Evil – a timely reflection

Do not scorn an evil though small, for it never comes singly, but in battalions, as does joy; good fortune and bad concentrate where they are already thick.  Gracian #254

George Rebane

History records that when Christian knights subdued Jerusalem during the Crusades, they slaughtered most, if not all, of the then resident Muslim population, including women and children.  And we are all witness to the killings of thousands of innocents in the 9/11 attacks by devout Islamist fanatics.  Neither the perpetrators, planners, nor their supporting populations considered these acts as anything other than carrying out the will of God; most certainly neither side considered the massacres to be evil acts.

Yet in the eyes of the targeted populations, these and many more such acts were the very embodiment of unspeakable evil.  And the belief systems that spawned them to be wellsprings of irredeemable evil, that were nevertheless confirmed in their respective canons and credible visions wherein God directed and gave imprimatur to the mass killings.

Countless other such historical narratives can be presented to abet the conclusion that evil is almost entirely in the eyes of the targeted recipients and sympathetic observers.  In a broader sense, we may conclude that evil is really culture dependent and/or culture specific.

Today we see more examples of such relativistic expressions and interpretations of evil.  They continue to be a global phenomenon and an historical constant.  Consulting dictionaries gives us lame meanings that should not inflame any sensibilities, but nevertheless cannot help but corroborate the above interpretation.

From Dictionary.com - Evil (adjective) 1. morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked: evil deeds; an evil life.  2. harmful; injurious: evil laws.

From the Random House Dictionary of the English Language – Evil (adj) 1. Morally wrong or bad; immoral; wicked.  Evil deeds, and evil life.  2. Harmful; injurious.  Evil laws. … 4. Due to actual or imputed bad conduct or character.  An evil reputation.

From the Oxford English Dictionary – Evil (adj)  A. Antithesis of good in all its principal senses.  1. Morally depraved, bad, wicked, vicious.  2. Doing or tending to do harm, hurtful, mischievous, prejudicial.

All the definitions appeal to the violation of morals which are overwhelmingly determined by culture (e.g. cultural mores), and therefore relativistic, in the eye of the beholder, etc.

When we bring this understanding to today’s polarized America, we run head on into the political attribution of evil by our Left.  Democrats are now on a growing public record of defining Trump and all those who support him and his policies as being evil.  That is their core, and to date, only argument as to why the president should not only be denied a second term, but also be prosecuted for crimes claimed and yet to be claimed.  In sum, he is fundamentally evil, and a good person opposes evil with no further argument or evidence needed – the constant chorus of its attribution should be more than enough to indict, convict, and punish.

In the eyes of the Left, we who oppose BLM, Antifa, et al - the new radical organs of the Left and the Democrat Party - are of necessity painted with the same broad brush.  We too are of the deplorably irredeemable cohort of evil people in the land already blemished by indelible racism, prejudice, white privilege, and social injustice to the very marrow of our bones.

This sentiment is not reciprocated per se by the Republican Party.  The country’s political representatives of the Right today are a timid bunch, that has pretty much lost its way and will to fight in the ongoing chaos.  As an institution it doesn’t know whose ass to kick or kiss, a deficit not shared by its audacious and blustering fearless leader who can still be taunted off-message in a heartbeat by any unsubstantiated charge or even a randomly tossed ad hominem.

I, on the other hand, have no such inhibitions, as RR readers with functioning memories will attest.  (e.g. search ‘The Liberal Mind’ category with ‘evil’)  Along with a number of conservative commentators, I long ago concluded that the Democratic Party, as embodied by its leadership, is an evil and anti-American institution.  And I readily acknowledge that my perspective on evil is not some assessment from Mt Olympus, but one that also succumbs to all the culturally adorned attributes outlined above.  Of course, I don’t value all cultures equally, and consider my own to be the custodian of more goodness and light by far than most others on the planet.  I am among those who do not necessarily want to impose their own culture on others, but I will willingly fight to maintain the right to practice it with other like-minded people.

So from that standpoint, the question arises about America's socialist leadership.  Are these Democrats intrinsically evil in that they recognize the harm their public policies will do to America and its people, as they continue to pursue them for their own political and personal benefit?  Or are they true believers, and therefore as tragically ignorant as their grass roots constituents – all those who oppose meritocracy, free enterprise, open markets, minimally regulated capitalism, smaller government, ownership of private property, lower taxes, and abundant liberty to pursue happiness?

