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May 22, 2023 - Lionel Nation
15:55
What Is Evil?
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This is one of my favorite subjects.
It's one of my favorite subjects because it upsets people when I talk about what's evil.
What I think is evil.
Because what I think is evil is just being human.
And that really bothers people.
And you'll see why.
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I want to go back to something.
Something I heard years ago.
Something that I never forgot.
When people first saw Adolf Eichmann in a courtroom.
People who remembered him from days of the Holocaust just passed out.
Couldn't believe they saw this monster.
This monster.
And he looked as nondescript and as unmenacing as You can imagine.
And the banality of evil was the quote.
Remember that one?
The banality of evil.
I'll never forget this.
This was this quote that made me...
I don't know where it is right now, but it was something that I thought it was so perfect.
But now, for some reason, my machine is not working.
The banality of evil.
Ah, Eichmann.
A report on the banality of evil.
It's a 1963 book by political thinker Hannah Arendt.
The banality of evil.
This is so interesting.
The ordinariness.
The usualness.
That's what fascinates me.
They're not Monsters.
They're not.
Now we can go through this.
And by the way, these are merely my opinions.
I'm not an expert.
Who's an expert in evil?
What does that even mean?
But war and the systematic dehumanization of people and the enemy make people do things that are just beyond disgusting.
Beyond horrible.
Beyond Anything we can imagine.
And American soldiers have done it.
Soldiers in war have done it.
You've heard the stories.
You know what they've done to little girls and women in villages.
Something happens.
Something comes over.
Something innate, not inane, but something atavistic, primordial, something that is perhaps recessed in us until something triggers it.
Are they evil?
What is evil?
They can come back and say, no, you don't understand it.
You made me evil.
I was just normal.
I submit to you, all of us have the potential to do things that are evil, but nothing triggers it.
It's there.
It's there.
You have it.
And there are some folks who have never, ever, ever Exhibited.
We're going to be talking about serial killers and the like.
But we've always talked about faces of evil.
Evil.
He's evil.
We always try to attribute it to Satan and to Luciferian.
I submit to you, my dear friends, that being human is evil.
Man is not usually good.
Man is not innately good.
Man is not...
Born good.
What is good is not doing bad things.
These are normal people.
People who just do normal stuff during the day and something happens.
Now serial killing will go into another chapter, but while we're at it, they're still trying to figure out that one.
Three things they talk about with serial killers.
Enuresis, bedwetting.
Teasing small animals.
And arson, fires.
And guess what?
There are people who've teased animals, had bedwetting experiences.
They waxed enuretic.
And they also, interestingly enough, or sadly enough, or whatever you want to call it, would commit arson.
But they weren't serial killers!
There are people in prison who have murdered.
There are rapists who have never killed anybody, who have never felt the need.
There's no rhyme or reason.
We always love to figure something out.
We love to define it.
But always, in all of our discussions, evil is always not us.
Oh, that's that Drake meme.
Anyway, it's not us.
Not me.
Them.
You're evil.
You have the capacity to be evil.
It's not something that people become.
It's something that is experienced.
It's almost like an allergy that you realize you have.
It's always like this potential that you had.
You didn't realize it was there.
It was atavistic.
Everything about these people, it goes back to our more animal senses, our more mammalian.
In the wild, it was self-preservation, it was predation, it was getting the prey, and that's it.
And there was never any sense of being nice or what have you.
No, I submit to you that evil is a continuum.
It is not anything special, but let me just throw some ideas out.
First, Let me tell you what good is.
Good and evil can coexist.
Most people sense, have a feeling of accomplishment, of feeling good when they do good for others, but they don't go out of their way to do it.
But if they do, if they open the door, if somebody, hey, you dropped your wallet, see, I'm a good person, they do the most minimalistic of good for them to...
Wallow in the sense of, I'm so great!
But they don't really care.
Most people are indifferent.
Most people feel nothing.
They feel nothing.
I mean, they have their own, their own family.
They'll look at others and they'll say, have you noticed this on social media?
When somebody dies?
Oh!
No words.
I'm heartbroken.
I'm heartbroken.
I can't.
They love to convince you and themselves that they are overly sentient.
