Ville

Let me start with a story.

vladimir putin

A boy, small for his age, grows up in post-war Leningrad.

The world around him is harsh. Things are scarce, people are violent, and the city is still recovering from the devastation of the second world war.

He is bullied. He fears, body contracts from jabs and blows, and he feels humiliated. His mind creates a story: I must never be weak again. This thought lodges deep in him, hardens like armour. The next time he feels fear, he does not allow himself to feel it. Instead, he fights. He becomes the bully. His mind tells him he is powerful.

This boy grows up. He joins the KGB, an institution built on control, dominance, and never showing weakness. He learns how to manipulate, how to create fear in others—because he still feels fear inside himself, though he would never admit it. The disconnection deepens.

When the Soviet Union collapses, the fear returns—fear of instability, fear of chaos, fear that Russia will be humiliated like he once was as a boy.

But he does not sit with this fear. He does not feel the subtle sensations of clenching in his stomach, the irregular breathing. Russia must never be weak again; I must make Russia feared. The same pattern, now on a geopolitical scale.

Now he is in power. He controls the state with the same tactics he learned as a child—dominate, suppress, never show weakness. Journalists disappear, political opponents are poisoned, protests are crushed.

Every act of resistance triggers the same old sensation in his body, the same fear of losing control. But he does not feel it. He reacts, aggressively, tightening his grip, eliminating threats. The more fear he feels, the more force he uses. Without me, Russia will fall into chaos. I am the only one who can hold it together.

Then, much later, something rises in Ukraine. A country on Russia’s border chooses a different path—democracy, openness, freedom.

This is intolerable. His body feels a deep, unspoken fear: What if Russia’s own people see this and want the same?

But he does not sit with this fear. He does not allow himself to feel the vulnerability. Instead, he turns it into rage. His mind creates yet another story: Ukraine is a threat. Ukraine is not real. The West is behind this. They want to humiliate us.

And so, he invades.

Every atrocity that follows—the bombed hospitals, the mass graves, the kidnapped children—is the result of this disconnection. A man so lost in his mind’s stories that he cannot feel the suffering he causes.

If he could feel it, if he could sit for even a moment with the reality of what he is doing, his body would recoil. The grief, the pain, the weight of all those deaths would be unbearable. But he cannot feel it. He has trained himself for decades to ignore, to suppress, to live entirely disconnected from others.

This is what ignorance looks like when it takes control of a nation. It is not a supernatural evil. It is simply the same disconnection that happens in all of us, multiplied a thousandfold, reinforced by power, by fear, by a lifetime of avoiding the body’s truth.

If he could sit, if he could feel, if he could observe even for a moment without reacting, the stories would begin to crack. The body does not lie.

If he could feel, he would see. And if he could see, he could not do what he does.

boss

Let me tell you another narrative.

A girl grows up in a home where love is conditional. When she achieves, impresses, or wins—she is praised. When she fails, is vulnerable, or cries—she is mocked, dismissed, or ignored. Her body feels the pain of this deeply, and she does not sit with it.

How can she? She is too young to understand, too young to process.

Instead, her mind creates a logically-sounding story: I must always be impressive. I must never be weak. If I am not the best, I am nothing. Her body still holds the pain, the loneliness, the deep craving for unconditional love, but she learns to suppress it. She learns to live in the mind, in the story, in the image she builds of herself.

As she grows, this survival strategy works.

She works hard, achieves, pushes himself beyond limits. Every success gives her a fleeting hit of worthiness, but it never lasts. Her body still holds the same aching emptiness, the same fear of being unlovable without achievement. But she does not feel it. She doesn’t even realise it is there. Instead, she chases more success, more validation, bigger wins.

She rises through the ranks.

Now she is the boss. She has power finally. And her story has hardened into something deeper: I am the best. I am superior. I am different from others. This is not confidence; it is an armour.

Because to admit otherwise, to even allow the possibility of failure, would mean facing the old wound—the unbearable fear of being nothing.

One day, an employee challenges her in a meeting. A simple disagreement. But at that moment, something primal is triggered.