In the final analysis we can ask what difference does it make in how we respond to those who seek to diminish our freedoms, fortunes, and futures.  Whether they deprive us individually while they devastate the country with intentions good or ill, either will produce the same end state.  Socialism in America will not stop with the mild-mannered versions in the EU that have been anchored by capitalist America.  When America succumbs to socialism, with no other great nation to anchor us, our nation will inevitably slide into tyranny.  The governance promised by Democrats will be indifferent to their kind of evil - either will equally will herd us into a draconian land in which all will suffer.

Comments

[Ben Emery]

George,
How can a guy who thinks so highly of his own intelligence be so stupid.

The only representation of the left in America are the millions of people in the streets for BLM, Environmental Justice, Stopping Fossil Fuel Pipelines, Occupy Wall St a.k.a. tax the living shit out of unearned income with HFT, Ending Illegal Wars, Ending Biotech/ Green Revolution, Climate Change, 6th Mass Extinction, Voter Suppression, etc...

Please show me anything the Democratic Party has done other than pander and spew out rhetoric that has addressed any of these issues seriously?

How do you take yourself serious?

[Ben Emery]

To think either the Democratic or Republican Party actually make the decisions of our government, which is only supposed to be done by our consent by the way is ridiculous.

The fact with the entire country going down in the shitter and the two major parties put forward a silver spooned below average intelligence bigoted bully in Donald Trump and 5 decade DC Beltway insider who appears to be in cognitive decline who votes for all illegal invasions, supports financial sector, biotech, part of the '96 Crime Bill, exempting student loans from bankruptcy, supports fossil fuels, and on and on it goes.

America is screaming at the top of our lungs we want representation not plutocracy or oligarchy.

Capitalism on global scale has failed miserably and we in the middle of Climate Change and 6th Mass Extinction. It is eating itself up just as we were told over 150 years ago.

The world is burning, literally, and you're playing a fiddle from your disgusting career pretending there is no connection.

[George Rebane]

BenE 901am - I'm doing the best I can with what I've got Ben. Never claimed to be the brightest bulb on the tree, but I am curious as to what about my career you find so disgusting. (I assume you did put some thought into choosing that descriptive.)

[scenes]

"but I am curious as to what about my career you find so disgusting."

Perhaps it was the spellchecker acting up and he meant dissolute....wait, that would be me.

My guess is that he has a notion that the country is made up of two groups...The Elite and The People.

The People are made to argue by The Elite in order for The Elite to keep power. If The People just all voted, then we'd have The PeopleElite or something.

It's the kind of thing you run into now and again, I wouldn't pay too much attention.

[scenes]

...as a side note, I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of scaling up the notion of 'evil'. It seems to me better applied only to individuals.

Mass behavior looks to have it's own rhyme and rhythm and isn't (obviously) just a large version of a singleton.

[George Rebane]

scenes 1031am - Apparently our readings and life's experience differ somewhat. I am familiar with many organizations whose structure and operational principles were purposely configured to provide institutional embodiments of evil. These organizations demonstrated the truth of this assessment during their lifetimes by taking in thousands of presumably pre-evil people, and turning them into evil individuals.

[Ben Emery]

George,

You need to tell me since this watered-down hogwash is now what I can find in your life's work. "Naturalized Citizen, Entrepreneur, Professional Engineer, and Systems Scientist formally trained in Physics, Complex Dynamic Systems, and Computer Science.".

Prior you bragged about how your family fleeing Estonia and how you have been a military producing bigoted hate filled killing machine.

I respect your honesty about your bigotry and perceived superiority but oppose your world view at basically every level.

[Ben Emery]

Scenes,
There are no elites and the people. There are people who have set up a system that keeps people from receiving equitable share of the wealth created. They are thieves and should be held accountable for their injustices. Guillotine seems like a good stick and the carrot would be to give the wealth back to the people who actually created it.

[scenes]

GeorgeR@10:43AM I see what you are saying here, that organizations and their defacto philosophies can create evil people, so the organization is evil, but I still wish there was a different word. 'Evil' to me implies a sort of inner world felt by an individual, often expressed in causing great harm with little benefit. Using that sort of nudge, I'd say that vandalism is more evil than burglary. Control of course is built into a lot of this.

In the end, perhaps being subjected to the tender ministrations of a freelance sadist vs. one 're-educating' you at the camp is perhaps a difference that makes no difference. Year Zero may yet give us the chance to judge the finer gradiations in all this.

Ben E.: "you have been a military producing bigoted hate filled killing machine. "

ooh, I bet you say that to all the girls.

[George Rebane]

BenE 1107am - Ben, you sure are one piece of work - very remarkable. You're the first person ever to look at my biography as a refugee and call it "bragging". BTW, a more complete bio is available on this website, and in the 'My Story' category of RR. Lots more there for you to hate.

