crown jewels. We didn’t bother. The Palace garden and an old gnarled tree fascinated me more than anything else in Prague.The Final ConclaveOn our third day in Prague I reconvened our imaginary convocation on evil in the dark dark basement of St. Cyril’s Methodius Church. The place where the Nazis killed Heydrich’s assassins.“Today we meet at the St. Cyril’s Greek Orthodox Melodious and Methodius Church in Prague,” I said. “The place where seven Czechoslovakian resistance fighters died after assassinating Reinhard Heydrich, the man the Czech’s called the ‘hangman’ and the ‘Butcher of Prague.’ He was the number two man in the Nazi hierarchy after Hitler and he was the only person in the Nazi leadership that fit the Aryan model, blond, handsome, six-foot four and fiercely anti-Semitic.“He took over the government of Czechoslovakia, because this area was the most productive industrialized area in Europe. The Nazis planned to produce their armaments in this country. Yet, the workers were slow-walking production. Heydrich took over Czechoslovakia, executed slow workers and anyone who protested innocence for even a parking ticket and hence, production increased. The tanks started pouring out of Czech factories.“Heydrich was the architect of the holocaust. He was evil personified.“We sit on our usual circle in wooden church chairs in this dark dungeon, lighted only by the light that can penetrate the stained-glass windows because here is where Nazi soldiers made martyrs of the Czechoslovakian paratroopers that assassinated Heydrich on May 27, 1942. You can see the bullet holes in the wall around the sanctuary and in the church ceiling if you look carefully.”“You were right, our accommodations have steadily deteriorated since Neuschwanstein Castle,” Wagner said. “We have the same six wooden folding chairs. We are sitting like we were last time, but the only natural light we have comes from a slit in the concrete wall and the other light is so dim you can barely read the plaques on the wall about these so-called heroes.”“Though it is a bit cold in this dungeon,” Nietzsche said, “I feel at home here in the Czech Republic, the only atheist country I know of. Here they got the message. God is dead.”“We are meeting here for you Dietrich. These men fought evil as you suggest we all should do. They murdered an evil man as you tried to do, but failed.”“Yes, they did, Dietrich,” Nietzsche said. “And what good did that do. Other evil men replaced him. And Hitler killed thousands of people to punish the Czechs for letting this happen. He wiped out two villages, bulldozed their cemeteries and poured salt on their land so nothing could grow there. Isn’t that what fighting evil does, create more evil?”“Perhaps,” Bonhoeffer answered. “But I prefer that to living a life simply for self-gratification, as you and Sigmund suggest, and you even admit that in the end, it all means nothing.“I believe my life meant something. Life is not about pleasure. Life is about the story your life creates.”“Yes, and you are here today, Dietrich, because of your compelling story,” I said. “The legend from your life is that you gladly gave your life for your service to God and your fight against the evil of the Nazis.”“Well, thank you,” he replied slightly bowing his head to me. “I suppose that is the legend and there is some truth to it. ‘Gladly’ may not describe all my feelings, but yes, I did choose to risk my life knowing that I might die.”“Isn’t this just vanity, like Hitler’s vanity,” Wagner said, pulling out his pipe. “Your resistance to him just empowered him and he became even more entitled to kill and oppress because he had to protect this Fatherland from the likes of you.”“Don’t smoke in the church, Richard,” I said.He put his pipe back in his jacket.“Richard, you could see it that way,” Dietrich answered. “But I like to see myself as one of the ants in my ant clan to use E.O.’s metaphor. We as a clan, together, fought evil. I was one of the many who sacrificed in this fight. I am proud of my legacy. Are you Fritz or are you Sigmund?”“Well yes, I am,” Freud answered pulling out his cigar.I glared at him and his cigar and he said, “I won’t light it here. I enjoy chewing on it and my ideas are my legacy.”“And your secrets are as well,” Bonhoeffer said. “And the children you neglected, except for your daughter Anna. And look what you did to her. She never married. She gave her life to extending your reach, expanding your ideas, and taking care of you. She had no life of her own. You consumed her. This is also your legacy. Are you proud of that?”“That’s none of your business,” Sigmund replied.“Perhaps not my business alone,” Bonhoeffer replied, “But it is the business of your disciples. They worship you. You heard what David said about the people standing reverently on the steps to your apartment simply to see inside and inside there was really nothing much of you to see there. Don’t these people have a right to know if your so-called examined life was worth living, your life in pursuit of pleasure, responding to your libido and managing the conflict of your desires with your conscience. How did that work for you?”“I never said I was happy,” Sigmund said. “I agree with Fritz that life inevitably is suffering. Yes, I died of cancer, miserable. That’s life.”People began to enter the church and wander about looking at the bullet marks and commemorative plaques.