Betrayal Essay

And that someone or something else may be – in fact is likely to be – of real value. So we have to bear in mind what Judas might have been protecting – what values he could have been serving other, that is, than Satan’s – in his betrayal of Jesus.Unless it wasn’t a betrayal at all: some interpreters have wanted to argue that Judas was trying to help Jesus, but it misfired.‘I know who you are and where you come from,’ he says to Jesus in the Gospel of Judas, written apparently in the middle part of the second century, a few decades after the New Testament gospels, and discovered in the 1970s in Middle Egypt, but not coming properly to light, after much shady dealing, until 2001.

The child, at least initially, feels betrayed by the new life he is precipitated into; he is like the man in Dylan’s audience shouting ‘Judas’ – at his parents.This fact reveals just how starkly our sense of ourselves as moral creatures is organised around the question of betrayal, and whatever we take to be the alternatives to it.What would the social bond look like – and what would the bonds between individual people look like – if we thought of the capacity to betray and be betrayed as a virtue; or at least as in some sense integral to the moral life; as something to be taught in schools?, and set off on a world tour that would change popular music.At a now famous concert at the Manchester Free Trade Hall, Dylan was playing his new electric and electrifying music when a disaffected folkie in the audience shouted ‘Judas’.Sexual jealousy is not just one of the things that happens when you become attached to someone: it is the sign of attachment.If there was no such thing as betrayal in the world how would anything matter to us, or how would we know that it did?We know something is new, that something is changing, when we feel betrayed.You know someone matters to you if they can betray you, or be betrayed by you.At each of these developmental stages in the psychoanalytic story, the child suffers what feels like a breach of trust, a loss of entitlement, a diminished specialness.As in the sexual infidelities of adulthood, something that was taken for granted and taken to be exclusive has had to be shared.