I don't like the word 'evil', partly because of the heavily supernatural and religious connotations it has (I prefer a scientific, analytical approach to studying the various problems plaguing humanity and think we learn much more this way!), but I like this quote:
"Evil is humanity turned against itself and so conflict and contradiction are fundamental to its nature".
I find the statement quite applicable in our modern judgement of Communism. Communism sought, through brutally-enforced naivety, to bend humanity to behave more altruistically than we are perhaps naturally inclined to. This could lead us to have contempt for, and ultimately to hate ourselves and to be willing to commit atrocities to improve what mankind is.
2 comments:
Lance, if I meet you on some dark road, beat the crap out of you and take your wallet, leave you there to die bleeding in the gutter while rejoicing in your suffering, use your credit card to steal your identity and then use the money thus acquired to lure some runaway kid into white slavery, what word would you use to describe my actions?
Evil works for me.
That'd make you an arsehole :) A really really big arsehole!
No, I mean, what you've described is a mixture of sadism, recklessness, cruelty, lack of empathy etc etc
I guess, if you want to use the word 'evil' to describe some combination of all of the above, nobody's going to argue with you.
It's just that the word evil carries some connotations, which is why I disown it. For a start, the supernatural element...evil is supposedly some dark force lurking within the heart of anybody who does anything bad. then all the imagery of the Good doing battle with the Evil. I guess the word evil just needlessly simplifies too many other things and the word is going to be bandied around too much to be useful.
Instead, you'll have Axes of Evil and Evil people or evil ideologies or evil cultures or whatever.
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