Good and Evil

Whether we call it ‘evil’, ‘inhumanity’, ‘extreme cruelty’ and something else, is it a human phenomenon, not supernatural? I’d say yes.

But ‘evil’ has a religious connotation. Also seems to denote a fixed characteristic, as distinguished from what can be a temporary lapse in normal empathy. For example, people who commit atrocities in one particular social setting can go on to act compassionately in other circumstances. Writers about child soldiers may have elaborated on this, as well as psychologists.

The reverse is also true. Under social pressure, ‘ordinary people’ can commit atrocities. Christopher Browning, author of Ordinary Men, is one of many writers who give an account of this.

Have sought, in my own small humble way, to understand lack of empathy and cruelty (my own and others’) scientifically—not to justify it, but to better manage, if not eliminate, it. I turned off people I’ve talked to about this over the years, because of not understanding what I myself meant. That’s where writing comes into play: it’s a process of using reason and discourse to untie the knots and unwrap the bundles that emerge from our minds thru intuition. You can intuit something when you’re 18 and spend the rest of your life trying to make it jibe with the rational parts of your mind.

As for studying ‘evil’ scientifically, suggest as a model a bell curve where there is extreme cruelty on one end and extraordinary benevolence at the other end. As with math ability, verbal skills, and other faculties, most of us fall in the middle of the curve. Hence much of the evil in the world results not from bad people but from bad systems, such as, for example, US chattel slavery, imperialism, and cultural systems that involve racism, sexism, heterosexism, religious fanaticism, and so on. Lots of isms.

Well, anyway, the focus on improving flawed social systems—instead of weeding out all the ‘bad people’—involves the ‘love’ that King, Ghandi, Tolstoy, and others talked about. Hitler is an extreme example of someone who focused on the perceived badness of people, that is, those who fell within particular categories. That’s why I’m focusing on love with my new site.

Might take a more mature look at Nietzsche’s Beyond Good and Evil. Suspect he wrote it because he cared deeply—in his own abstract way—about humanity, and didn’t write it to be monstrous or to be an intellectual bad boy rebelling against Christianity. Not saying you think this, but figured it’s worth suggesting: blaming Nietzsche for Nazi ideology is like blaming Christ for the Crusades.