Passivity fosters Manichaean thinking that divides the world into pure good and pure evil

Evidence

But whoever is passive puts himself on the sidelines and refuses to pose, even in thought, ethical problems: good must be realized, and if it is not, there is wrongdoing for which the guilty must be punished. Like the child, the woman imagines good and evil in simple storybook images; Manichaeism reassures the mind by eliminating the anguish of choice; deciding between one scourge and a lesser one, between a benefit today and a greater benefit tomorrow, having to define by oneself what is defeat and what is victory: this means taking terrible risks; for the Manichaean, the wheat is clearly distinguishable from the chaff, and the chaff has to be eliminated; dust condemns itself, and cleanliness is the absolute absence of filth; cleaning means getting rid of waste and mud. Thus the woman thinks that “everything is the Jews’ fault” or the Masons’ or the Bolsheviks’ or the government’s; she is always against someone or something; women were even more violently anti-Dreyfusard than men; they do not always know what the evil principle is; but what they expect from a “good government” is that it get rid of it as one gets rid of dust from the house. — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 1748

Categorization

• XREF: Connects to Hannah Arendt on totalitarian scapegoating and the banality-of-evil refusal to think; also to her own housewife analysis elsewhere in The Second Sex where cleaning is ontological warding-off of dirt. — connects to: Opposites like good and evil are relative contrasts within an absolute whole — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 915
• DEEPTHINKING: Beauvoir grounds political Manichaeism — scapegoating, the demand for a ‘clean’ France, anti-Dreyfusard fury — in the material psychology of housework and dependence. The political and the domestic are one mechanism. This is dense and paradigm-shifting enough to sit with.

Broader Connections

• Opposites like good and evil are relative contrasts within an absolute whole #exemplifies (0.75) — Georg Simmel, on individuality and social forms_…, 915