I sat a while on this post from Searching For Dragons called "Evil: is Not a Thing?"
I can't even excerpt it. It is at times vulgar - because it looks at something very ugly. It is gut wrenching, because it turns our attention to the truly vile, and dares us to refuse to believe it exists.
In an excellent recent podcast, Jordan B. Peterson, who has also been on Stefan Molyneux show, mentions something Solzhenitsyn said about the Nuremburg trials. The point he brought up was that some things are done are so awful that everyone who is not a monster knows they are wrong, regardless of culture. Eric Raymond once noted - I cannot find the article - that a trading methodology involving piles of goods, splitting them, moving them, requiring no language, implied at least some degree of universal moral standards, even if the exact details of what constitutes, say, murder, or theft, may vary.
That post? Evil exists.
Just go read the thing.
I will add one observation. One consequence of the postmodern nihilism, of dragging everything into the muck, is that not only do we tear down the good, the virtuous, the capacity for divinity and light, but we provide cover for evil as well.
From the primary article: "There is only one thing that is greater than a person who commits evil. The person who allows it to occur through passive permission, or damnable inaction."
ReplyDeleteSo, like a "cuck-vile", perhaps.
As a compliment to the passive enablers of Evil, there are more and more people today that want to actively defend Evil, assuming that it is somehow a twisted Good, and that it must be allowed to work through its Evil until those "poor souls" magically become Good ... someday.
And always, always, always this action must come at the expense of the innocent. The more innocent the victims of the Reforming Evil, the better.
Like cuckservatives, the enablers of Evil should be dealt with first.
Always.
Sometimes I wonder if part of the reason, somewhere in the back of the mind, for tearing down good, is because, if you don't have good, if there is nothing _different_ about good that distinguishes if from bad, then there is also no evil.
ReplyDeleteI believe this is part of it. People who wish no higher authority nor strictures to answer to in their lives seem to be more willing to layer in "nuances" between Good and Evil, likely to better lose themselves in the gray between for their benefit (material, psychological, moral, etc).
ReplyDeleteThat kind of petty Evil is that of which Solzhenitsyn speaks of in his writings. It is a seed to a tree that bears bitter fruit in quantity.
" provide cover for evil as well."
ReplyDeleteAgreed. Accomplices before and after the fact.