“That’s not all life has to be,” Wilson said. “It seems to me that you, Sigmund and you, Fritz, emphasized what Jung would call the animus aspect of life, the ambition, drive, lust, the penetrating, seed-planting part of life. But you neglect to see that the creative life force has another instinct other than the lustful desire to plant, possess or conquer. There is the desire to nurture, tend and care for.“David earlier suggested that we have many innate instincts and that they can work together in balance. It is in this balance that we find real gratification. Dietrich, here, was playing out this other instinct. He was the mother-bear protecting his cubs, and he tells us that though this was not pleasurable, it provided him meaning. His religious myths and now, his own legend that add to these myths, make the same point. Life in the service of something beyond the pleasure principle gives us meaning and purpose.“When we raise a child and the child dies at a young age before we do, we tend to feel a significant loss. But this is not logical. The child was so much trouble. Now that she is gone, our life logistics are much easier, but life is not easier for us, because we have lost some of our sense of purpose.”“Yes, that’s exactly how I see it,” Bonhoeffer said raising his voice and slapping his thighs for emphasis.“David, you never asked me how I feel about my legacy,” Wagner said.“Okay, what about your legacy?” I asked and yawned.“I’m proud of my music, my operas. They’ve inspired millions. And they inspired Hitler and if he had prevailed in WWII, the victor would have written history and he would have killed or moved all of the Jews to Madagascar as he planned. And we would be breeding superior human beings.”“You can be proud of your music, Richard,” Freud said, “But your ideas make me sick.”“It is about time you expressed some real emotion about anti-Semitism,” I said.“Yes,” Bonhoeffer said. “The music confuses us. It is so amazing that we think a genius who can produce such beauty and art must also be brilliant and a master at all other things. Donald Trump made billions, so people believe he would make a great president. That’s the fallacy. A genius at one thing does not make a genius at all things.”“I wonder what Wagner’s music would sound like in this church. Somehow I don’t think it would be appreciated here.” Bonhoeffer said.“So yes, Richard has his blind spots and is stupid about people and governments,” Nietzsche said. “But his music, his music, listening to music was the only time I felt at peace with myself and life.”“And that’s because in music you found balance and harmony,” Wilson said.“Yes, that’s exactly right,” Nietzsche said. “I felt like I was part of something more than myself that was carrying me with it, supporting me, inviting me to join and I merged into this something.”“It is exactly this something that makes our lives matter,” Bonhoeffer said. “I call it God and I see God’s spirit expressed in stories. I see it in the story of the paratroopers who killed Heydrich. I see it in Bible stories, in stories of Jesus. It is this spirit that I want to join. It is in the harmony of music, the peace that can be among people who can apologize and forgive, and in the love of a parent for a child or a friend for a friend. I want to share in this spirit and when an evil like a Hitler or a Heydrich or a Trump presents itself, it inspires a passion in me. It invites me into a holy place and I did accept that invitation gladly and I hope I added another story that reflects this spirit.”“But look how many people died because of these foolish paratroopers,” Wagner said.“Yes, but look at the story their deaths created,” Bonhoeffer said. “Look at the people around us in the crypt today reading about the paratrooper’s love of country and their desire to free their people. Their deaths meant something.”“And Dietrich, yours did as well,” I said.“I hope so,” he replied. “I’d like to think so. My point is a simple one. Yes, life is full of suffering like you Fritz, Sigmund and Buddha say, but you have to have a reason for your suffering. Running away from your suffering into adulation, wealth, lust or other pleasures will lead to more misery. Our suffering must have a reason, a purpose. Sigmund, your reason or purpose was to discover the dynamics of human nature. Fritz, yours was to show how silly bourgeois reality was. Richard, your constructive purpose was to share your music with the world. But none of us avoided life’s sufferings. Life means more when we have a purpose that transcends ourselves and joins with a set of eternal spiritual values. That’s my point.”“I’m tired of all this,” Wagner said. “Get to your theory of evil. So far you blame it on the idea of an Ubermensch. I don’t see why, but you do. Something about inequality and empowering one person at the expense of the community. But Jesus was an Ubermensch, hey Dietrich. Isn’t that right? That’s your first point. What was your second point?”Some of the people walking about began to form an observing circle around us.“It was that truth is a paradox,” Wilson said. “It can be absolute and it can be relative. And relative truth without the balance of absolute truth can have us disregard reality and give up on science and the search for truth.”“The third point,” Bonhoeffer said, “had to do with two-category thinking, false polarities that simplified reality and encourage quick easy answers to difficult complex problems, making the shallow ideas of a demagogue seem reasonable.”I was uncomfortable again with the focus turned to me. I stood and bumped into one of the observers. I put my hands on the back of my chair, coughed to clear my dry throat, excused myself to the observer and said, “I have more to say on those three points before I get to my last idea. The idea that some people are superior to others cuts against my democratic southern roots.