That they are this, I don't want to say effulgent, but that they are just brimming with this humanity.
Now let's talk about what evil is.
First of all, there are actively evil people.
People who go out of their way to objectify, to create.
To potentiate, if you will, that evil.
They want to hurt people.
They want to go after.
Then there is the sadist.
Now, the sadist is also a form, you might say, of evil, but they don't even consider that evil.
They get their jollies watching you feel pain.
Part of the psychopathic, in some respects.
Evil is something that doesn't exist.
Evil is this grandiose term for some noble form of human emotional pathology.
It's not.
It's just bad, nasty people doing some things occasionally.
Some do, some don't.
You know these people?
Do you ever see these?
Sometimes you'll see on social media, TikTok, all of a sudden they'll be in a restaurant and they'll beat somebody up or they'll tear the place apart or they'll beat some poor...
That's also part of this collective.
This is the pack mentality.
This is Gustave Le Bon.
This is crowd theory.
This is the aclacracy.
This is the rule of the mob, which is another thing.
This is where our individual personality loses, becomes absorbed into the collective psyche of the group.
We lose all connection.
We go into our most primordial Our most mammalian and reptilian and animalistic and most horrible, that's not evil either.
That's, if you will, that's atavistic.
The evil, the people who want to do things, who feel nothing, that's not evil.
People love to talk about that certain German leader with the chaplain, by the way, it's a toothbrush mustache.
That guy.
So profoundly ordinary, it'd make your head spin.
And the reason why people do not want to think about that is because they don't want to think the banality of evil.
They do not want to think that they share DNA with somebody.
That guy wasn't even a psychopath.
You are able to do things of incomprehensible horror if given the situation, but most of the time you are not.
People who drop an atomic bomb over a city are lauded here but reviled as evil monsters from the viewpoint of the people who had the bomb dropped on them.
How do you explain this?
Because morality is relativistic.
And I know you hate to hear that, but it's true.
There is no evil.
Look at what happens to human trafficking.
Look at what happens to kids.
Look at what people do to kids.
Do you know why they do it?
Money.
When it comes to money, people will do anything.
They will do anything.
They will sell anything, traffic in anything, deal with anything, whether it's shark fins or elephant ivory.
People who abuse children, the actual abuser, it's not because they're evil, they're indifferent.
They don't care.
These people don't mean anything to them.
This is the psychopath, if you think about it.
The head and the heart connection are disconnected.
They're not evil.
Evil isn't...
You're making it so grand.
It's simple, indifferent animal.
They're just a thug-like, lumbering predator.
It's all they are.
And human beings are like that.
It's in our nature.
And we love to make ourselves think that we are just beyond, beyond this, oh my God, that there's this morality, this Jordan Peterson nonsense.
Look, I'm a realist.
And I think there are good people in the world.
I would like to think I'm a good person, but I don't go out of my wage.
I'm not a saint.
And anybody who does do that, there's something wrong with him.
And I think I'm good because I recognize bad, and I'm constantly pointing out that that behavior, what they are doing, is wrong.
It's either wrong on a political level, on a humanistic level, on a practical level, economic level.
Some awareness of goodness.
But I'm not going to make myself out to be some kind of a saint.
But the people that you think are, and I was a prosecutor, I've seen some bad people.
But you know where they were bad?
Because they were indifferent.
Or they themselves were hurt.
Or they had their sense of morality and humanity cored out.
Or never developed.
They're very uncompleted, non-completed, very broken people who work and who subsist at the most base level.
And the evil that they impart is, as you would say, evil, is really sadism.
It's demented.
Or it's indifference.
There's nothing worse than difference.
I don't care.
And when you look at somebody else, not as a human, but as either an object of your momentary or transitional lust, or somebody whose life you want to snuff so that you can claim it in some kind of a weird place, Power thing?
It's not because you're evil.
You're just sick.
And you're cored out.
And you're demented.
And you're...
I submit that evil is too grandiose a term.
It's not evil.
They're just...
Well, there's a word for what they are.
And I can't say it.
But I can think it.
All right, dear friends.
Think about what I've said.
I want to hear what you have to say.
I love your comments.
I love your comments.
If they're good, I might read a few of them.
Anonymously, of course.
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