Good and Evil are great examples of abstractions gone wrong. They are too high level to mean anything now.
They've become a psychological comforting mechanism where we apply "good" to things we like or want to like and "evil" to things that we don't. But the words themselves connote something deeper than that--something foundational about morality.
It's convenient. Tidy. We all want to think of ourselves as "good." We don't want to think that we, individually or as a nation or whatever group identity we cling to, is capable of being "evil." Calling something evil is a way of creating cognitive distance between ourselves and what we don't like.
I think it's dangerous. Literally dangerous to engage in the world this way. The real fact of the matter is that perfectly normal, sane, rational, "good" people are capable of doing atrocious things. Even you. Even me.
Hitler wasn't fundamentally different from any of us. Any one of us could become just as bad under the right (wrong?) circumstances.
Pretending that we are different in some basic way paves the path for us to become "evil." It allows us to believe that we are immune to certain types of bad actions.
But we aren't.
Any single individual among us has the capacity to do awful things. Some people were simply able to scale awfulness effectively. That doesn't make them fundamentally different from us.
Calling some individual "evil" isn't semantically different from applying the "good" label to yourself. And when you believe that you are good, it's a lot easier to bend the rules.
There's a specific and frightening chain of logic that goes like this:
I'm good. Good people don't do evil things. So this [insert bad behavior here] is good. Because I'm good.
But the good/evil lens of the world has another drawback. It removes accountability and consequence. If I believe that I'm "good", there's no credit to be given when I choose not to do "evil" deeds. Of course I wouldn't do that. I'm not "evil".
When you apply a label like "evil" to a person, what else could you expect? Of course that person is going to do horrible things. That person is "evil."
The Good/Evil abstraction is pernicious, self-fulfilling, and circular.
We need to be better than that. We need to own up to the full spectrum of our nature and accept it so that we can guard against the worst parts of it.
Pretending that we are not capable of being "evil" is pretty much the foundational mechanism that allows truly terrible things to happen.
They've become a psychological comforting mechanism where we apply "good" to things we like or want to like and "evil" to things that we don't. But the words themselves connote something deeper than that--something foundational about morality.
It's convenient. Tidy. We all want to think of ourselves as "good." We don't want to think that we, individually or as a nation or whatever group identity we cling to, is capable of being "evil." Calling something evil is a way of creating cognitive distance between ourselves and what we don't like.
I think it's dangerous. Literally dangerous to engage in the world this way. The real fact of the matter is that perfectly normal, sane, rational, "good" people are capable of doing atrocious things. Even you. Even me.
Hitler wasn't fundamentally different from any of us. Any one of us could become just as bad under the right (wrong?) circumstances.
Pretending that we are different in some basic way paves the path for us to become "evil." It allows us to believe that we are immune to certain types of bad actions.
But we aren't.
Any single individual among us has the capacity to do awful things. Some people were simply able to scale awfulness effectively. That doesn't make them fundamentally different from us.
Calling some individual "evil" isn't semantically different from applying the "good" label to yourself. And when you believe that you are good, it's a lot easier to bend the rules.
There's a specific and frightening chain of logic that goes like this:
I'm good. Good people don't do evil things. So this [insert bad behavior here] is good. Because I'm good.
But the good/evil lens of the world has another drawback. It removes accountability and consequence. If I believe that I'm "good", there's no credit to be given when I choose not to do "evil" deeds. Of course I wouldn't do that. I'm not "evil".
When you apply a label like "evil" to a person, what else could you expect? Of course that person is going to do horrible things. That person is "evil."
The Good/Evil abstraction is pernicious, self-fulfilling, and circular.
We need to be better than that. We need to own up to the full spectrum of our nature and accept it so that we can guard against the worst parts of it.
Pretending that we are not capable of being "evil" is pretty much the foundational mechanism that allows truly terrible things to happen.