“You, Richard and Fritz, promoted this idea. You both thought that you were such men and were entitled to ignore social conventions. Hitler grabbed this theme and pretended that he was the best of his generation. He used your idea that an Ubermensch, such as he, deserved worship. This was how he built his cult. Trump is doing the same thing right now as I write this in his campaign to President. The problem is if there are superior people, there must be inferior ones.”I felt faint. My stomach was bloated. I held on tight to my chair and continued, "It is, what was that word, Quatsch? We are all different, yes. But no one is superior. Some are better suited for some roles than others. My sister, Betsy, was not suited for the role of President. But she did a good job busing tables at Pizza Hut. She ennobled many people who reached out and helped her. Helping her, helped them.”“David, you look pale. Are you okay?” Wilson asked.I began to slur my words. “No, I don’t feel well, but I want to push through this if I can,” I said.“I think he has what Mexicans call tourista,” Wagner said and laughed. “Don’t spoil the company with gas. We are in an enclosed space and many of the people here can still smell.”“I’ll try to hold on.” I stood straight trying to look strong and solid and continued. “Many people could become a great President. No one expected Abraham Lincoln to become such a great man. When he ran for President, he didn't want to free the slaves. He didn't believe that Negroes were equal to Caucasians. He was often clinically depressed. He had many flaws. He was certainly not a Ubermensch. But the events of history, a diverse cabinet of advisors, some great speeches, and some wise decisions made him a legend and one of our greatest Presidents. And so did the spirit of American's people. Our community has a way of helping our leaders be better. Our nation's critics, the opposing party, the press, and the values of our democracy inspire our leaders to do well.”I almost lost my balance. One of the observers caught me. I reached for and found the top of my chair, I stabilized myself and continued. "It is not a superman that makes a culture better. It is a community of people who respect each other and have the courage and faith to work together. This spirit that transcends any one person is what builds a better society. It is the culture’s traditions that value opposition and dissent."Demagogues, like Hitler and Trump, sell themselves as superior men. A frightened public long for a champion to make them safe. When we, as a collective, are frightened and angry, we want someone who can do the impossible, a superior man. Our fears and insecurities undermine our individual and collective confidence. We want a simple, quick fix, the hero who will solve all our problems."The myth of the Ubermensch, the superman, who doesn't exist, some man who could only be a god, that myth is what demagogues sell.”I belched a loud burp and felt much better and I continued, "There is no easy solution to the culture wars that we are fighting in this century. The West's view of women is so divergent from so much of the world. When you mess with the roles of the sexes and the traditions of another culture, there will be repercussions. Society cannot completely control or contain its crazies.”With the strength I got from my belch, I began walking about the circle speaking, the observers made space for me. "In the U.S., rogue police officers will execute black people handcuffed in police cars. Crazy Black people will kill white police officers. Racists, radical white people will blow up a federal building. Deranged radical Muslims will be manipulated to become suicide bombers and a democratic process that makes a place for everyone and respects the dignity of every person will be attacked.”I felt the urge to vomit and I took my seat hoping that that might help."We can't stop this with an army. No superman can protect us. We don't need leaders who believe they have a quick answer. We need a leader to inspire our courage and our faith in the face of the random, senseless violence that comes from individuals who are alienated, lost and easily manipulated. We need societal paradigms that do not depend on one particular person. We need to believe in our community.""That's a sermon, David," Bonhoeffer said."I don't think that political slogans will be made of someone saying ‘reality is complex,’ and ‘truth is a paradox’," Nietzsche said, "So, you think my myth of Ubermensch created evil? Dietrich, you are selling Jesus. What's the difference? He was an Ubermensch.""No," Bonhoeffer said. "Christ is clearly a mythical figure, the son of God who experienced the human condition. Christ was born when Jesus died. It was the Jews who followed Jesus that built the legend. It is the myth of Jesus, Jesus Christ, which I worship. I don't worship Jesus, the man. We're not even sure Jesus, the man, knew a woman in the biblical sense. And if he did, why didn't he marry her. My version of superman would include a father, a husband, a man who navigated human relationships. I'm not so impressed by Jesus, the man.""But what about his miracles and his ascending into heaven?" Wagner asked. "Surely these are the acts of a superman. Jesus performed miracles. You’re a minister and what you are saying is very disconcerting to my faith. Don’t you agree?" he asked turning to the observers.