The unintentional villain

 

The “unintentional villain” belongs to a small category of people who are not necessarily intellectually dishonest. However, the involuntary infamous person is still infamous, objectively despicable in their expression and in the construction of their arguments. Unlike the subjectively infamous “voluntary” infamous person, who cultivates their infamy in full harmony with their personality, without any sense of guilt and totally subservient to the demands of power, the involuntary infamous has a troubled history behind them, made up of inner conflicts, extreme experiences, often marked by violence as the emergence of an inner journey in which the parasite of duty has imposed radical, albeit painful, choices. We are talking about a vision of universal justice where the choice to side with the weakest and the exploited is imposed without compromising one's conscience, aware of having to make dramatic and perhaps irreversible choices. However, once the violence and drama of certain choices have been experienced and the social and political context has changed, the unwitting villain is overcome by deep feelings of guilt and disgust for his past and pours his resentment onto certain categories of people, once friends and comrades, considering them guilty of his previous choices.
Resentment is a kind of sublimation of guilt, which would otherwise be unbearable. All this leads to identifying the political orientations and worldview of the incriminated categories of people as absolute evil or as the epiphany of a metaphysical stupidity, unaware of true reality and bound to harmful precepts and ideologies.

The unwitting villain thus enters a spiral of delusional dereistic thinking, which leads him to remove events that would disprove his worldview or to reinterpret reality according to the friend/enemy scheme, where the friend, even if he has flaws and contradictions, is still included in a hierarchical order of superiority in terms of civilization and historical goals, while the enemy is the child of darkness and wants to regress civilization by compressing it into an authoritarian and reactionary, spiritualist, and anti-Enlightenment vision. In short, a sort of historicism of manifest destiny, where, for example, people like the Palestinians have no place, as they are the product of a backward and inferior civilization. Infamy is the product of the denial/removal of facts, realities, and events that are blatantly unjust, as an epiphenomenon of resentment projected onto friends of the past and disgust towards oneself and past choices. Ultimately, it is the classic unconscious defense mechanism that rises to ideology and worldview.

However, a question arises spontaneously: why do some people undergo such a metamorphosis, while others who have had the same experiences maintain their consistency and rationality? I believe the answer lies in personality structure. A personality marked by neurotic experiences and distorted cognitive patterns is more inclined to force its conscience by imposing choices and paths experienced in an ambivalent manner, cultivating the seed of repentance that leads to resentment, guilt, and therefore a reversal of perspective. Those with a solid and rational personality, on the other hand, make choices driven by deep conviction and a strong ethical impulse, and while they are able to criticize their own choices, recognize their mistakes, and detach themselves from their past, they are not assailed by the dark demon that corrodes the soul and demands total rebirth as a ritual of salvation. I believe this is the fundamental difference.

Unintentional infamy does not particularly affect reality, but in certain political and social circles it is particularly troublesome.