[scenes]

BenE: "There are no elites and the people. There are people who have set up a system that keeps people from receiving equitable share of the wealth created. "

lol. That's sure a long way to say 'elites'.

OK, how about

1) people-who-have-set-up-a-system-that-keeps-people-from-receiving-equitable-share-of-the-wealth-created
2) people-who-are-kept-from-receiving-equitable-share-of-the-wealth-created-by-people

I'll call them The Elite, and The People for short, although you are welcome to use an acronym like PWHSUASTKPFRESOTWC and PWAKFRESOTWCBP.

Hie thee to a people-who-are-kept-from-receiving-equitable-share-of-the-wealth-created-by-people committee and become the leader. Lots of heads need nipping off and there's real profit opportunities available in those gigs. Keep in mind that the time in office tends to be depressingly short.

[Ben Emery]

Scenes,

Elite- a select group that is superior in terms of ability or qualities to the rest of a group or society.

superior at stealing the wealth of others, if that is what you meant by elite, then we agree.

[scenes]

Let's simplify that down to a power relationship. You appear to be saying that there's a (probably) small monolithic group of powerful people and a large monolithic group of unpowerful people who need to unify...and, well...that's it. Just trying to be on the same page and all.

[Ben Emery]

George,
You and I have conversed about your time in Estonia, you were what 5 years old. Yet, somehow you don't have any connection towards those children being locked in cages now. The native children being forced into Christian schools where they were not allow to speak their own language or practice their culture. Or how our "free trade" has promoted inequality to the point rural people throughout the Americas are migrating to US since their unsubsidized biotech corn cannot compete with prices creating a different type of migration that you seem to label as criminals.

Don't try and act like this is the first conversation about these topics. This is over years of having dialogues with you about, humanity and the natural world.

[scenes]

GeorgeR: "Ben, you sure are one piece of work - very remarkable. "

oh well, at least he didn't call you a bald military producing bigoted hate filled killing machine. That would be too much.

To Mr. Emery's credit, he's at least trying, in a rather uncouth way, to make some sort of point. It's a step-up from the daily Trump Poll.

[Gregory]

Ben, how's Nursing school goin'? Emptying bed pans now?

[Gregory]

"There are people who have set up a system that keeps people from receiving equitable share of the wealth created. They are thieves and should be held accountable for their injustices. Guillotine seems like a good stick and the carrot would be to give the wealth back to the people who actually created it"

Those are fighting words, Br'er Ben, and the Jacobin did not end well.

[George Rebane]

BenE 1152am - Ben, you aggrandize too much. I've never felt any need to "act like" anything in communicating with you. And all of our exchanges remain archived in these pages, shamelessly accessible to one and all.

I look forward to your assessment of the DNC platform here -
https://rebaneruminations.typepad.com/rebanes_ruminations/2020/09/democrat-2020-platform-the-disaster-revealed.html

[scenes]

"Yet, somehow you don't have any connection towards those children being locked in cages now."

Oh jeez, here we go with the Whac-A-Mole, although honestly 'Children in Cages' sounds like a new Netflix blockbuster.

He must mean these cages.

https://pjmedia.com/news-and-politics/matt-margolis/2020/02/15/biden-finally-admits-he-and-obama-put-kids-in-cages-but-only-to-keep-them-safe-n381547

[Scott O]

BE 11:10 - Yeah, this is way more fun than the latest cherry-picked poll result.
"There are no elites and the people. There are people who have set up a system that keeps people from receiving equitable share of the wealth created. They are thieves and should be held accountable for their injustices. Guillotine seems like a good stick and the carrot would be to give the wealth back to the people who actually created it."
I'd actually think Ben had some sort of intelligence if he would name these worthies and let us in on when 'the system' was set up. Maybe let us in on the location of where the plan for the 'system' is.
Ben claims he knows all about it. But I think he's just full of hate and wound up with the latest from Mother Jones.
And of course there's that old standard - "equitable share".
Ben would - of course - be in charge of what's 'equitable'.
Funny how the deciders always seem to be the ones in the limousines while the happy workers trudge alongside the road with their 'equitable' share.
Pro tip for Ben - those folks you would like to see bereft of their noggins or their cash probably don't see things the way you do.
And they tend to act in rational ways to retain their body parts and their belongings. History has shown that folks with your ideas tend to be either be dispatched before the revolution, during the revolution or pretty soon afterwards no matter which side prevails.
Look to Castro's attitudes towards the 'true believers' after he took power. There was no place in his govt for anyone with your ideas.

