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May 28, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:19
1370 The Characteristics of Evil Part 1

Step one of how to separate the tigers from the grass.

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Good afternoon, my precious friends.
How are you? It is Steph.
It is the 28th of May 2009.
On my way for a few errands and a nice old carcast.
Man, I wish I had this iRiver when I was doing my podcast.
Holy! Slightly more convenient than recording web files onto a notebook.
So... I wanted to talk about...
One of the questions that I'm working over in the new book is some characteristics of what is commonly called evil and what we'll call evil for the time being.
We've done a fair amount of exploration of virtue and some exploration of evil, but I wanted to look at some particular characteristics of evil that I think are useful or important and hopefully that will be helpful for you in your own life to help you with any...
Of the darker aspects of the Mycosystem.
Oh, and for those who are asking, there is a whole series on the Mycosystem.
I have kept it as a bonus for subscribers, right?
So if you subscribe, then you get the Mycosystem podcast.
It's pretty advanced, and so I wanted people to be a little bit more familiar with the conversation first.
You wouldn't want to jump in, learn to swim in a tempest in the deep end, right?
With a strong undercurrent.
So it's good to get at least some of the models of psychology that we work with here.
Before jumping into the ecosystem, so I just wanted to mention that.
If you sign up, I will send you the links.
But evil is a very, very fascinating, almost endlessly fascinating question or problem, and it is fundamentally the question or problem that is foundational to philosophy.
In many ways, it is the first cause of philosophy.
In other words, philosophy would still be around if there wasn't evil in the same way.
Nutrition would still be around if there wasn't disease, but you wouldn't have medicine in the way that we understand it today if there was no such thing as disease or illness.
But you might still want to tweak and optimize, which would be nutrition and exercise.
Illness is the first cause of medicine.
Evil is the first cause of philosophy.
And so, since philosophy arises out of a response to the reality of evil, it is a very good thing, I think, to understand it as deeply as possible.
And you could really say, and validly so, I think, it's a lifelong occupation in the same way that the study of illness and medicine is a lifelong occupation.
But there are certain characteristics that I think are worth examining, you know, right up front.
And Sorry, I'm just going to pause every now and then to listen to ye olde instructions from the GPS. And thank you again to the listener who sent it in.
Hugely helpful. Definitely avoids me getting lost and confused, at least on the road.
So some of the characteristics of evil, which we'll talk about and then we'll talk about possible etymologies or sources of evil...
Some of the characteristics would be...
Evil is obviously injurious.
Evil is unjust.
Evil initiates non-UPB compliant actions.
But evil really is, to me, characterized by knowledge and use of ethics for the purpose of corruption.
That, to me, is fundamental.
So... If I genuinely believe, because I'm crazy, that singing bad out of hell will cure a headache, then I will say that with all sincerity.
But if I have better knowledge, but I continue to say that because I can charge royalties or something, then clearly that is...
And knowledge of virtue is required for the categorization of evil to be applied.
Otherwise... It is morally indistinguishable from a lion, which certainly, if it's hungry and you're ambling along the African savannah, will leap and gnaw at you.
So that's the initiation of the use of force, but without any knowledge of ethics, right?
So crazy people, children...
And very young children.
Children learn ethics almost as soon as they learn how to walk, at least the value and use of ethics.
Because, you know, they'll always say, you come across two kids having a fight or a yelling match, and they'll always say the other person started it because they understand.
At a year and a half or two years old, they will understand that the initiation of force is immoral.
Of course, it takes a lot of education to turn them into relativists, but we all start off with that understanding.
So... You need to have a knowledge of ethics, and it can be an instinctual knowledge, but you need to have some sort of knowledge of ethics in order for your actions to be classified, in the ethical realm, for your actions to be classified as evil.
So if you are a kid, and we'll start with the simplest examples, right?
So if you're a kid and you push another kid to get a toy that you want, And then if the adult comes and says, well, what happened?
And you say, I wanted his toy, so I pushed him.
In other words, if you are not a child of the Homo sapien species, then...
And that's wrong.
And it's wrong because you know that it's wrong.
Sorry, that's not wrong because you're just honestly saying, sorry about that, lost consideration for that.
If you say, I pushed the kid and took his toy because I wanted his toy, then that's not wrong because you are genuinely doing and saying that which you believe to be the correct, if not moral, course of action, the appropriate or valid course of action.
