Most magical thinking in the world is tacit and the person may not be
aware of the superstitious thinking they are subject to.
Malice is popular for readers and film goers. And gossips. Religion imagines the malice of Satan and those in Hell. It says how malicious sin is and how Jesus took it so seriously that he had to die to forgive it. Society gives malice an attractive image. It fuels it through enjoying how it makes it look. It may be that we at the core of our mind or soul - if we have one - subconsciously and deliberately inherently awaken evil in ourselves when we see evil even in novels etc.
We will learn that while people do not fear the malice inside themselves as
long as it is directed outwards to others, they have a horror of another
having malicious intent towards them even if they do not or cannot act on it.
It is as if malice is fine for you to enjoy but not to receive.
Why
does an act make you feel more degraded and unsafe when there is malice
involved?
Your response supposedly helps you detect the malice and
detest it in the other. It may make you hope you never let such malice rise in
you.
It is selective for malice is not the only targeted danger out
there. The stupidity of others or accidents can do worse harm than it. And
malice never acts alone. Stupid people, errors and accidents do most of the
work.
Nobody holding malice against you completely fulfils it – they
cannot nor do they try to. They settle for doing enough harm.
While
malice is feared for it will repeat or grow, that is true of any harm.
If malice against you is hated by you for it insults your ego then that is revealing. The bigger the wound the more you think you are so special that nobody should be malicious to you.
There is the problem of how no matter how much good one does for you, one rash action of theirs or a cross word from them, wounds you so much. You fixate on the bad as if the good was insincere or worthless. Despite how this pains you and despite how you need to see life as more good than bad, you inflict yourself.
Inflicting harm on yourself over what somebody else did is irrational. It ruins your right to trust for doing that means you would start abusing others. It is as if by rubbing it in you want to send the harmer a negative message and arouse savage hate for them. It looks like a magic attempt to send them some bad energy as well. Or do you think some magic went out of you and caused them to harm you? Is that why you are punishing yourself?
We have a tendency to turn words such as good, evil, God into the things
they represent. We inflate the words psychologically. That is why
we get triggered. It is like how the word malice becomes a sort of
supernatural spell - perhaps subconsciously.
What malice is or is not does not matter. What is relevant is how we act
towards it as if it is a power or has some real occult or magical power to
harm us.
Religion says God only makes good and that evil or sin are
just distortions of his good creation. They are not real the way good
is. Malice is supposed "to be a parasite on good. It hides in good for
protection - to work in secret. And it has a good side that by chance may
benefit. It will take advantage of good in order to promote and strengthen and
prolong itself."
If this teaching is supposed to put us off doing evil or harm it is not going to work. Evil is made to look like an appealing cartoon villain or some mystical intriguing forbidden attraction. Those who know the teaching and claim to live it have to know all that fine well.
APPENDIX:
Q If people do harm not cultures or religions, then
why do some traditions set out to do harm and engage in malice more than
others?
A Saying it is people not cultures or religions that harm is the problem. If a group of people can harm then a culture or religion can harm.
It is listening to assertions like that that protects their evil.
Malice is a human problem and of course some systems will further it more than others. Your own system may be calm now but next year is another year.
If the system honours malignant saints and brutal scriptures there is a rot
in it no matter how civilised it acts right now.