“We are Czechs. Most of us don’t believe in God,” one of them said."I'm sorry about that, Richard,” Dietrich said, “but in the time of Jesus, Rabbis were rock stars, just like you were in your day. Spiritual leaders vied for public support. You couldn't be a star teacher in Palestine at that point unless you came with a life story that included miracles."They were sales people just like we are. They hawked their philosophy just like we sell cars. We sell cars with sexy women. They sold ideas with miracles. Hot women don't make cars great, and Jesus didn't make supernatural miracles. He died. And I don't believe his body rose from the dead.”Wagner moaned, leaned forward and put his head in his hands."I think Peter and his fellow Jews knew that they had a good thing in their version of Jesus's story. They added some architectural do-dads, some miracles for appeal to sell the message because that's the only way they could sell it at that time.""But you even say that you want to be like Jesus," Wagner said straightening up looking as if he were imploring Bonhoeffer to change his mind. "Aren't you challenging yourself and other Christians to be Ubermensch's, just like Hitler did?"God, I hope not. I love the Christian message. And I want to be selfless and find my fulfillment in sacrificing for the good of others. But Christians sell Christ as a perfect being, the son of God.""Aren't we all the sons and daughters of God?" Wagner asked."Yes, but none of us is perfect," Bonhoeffer said looking about at our audience as if preparing to deliver a sermon. "The early Christian church addressed this Ubermensch idea that we all can be Jesus's perfect children of God. And they called this the Gnostic Fallacy and said that Jesus sacrificed his life so that we could be ourselves, not Jesus. We are not Avatars. We all have flaws and we all sin and make mistakes. I’ve made my share.” He looked down at the ground and continued. “The Crucifixion was the sacrifice of Jesus made for our sins to be forgiven. So no, no one can be Jesus Christ. There is no need for that. We are free to be our flawed selves, unique and similar. This is what I believe. This I why I am a Christian. Inside the paradigm, I can be myself, and yet, Christ challenges me to follow the path of love, of standing for good against evil even if it costs my life. And this is where I find meaning for my existence. I'm a Christian because I believe that love, compassion, regret for the hurt we cause others and faith that there is order to the universe and a purpose for human life and that we find meaning for our lives by doing good, serving others, and fighting evil. I believe in this path for myself, and my version of Christianity sells this as the best path for all of us. That does not mean to me that an atheist can't follow this path or a person of any other religion isn't following this path. They may be unaware that they are who I consider to be Christian, but they may be on the same path as I was."No one noticed how sick I was, because they were so taken by Bonhoeffer’s surprising comments about his religious beliefs. He continued on, thank God. I needed this break."You know," Nietzsche said. "Your sermon is only a little bit different from my sermon, follow your bliss, let your unique desires take you where they will. You will make a mess, but you will learn from your mess, and in the end, perhaps at your death, you will understand and discover some reason for it all. But I didn't say that last part, but that's what you are saying. Right, Dietrich?""Not exactly, but there is a resemblance.""So, David, what about your other idea about where societal evil comes from?" Wilson asked. "So, you got relativist truth as a source, dichotomous thinking as another and now the myth of the Ubermensch. What's next?Startled and knowing that my restraint would not hold much longer, I bolted into my finish. "It is the cartoon myth that we sell to children where there is a damsel in distress who can't pay the rent, a landlord who will hurt her if she doesn't, and a hero who rescues her and pays the rent This is essentially the myth of Dionysius and Ariadne. This is an elaborate myth with a Minotaur for Ariadne's brother, an enigmatic labyrinth in which it starts and to which it returns, a circle with twisting paths."Ariadne is the damsel. She appeals to a man, Theseus, to help her. He rescues her. And for his trouble, Ariadne's agrees to marry him. Theseus abandons Ariadne, and she is again saved, this time, by a god, Dionysus. They wed, uniting the human and the divine in an ecstatic union.""This was my religion," Nietzsche said pulling his blanket up under his arms. "I used this myth as a template for my life. I wrote about it directly in many of my treatises and indirectly in everything I wrote. Just as Christ is Dietrich's understanding of how the divine and the human come together, this story is mine."I stood again and held tightly to the top of my chair. "And I believe it is the source of evil," I said. "First of all, we aren't in life's labyrinth as just one man or one woman or one crazy brother that is raping his sister. We live in community with many people. The woman may experience distress, but she is not helpless. She has a voice. She can use it. She has many allies, not just one. She has her own wit and imagination. She can use her creativity to put together a plan of liberation. This is the second flaw of this myth, the first one being that we are isolated individuals. We are rarely completely helpless