Her body reacts first—a tightness in the chest, a heat rising in the face. If she were aware, if she could sit with it, she would feel that it is not actually anger, but fear. The fear of being wrong, the fear of losing control, the fear that her image of superiority is cracking.

But she is disconnected from her body.

She thinks: This employee is disloyal. They are trying to undermine me. They must be put in their place. And so, she reacts—belittling them, cutting them down, making an example of them in front of everyone. The sensation in her body temporarily fades. The illusion of control is restored.

The tragedy is that she is still that same child, still running from the same wound, still disconnected from her own suffering. But in running from it, she spreads suffering to everyone around him.

If she were to sit down in silence, everything would begin to unravel.

At first, the mind would resist—her identity, her superiority, all of it is built on avoiding these feelings. But if she stayed, if she truly observed, she would feel what she had been running from her whole life: the sadness, the loneliness, the unworthiness buried beneath her success.

She would see how every action, every cruelty, every manipulation had been an attempt to escape this. And in seeing, the story would begin to break.

She would no longer need to prove herself. She would no longer need to dominate. She would no longer fear imperfection, because she would feel the truth—she was never unworthy to begin with.

The body knew this all along. She just had to listen.

we are ignorant

Sometime around turning twenty-years-old, I sat down on a chair in silence, and observed for the first time the sensations within me. It happened quite accidentally actually. I don’t remember how long I sat, but in that moment, something changed.

My body revealed truths my mind had been avoiding: the truth of my relationships toward my family, others, and most crucially, myself.

Soon, also by accident, I began to meditate, for a solid six months. During this time, my awareness transformed into something both beautiful and terrifying. I became very self-aware of the slightest facial expressions and bodily changes in me and others. It was a super power.

Unfortunately, this power faded and the experience blurred, and I didn’t feel and perceive it until after eights years later.

I found myself meditating again. I have now been to two Vipassanā-meditation retreats.

What I experienced there lives in a place words cannot reach. It was not just tacit sensitivity: it was a shattering of walls between myself and the world.

I felt, with unbearable clarity, the compassion and cruelty within all humans, especially within myself, through myself. I felt it like anti-Darth Vader: Humanity’s natural state is not cruelty but profound tenderness. Babies reach for connection before they learn fear. The suffering, the injustice that cuts through our world—it springs not from some Machiavellian darkness but from disconnection, from the tragic ignorance of one’s own bodily truth.

We yearn for answers when pain finds us. When injustice touches our lives or when we witness it around us, our minds desperately create stories, demand explanations, search for someone to blame. This is human.

But here is the heartbreaking truth that I dare to assert: the person we label “evil” exists in a state of profound disconnection. Not simply ignorance of facts—they may intellectually “know” the consequences of their actions. But they do not know it in the weight of their shoulders and arms, in their breath, in the pulsing of their blood. They do not feel the weight of what they do.

They are ignorant in the deepest sense: they don’t know and they don’t feel what they cannot know or feel. A kind of Dunning-Kruger effect of the soul, but infinitely more tragic.

There is a mind-body severance, a rupture so complete that it manifests as a constant, unnamed ache—a homesickness for their own humanity.

But they do not sit with this ache. They cannot bear to listen.

Knowledge lives not just in thought but in the body’s quiet wisdom—in feeling, in intuition, in the subtle vibrations that travel through us when we are still enough to notice. These sensations speak in whispers, not shouts. One of my dear friends called it the “little voice.”

Those who cause the deepest harm have lost this voice, or learned to drown it out. They live walled off from themselves, and so from others.

The word “evil” becomes our protection, our mind’s attempt to place distance between ourselves and the Lucifer we fear.

But “the map is not the territory.” Meaning, representations of reality—maps, models, words, or beliefs—are not the same as reality itself.

A map may help navigate a landscape, but it simplifies, distorts, and omits details, just as language shape but do not fully capture the complexities of the world. When we mistake the map for the territory, we lose our way. We believe our interpretations are truths, forgetting they were created by minds seeking comfort in certainty.

