What is Evil? 16 comments

29 Sep 2004 @ 19:28, by Flemming Funch That isn't really a very hard question, but it gets hard if one sort of starts in the wrong place. If you start off by assuming the universe and the life in it is just some random and meaningless occurrance, then it is a fairly meaningless question too. It just becomes something to say about people you really don't like. Or if your starting point is a story about God and the Devil, then it becomes a really convoluted thing to try to explain. I start with the observation and assumption that everybody and everything fundamentally is good. Not particularly "good" in a good versus evil sense. Not a polarized idea. Rather, everything is inherently tending towards being and doing something that has a constructive angle to it. It is good for something in the bigger or smaller picture. Or at least it is neutral. A rock is a certain piece of something that has certain properties. It doesn't do a whole lot, but it can be a piece of a mountain, or a wall, or many other useful things. If a rock once in a while falls on somebody's head and hurts them, it isn't because the rock is evil and was trying to do some damage. It is rather passively just being a rock, and obeying the law of gravity and things like that. Obviously. A tree is an alive entity that does a whole lot more, and actively extracts stuff from the environment, grows certain structures, and reproduces, etc. It has a certain natural cycle of how it does things. If one day a dead branch falls off a tree and kills somebody, it isn't because the tree is evil and meant to do that to be mean. Dead branches fall off eventually, and it was just time, and the wind helped a bit and then a bird sat on it. None of which was meant to harm anybody. How about animals, then. They spend a good deal of their time going around killing other living entities. At least they eat plants, killing them in the process. Or they hunt down other animals, kill them and eat them? Is that evil? Well, we might not like it when we look at it, but the animals appear to have no ill will about it. That is just what they do, and they need to eat. Even the animals eaten don't seem to be as stressed about it as we humans might be when contemplating it. A fish eats another fish. They second fish would instinctively get away if it could, but if it gets eaten there doesn't seem to be much involved that we'll recognize as emotion or suffering. Nothing evil anywhere. Even if they sometimes do it for sport. Our cat will happily keep a wounded lizard alive for as long as possible, while lazily dashing it around. Or bring a half-dead bird into the house and drag it around. Is it evil? Well, we sure don't like it, but no amount of yelling about it seems to make any difference. It will happily do it again. Because it serves a function. A cat in the wild would of course need to practice its hunting skills in order to get food and survive. Nothing personal about it. It is not that it doesn't like birds or anything. So, now, us humans are a little more complicated. We think abstractly and have feelings about complicated things. But most of the time we also just go about our business. We learn how to do things, find a spot to do it in, we eat, reproduce, entertain ourselves, form social groups, build tools, etc. Everybody's inherently just trying to live and do what seems to be there to do. When provided with a choice, we'll generally choose the better one according to our aggregated instincts for what we're trying to do and what works. Life is trying to survive well and do better. It would be fair to assume that such a fundamntal aim is built into all life-forms. Certainly we can observe it in anything that lives. But we humans are more vulnerable to bad information. In part because we do many things abstractly, apparently as opposed to many other players in nature. And, related to that, that our activities get very complicated. It is no longer just to eat the first thing that comes along that looks edible whenever we're hungry. The choices concerning maintaining and improving our lives are increasingly made with abstract information, and with the real stuff being quite removed from us. And we're tied into abstract social systems that might be beyond us individually to understand. So, if I'm a soldier trained to kill people, and I do so, is that evil? Not necessarily. I might have the information that I'm doing so in order to protect the large social group that I consider myself belonging to. I might have been brought up and educated and trained to look at it a certain way, and I simply do what I consider my duty, and what seems logical. Not necessarily anything personal against the people I kill. I'm acting according to the information I have, the training I've been given, and the circumstances I'm in. If I were a German soldier controlled by the Nazis, does that suddenly make it different? Not really. I'm still a victim of the information I have and what I've been trained into, and I might have limited choices available to make it all different. What if I'm a burglar or bank robber, stealing with a gun in my hand, to fund my crack habit. Evil? Maybe just the only solution I saw available to me. Again, doesn't make it right or permissible in society, but for the individual it might still be a matter of doing the best I can with my limited options, and possibly false information and misguided beliefs. Am I saying that there's no evil, and everybody's just acting within the information they have? Not quite. That's what's going on most of the time. But there's still something we could call "evil". Which is relatively rare. You know, when one looks at what is going on in the world, and one doesn't get around to seeing it in such an "understanding" fashion as I attempt here, one might well reach some different conclusions. There are bad people in the world, and they seem to get away with it. Being bad works. It is much easier and more productive to think about just yourself, and not care about anybody else. It is a misunderstanding, really. Again, based on faulty information, an individual looks around him and concludes that other people are evil and therefore they have the upper hand. And insted of continuing to be the victim of them, he flips