victims."The third flaw in the myth is that the hero is the only one able to save her and that for his sacrifice and for the risks he takes, he is entitled from this point forward to the obedience, status and the fulfillment of his every desire from the damsel. This is similar to the suicide bombers myth that because of his sacrifice he will be entitled to eighty virgins who will serve his every need in heaven."We sell this myth to high school quarterbacks, to potential CEO's, to politicians, to aspiring real estate moguls, to hopeful Nobel prize winners. Once they reach the status of hero, no one has to follow the rules. Once the husband rescues the wife from economic distress, he is entitled to her obedience, gratitude, and service.”I began to take quick steps around the circled chairs hoping that would help me push back the flood of what was coming. The observers made way for me, sensing my distress."It is this assumed heroes pass, which if we rescue the damsel or save the world, we get what we want forever, this prize of the hero, that destroys our souls."There is no place where kindness isn't necessary or where telling the truth is not required. There is no place where we are finished with our character work. Life's garden will always need tending. There will always be weeds to pull, and when others do the gardening for us, all the real benefits go to them, and our souls begin to deteriorate."This is the evil myth of the demagogues; where they flatter you by saying that you too, can be a hero like them, privileged and free to have your own gardener. Just as they deserve their free pass to avoid human pain, you do too. You don't have to worry about the truth. It doesn't exist anyway. It's relative. Choices are always on a polarity. It’s one or the other. Reality is simple. Just pick the one you want. Oh, to be a hero, there are dues to pay. You must first save the damsel. But once you have, life is good. The people you helped owe you for life, and they will be glad to pay. The demagogue tells his followers that once they achieve hero status, people will adore them as their hero too, like you adore me. Just find the simple, obvious enemy. It is them, those with a different skin color, those who follow a different faith, those who don't think like we do, those who are different than us. Follow me, your Ubermensch. Kill for me. And you will be a hero too."This is how I think demagogues sell evil. I’m leaving now. We are finished.” I ran to the closest public toilet and my body exploded there.After the convocation in St. Cyril’s Church, we were there two more days. We had massages for our backs. We toured a park next to an art museum.Evil Comes to VisitThe last night we had another fine dinner. We came home, packed and fell into bed. There was something about the lock on our door that we didn’t understand. We thought the door automatically locked when we were inside with the door closed. We didn’t understand what the bellman meant when he said, “Turn the key and leave it in the door.”The next day we awoke in plenty of time to get to the airport. We were packed and after a shower, we were ready to walk out the door. But Marietta couldn’t find her purse, actually two purses, one empty and one with money, phone and two credit cards. We turned the room upside down. I went outside to tell the maid to look for Marietta’s purse. She said she found two purses under some hall furniture. She turned them in at the desk downstairs. It was clear, now, someone had opened our door while we slept, walked in our room in the middle of the night, grabbed two purses that hung on the closet door and left.The purses were empty, but our passports were still with us. We boarded our plane and left. A few days later, Marietta received a letter from a stranger in New Jersey with her driver’s license enclosed. The letter said they found it next to a curb on a Prague street.I’ve been listening to Leonard Cohen of late. He believed that evil is a force that is forever with us. And that great evil inspires great sacrifice for good, like the sacrifice those two Czech soldiers made for their country and the sacrifice of Bonhoeffer for his God and his country against evil. For Cohen, good and evil are in a dance together. One doesn’t exist without the other and the dance is a constant cycle. For him, there is no human moral progress.Perhaps that’s true. But I am a son of the Enlightenment and I believe we can learn about natural human laws of justice and fairness that are born inside all of us.I believe the human moral world is struggling to keep pace with the potential destructive forces inherent in our technology. Globally, in spite of terrorism and our fears, less people are killing people. Last century fellow humans killed millions and millions of other fellow humans.Much less of that is happening now. Look at how we treat the mentally ill or people with special needs. Think about the words we once used to describe them. Consider how much kinder our clinical language is now. Consider the safety net that has been created in Europe and America.Consider how the use of death penalty is declining in the world.We are getting better. We must get better because our potential for destroying each other with nuclear bombs or nuclear disasters or pollution or biological warfare is getting more and more dangerous.As a species, in order to contain these forces, we must become kinder, more tolerant, more just and more moral.I believe learning how demagogues use evil and exposing their tricks can be a step in that direction.