Think about it: When we call Vladimir Putin or the cruel boss “evil,” we’re using a single word to collapse a whole universe—a childhood of wounds never healed, a lifetime of fear never faced, a human being who has lost the ability to feel their own suffering, let alone others’.

Notwithstanding, none of this excuses the harm they cause. We need not tolerate cruelty, nor should we. But it reveals how our labels can blind us to the deeper currents moving beneath behavior.

The danger lies in mistaking our label for reality itself. If we believe someone is “evil” in some absolute sense, we close the door not just on understanding, but on the possibility of wholeness—theirs, and perhaps our own. Our minds create another kind of prison—not just for them, but for ourselves. And in that prison, we all remain separate and afraid.

Notwithstanding, I, as an armchair philosopher living off on welfare benefits and sleeping like a baby and the grieving person on a war zone live in different worlds—one of analysis, the other of visceral, lived pain. As such, I want to bring up a small caveat.

I, the philosopher can dissect and explore ideas freely, while the person who has suffered directly carries wounds that words cannot mend. But does this mean the I as a philosopher have no say at all? Does detachment make my words meaningless?

From the perspective of the grieving person, philosopher’s views might feel hollow, even offensive.

If your mother was killed in an airstrike ordered by Putin, what use is it to hear my intellectual breakdown of Putin’s childhood wounds and psychological disconnections?

It can feel like an erasure of suffering, a way to humanise a man who has dehumanised others. “You speak of his fears and childhood,” the grieving person might say, “but what about mine? What about my mother’s fear in her last moments? What about the child now growing up without her?”

Experience grants authority, and those who have lived through the pain hold the most valid truth. The philosopher, no matter how well-read or articulate, has not felt it.

I haven’t felt it.

But does this mean the philosopher’s perspective is worthless? No.

Detachment allows for a broader perspective, one that sees patterns beyond the immediate pain. The philosopher can trace history, explore causality, and try to understand not just Putin but the machinery of power, war, and human nature itself.

We can ask questions that pain often silences: What led him here? How does one man’s disconnection create global suffering? Could he have ever been different? These questions do not excuse him; they attempt to see him in full—something that those in direct pain may find unbearable.

the disconnection

In those who cause harm, the mind and body are longer connected.

I argue that their sensations have become so crude, so vague, so diffusely broad that they no longer register in consciousness. They exist as background static, easily drowned out by the mind’s constant narration. The more there is rush and haste, the more forcefully they push through life, the less able they become to recognise the discomfort within, to hear what their body is whispering. In a sense, they are no longer consciously inhabiting their own flesh. They have become “ghosts in their shells”.

Their emotional suppression—practiced first as survival, then hardened into character—prevents them from feeling empathy. As they have disconnected from their own suffering, they cannot recognise it in another’s face, voice, or tears.

Only thoughts remain. Cold, calculating, self-protective thoughts…

Normally, your body sends signals—a racing heart when frightened, a warmth in the chest when moved, a tightness in the throat when holding back tears—that your brain interprets, helping you understand and navigate the complex terrain of emotion. But when this system breaks down, the connection weakens, making emotional experiences feel like distant weather patterns, confusing, overwhelming, or worst of all, simply absent.

Instead of feeling emotions as they flow naturally through the body, the brain begins to rely exclusively on thought, analysis, and stories. This creates a profound distortion.

People become emotionally colourblind, seeing reality through a grey filter of pure cognition. They overanalyse situations without truly inhabiting them. They think about life rather than living it. As a result, they struggle to connect—with their own deeper emotions, with other human beings, with anything beyond the mind’s narrow constructions.

Since emotions and bodily intuition are essential guides for moral decision-making, losing this connection makes it frighteningly easy to act without empathy or self-awareness.

The little voice that would say “stop, this is wrong, this hurts” becomes inaudible. This creates a spiralling cycle where the person feels increasingly isolated, disconnected from the human community, trapped in patterns of thinking and behaving that only deepen the chasm between themselves and others.