[scenes]

"Ben would - of course - be in charge of what's 'equitable'."

Plus, real wealth can be measured in something other than money. If you are in charge of an organization that can hijack a commercial firm, like a union boss or .gov apparatchik, the simple power of the position is worth as much as the money. Heck, the union boss sometimes gets to run a thing that's essentially a monopoly.

One angle is the ability to parlay government influence into the ability to make things happen. You have to be quite wealthy to whistle up a helicopter or live in a mansion, but the right level of bureaucrat gets that thrown in with the job title. It's one reason (besides wage differential) that the Soviet Union had such a high GINI score.

Really, it boils down to the difference between natural ecosystems of human behavior, like free enterprise, with a minimum of control systems laid on top (bills of rights and whatnot) vs. active control of the whole she-bang. It's odd to think that a modern American probably has less freedom (and much higher taxes) than a citizen in the Roman Empire, but then top-down control systems have become a lot more common in the West since then.

[Gregory]

I wonder how folks like Oprah Winfrey would get their kosher cashectomies performed. Mme. Guillotine? Br'er Ben? Oprah is the first black multi-billionaire in North America, if the wiki is to be believed.

Did she get her wealth by screwing others out of their share?

[George Rebane]

As an aside, does anyone here think that BenE really understands any of this?

[Bill Tozer]

As an aside, Ben was not his usual nice mannered self today, Rather cantankerous. Or, maybe that polite articulate Ben is long gone. He takes a sabbatical from RR and comes back at full of piss and vinegar. Maybe because he has no viable 3rd Party to rally behind this time around. Left out in the cold. He is turning into an angry old white guy, I tell ya. I have seen it happen before....with regularity. Maybe the Plague put crimp in the barter system. Who knows? Boy, it’s probably been close to a hundred years since they took school children off the reservation and shipped them Back East to Christian Schools and were forbidden to speak in their native tongue. Ben remembers that like it was yesterday.....er.....like it happened today.

Waltons, Waltons, Waltons, Walton Family, Waltons, Waltons. It’s ALL Sam Walton’s fault. He rounded up the unskilled, pointed a shotgun at their backs, and made them apply for a job at Walmart. Kill the Waltons!

I did enjoy Brother Ben’s reference to the Holy Shrine of the Guillotine. Makes sense. Everytime I think of Brother Ben, I think of the French Green Party platform.....now with a guillotine. Nice Frenchie touch. Oh moi.

[Bill Tozer]

Evil: A direct link from Tom Hayden to the Weather Underground to today in the here and now.

'How The 1960s Riots Foreshadow Today’s Communist Weaponization Of Black Pain'

Many would have us believe that the riots and violence sweeping across America’s cities this year are spontaneous. But history and current evidence tell us otherwise.

"Young, bored, white college students decided to conduct their revolutionary experiment using black people as the trigger."

https://thefederalist.com/2020/09/14/how-the-1960s-riots-foreshadow-todays-communist-weaponization-of-black-pain/

[Scott O]

scenes 2:07 - "Plus, real wealth can be measured in something other than money."
You got that right. In the 50s in the USSR, the plumbers and electricians had the nicest clothes and were well fed. If you wanted the toilets to flush and the lights to work, you would (if you had any) have to bribe the workers with food, clothing, a radio - whatever - to jump the long waiting line.
By the 70s this elite group included the auto mechanics. There were enough doctors and mid-level stooges who had acquired cars to form a long line of those waiting for parts/repairs to keep their Soviet piles of crap running.
At least there were no billionaires to cause any misery in the workers' paradise.
Ben missed his time and place in history.

[Bill Tozer]

Scenes @ 10:31 am

“...as a side note, I've always been uncomfortable with the idea of scaling up the notion of 'evil'. It seems to me better applied only to individuals.

Mass behavior looks to have it's own rhyme and rhythm and isn't (obviously) just a large version of a singleton.”

Interesting conversation you had with Dr. Rebane. As a side bar, the English language is so limited in its words. Other languages had two words for evil. They had evil as Dr. Rebane used it, and they had evil personified. For an example, when Christians (not Steve nor either of the Emery’s’ favorite group of people) recite the Lord’s Prayer and say, “deliver us from evil”, that word evil is in the personified form of evil.

Thus, the text should read “deliver us from the Evil One.” There is evil and evil personified. So, perhaps you and Dr. Rebane are both correct.

[Bill Tozer]

There’s that word evil again.

https://thefederalist.com/?s=Evil+

[Bill Tozer]

Evil has many masks:

https://www.facebook.com/Breitbart/photos/a.10159587164165354/10166182793195354/