around and instead assumes what he believes is their kind of personality. Bad. Evil. Thinking just about yourself, and not caring who gets hurt when they get in your way. It is not about certain types of actions that are inherently evil. Those depend on the context. What is key here is the intention. Somebody who actually intends to do harm and it doesn't bother them. It is a fake personality. Nobody really were like that originally. There are no evil babies. But a sufficient amount of torture and abuse from an early age from one's parents or from authorities or from what one perceives as "the system" can do it to the best of people. Or one might simply take a "logical" overview of the world and mistakenly conclude that being evil is the way to go. One might do all that unconsciously, without thinking it through, simply changing one's personality to survive. Or, more chillingly, one might consciously conclude that it will work and one will get ahead over others by being that way. Very few people have adopted what we could call an "evil" personality. Maybe a couple of percent of us. But that can create a lot of havoc. And any of us might in some moments, for reasons we might not completely understand ourselves, instinctively choose to be evil, and to act with the sole intention to hurt others, maybe to bring oneself ahead. Either way, it is a copy of what we think others are doing. Which they probably weren't really doing for the reasons we think. The parent who was mean to you when you were little might have had their own story of being a victim of the circumstances and of bad information. They might think the Bible told them to beat you, to make you a better person. Or they were repeating what their parents did to them. Or they were lost and stuck and unaware. But one way or another, some people end up acting as if they're evil, and they will deliberately hurt other people and enjoy it. Psychopaths. That only happens when they're already pretty bad off, when they've closed their hearts, when they never developed any empathy for others, and when they're loaded with false information about how life works. But there's plenty of that around, and no general education that teaches you how to be social. So, what to do about that? Well, with the majority of people, who're mostly trying to do what they think is good, reason and kindness and good information will work. If they do something that hurts others, one can make them understand that, and they would naturally feel bad about it and try to do it better. But with the smaller number of people who're stuck in the evil personality, it is quite different. Being nice to them is not going to help, and will only show them how weak you are; and showing them how their actions hurt others is only going to encourage them. Because they aren't really there, but they have adopted a strategy quite opposite to yours or mine, and they've invested a lot in cementing it into place. Anybody might change. One might wake up and realize what one is doing, and change one's ways. But with this kind of thing, it doesn't happen easily or casually. It does happen, though. But in the meantime it would be valuable to develop a keen ability to notice who's who. If the person in front of you is still connected with their basic goodness, then you can talk with them, give them information, tell them truth, share how you feel, and you might get along better, and they'll use what they learn to make better decisions afterwards, more beneficial decisions. If the person in front of you is one of the very few who have lost touch with who they really are, and adopted an evil personality, then it is all different. They'd use everything they learn about you to gain an upper hand over you and get you out of the way. Now, many people have bad inter-personal skills and foggy perceptions and lots of emotional baggage and might easily conclude that what I described fits perfectly on their ex-wife or their boss. So let me say again that the odds are that it isn't so. Most likely any differences could be sorted out if the emotional baggage gets out of the way, and it becomes evident that all parties really would like things to work. It is a bit dangerous to even have labels like that, as people who can't figure out how to understand each other and get along are likely to hide behind horrible labels they apply to each other. You know, if you have a different belief system than I, and you do things I don't like, you're just evil. No, it is not that I'm talking about. No, we're more talking about serial killers and otherwise criminally insane psychopaths. Oh, and some of the people who are gang members, muggers, terrorists, etc. But far from all. And indeed there would be people in the group that wouldn't be very obvious at all. Well-educated CEOs of companies, government officials, people who on the surface appear to have great people skills, be charming and eloquent, have families, etc. But underneath, their modus operendi is to sabotage and disable everybody else, preferably in the hidden, so that they can get their own way and the others don't. Everything looks right on the outside, to the casual observer, but inside we have the walking dead, and they leave a trail of destruction in their wake, which they well might succeed to make appear as somebody else's fault. Hard to pinpoint, but very important, to spot the psychopaths that don't look the part. And not to pick them as your leaders. As some point we might with some luck have a society that makes it easier for us to connect with our basic humanity, and which no longer rewards psychopathic behavior. Until then it is just very necessary to pay close attention to what people's basic motivations really are. Another angle on it is that despite our individually fairly noble intentions, we might very well accidentally create organizations that possess similar characteristics as that of a psychotic individual. It is not very hard for a large corporation to be evil, and to act in its own interest to the detriment of anybody who gets in the way. For that matter, it is inherent in its design. Only if some of the people running it go way out of their way to make it act more decently and socially can it be otherwise.

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