Then, sometimes, these disconnected souls do cruel things.

cruelty

“THE GREATEST CRIMES IN THE WORLD ARE NOT COMMITTED BY PEOPLE BREAKING THE RULES BUT BY PEOPLE FOLLOWING THE RULES. IT’S PEOPLE WHO FOLLOW ORDERS THAT DROP BOMBS AND MASSACRE VILLAGES.”

Banksy

Are the boss and Putin truly “evil” in some absolute sense? Hannah Arendt would say no—their evil is mundane everyday and bureaucratic rather than monstrous intent.

There exists a physical and emotional distance between perpetrators and victims that enables cruelty to flourish unseen. The drone operator never feels blood on their hands; the dictator never witnesses the suffering their policies create.

Albert Bandura’s moral disengagement theory illuminates how ordinary people commit extraordinary harm through gradual disconnection from their moral standards.

The boy from Leningrad who becomes a ruthless leader justifies his actions that “It’s for Russia’s security”, uses euphemistic language such as a “special military operation” not “war”, makes advantageous comparisons like “What we’re doing isn’t as bad as NATO expansion”, and displaces responsibility, saying “I am responding to the will of the people”.

The boss who was once praised only for perfection continues the pattern, distorting consequences, thinking “A little pressure builds character”, dehumanising employees seeing that “They’re just resources”, and blaming employees, convinced that “They’re too sensitive”.

I would add and argue, that on top of this, these people gradually lose awareness of their bodily sensations—the tightness in the chest when lying, the subtle nausea when hurting another. Their bodies try to speak, but the connection has been severed.

Then, ordinary people commit extraordinary harm while sleeping soundly at night. The mind shields itself from what the body would know if allowed to feel, making cruelty possible not through dramatic evil, but through the quiet death of feeling.

vipassanā

Every action, every thought, every feeling has a sensation in the body.

When you are angry, there is heat in the chest, tightness in the throat. When you are afraid, there is a sinking, a contraction, a shiver. When you are at peace, the body is open, light, fluid. The body always knows first.

But the mind, when disconnected from the body, does not listen. It builds its own stories, separate from reality, and those stories shape the world.

This happens every moment of every day. A person feels loneliness, but instead of noticing the hollowness in their chest, they numb it with distraction.

Another feels fear but does not feel the trembling inside; instead, they lash out, screaming at others. Someone feels guilt, but instead of sitting with the knot in their stomach, they justify, lie, manipulate to avoid discomfort.

Every crime, every cruelty, every war has begun this way—with a simple disconnection from the body’s truth, allowing the mind to spiral into stories, illusions, and suffering.

This disconnection happens because we are not are not allowed to feel. From childhood, we are told to suppress, to ignore, to distract. “Don’t cry.” “Don’t be weak.” “Be strong.”

We are taught to live in the mind—thoughts, concepts, identities—while the body’s reality is ignored.

Over time, this gap between body and mind grows. We no longer feel pain when we hurt others, because we no longer feel deeply at all.

Vipassanā-meditation reverses this. It forces you to sit, to feel, to notice.

At first, it is fucking unbearable. The body aches, the mind rebels when you sit for hours and hours. The pain that was long suppressed begins to surface.

But if you do not react, if you just observe, something happens.

The pain moves, shifts, dissolves. You see its impermanence. Anicca. You see that it is just sensation, just energy and vibrations, rising and falling.

The mind and body begin to reconnect. You feel anger arise, but now you feel it as a tightness, a heat—nothing more.

It comes, it goes.

You do not act on it. You feel sadness, but instead of running, you stay with the weight in your chest, the heaviness in your breath.

And then, it passes.

Slowly, the illusions break. The mind stops creating stories. The body becomes the guide once again.

Through this, ignorance fades.

You do not need state rules, morals, religious commandments—you simply see clearly.

When the body and mind are connected, there is no room for cruelty.

You cannot harm another because you feel the impact in yourself.
You cannot lie because the tension of deception is unbearable.
You cannot hate because hatred feels like poison in your own being.

Awareness restores the natural balance that ignorance had severed.

This is why Vipassanā heals.

Sukhi hotu. May you be happy and well always.