But if you say, if you start defending yourself and saying that you didn't do what you did or you did because you were provoked when you weren't and so on, when you start using moral justifications for your actions and lying, then your actions are subject to Judgment and possibly censure, right? So again, we're talking about kids.
It's hard to say that kids are evil.
It's hard to say that kids are making poor nutritional choices because it's their parents who buy the food, right?
It's hard to say that kids are evil because it's their parents' behavior almost always that they are mirroring or those in their society.
So it's really hard to say that they're just out and out nefarious.
In fact, I think it'd be pretty impossible to say until...
Kids get into their...
I would say puberty is a rough guess.
The brain matures pretty quickly during and after puberty and so on.
So a knowledge of virtue and the use of virtue as a justification for actions which contradict the values you are using to defend them is a necessary...
Requirement for the judgment of evil to occur.
To take an infinitely more egregious example, if George Bush did say we are attacking Iraq because Iraq is going to attack us, then you're saying that self-defense is the only Justification for preemptive war.
And, of course, they knew that, right?
I mean, that's why they said the smoking gun in the form of a mushroom cloud and not we want oil or we need to blow things up or we want to provoke more enemies so that we can extend our powers or war precedents get praised in the history books or whatever the real reason was.
There is many ways of covering up your real motives by saying, well, no, I'm only here to defend the American people, right?
And, of course, it's not true that it defends the American people.
Torture, of course, is also justified with an appeal to, you know, oh, there's a ticking bomb and blah, blah, blah, and it's all complete nonsense, right?
Because when you torture a highly volatile and irrational set of Newfound enemies or new created enemies like fundamentalist Muslims, you simply create more anger and opposition towards America.
And by extension, Americans who are not doing a lot to criticize the political regime that is performing these actions, you simply make Americans more dangerous.
You simply make your enemies more dangerous.
Americans are in greater danger because of torture.
I mean, there's no question of that.
Generation Kill has a great scene in it where They point out that the people that they're shooting are all newly recruited terrorists who are there because Iraq has been invaded and other Muslim children have been killed.
In the same way that you would feel if other Americans or other Christians had been killed and murdered, say, as in 9-11, the desire for vengeance.
That, of course, is what happens to others, right?
We are all made of a similar mix.
So you need to have a knowledge of virtue and use it to justify the opposite of what you're using to justify it in order to fall into the category of immorality.
So immorality fundamentally is a kind of superior and contemptuous hypocrisy, right?
That morals are simply useful for blinding the sheep as to your true motives and to get them to cheer as you endanger them and their children and sell their progeny into infinite oriental debt, right?
So that's the first characteristic, that evil has a knowledge of virtue, and evil uses virtuous pronouncements to cover up its own immorality.
And we know that it's immorality because the person who's performing the immoral actions is claiming the exact opposite in terms of moral justification, so they know that the truth can't be spoken, right?
In other words, evil understands that ethics...
Morality is just another kind of religion for the vast majority of people, and I would say for just about everyone until our thundering conversation came along.
But morality is just another kind of religion that people will simply follow like sheep to the slaughter, wherever the leader points to, because they believe in ethics, and ethics are infinitely manipulatable in a way that Reality, as I mentioned before, is not.
So, another aspect...
So there's a great deal of belief in the practical utility of ethics as a livestock management technique.
As a way of hiding the slaughterhouse from the cows and making them think it's some sort of fun party that they're going to.
So that's very important.
The hypocrisy and the knowledge of the power of ethics...
Among the broken slaves of the general population.
That you simply can't get people to accept evil without calling it virtuous.
And so, a deep knowledge of the power of virtue is so essential for the attainment of evil.
Now, another aspect of evil is that evil is Fundamentally, a form of cowardice.
So to take an example, if some, you know, tiny 98-pound guy comes up and throws a drink in Mike Tyson's face when Mike Tyson is obviously in a bad mood, Then, or slaps Mike Tyson when Mike Tyson is obviously in a bad mood and Mike Tyson then punches him back and, you know, knocks out half his teeth and gives him a cracked jaw or whatever, right?
We would understand that This is just a form of masochism.
Now, certainly the chicken-chested little guy who threw the first slap is initiating the use of force, but his slap is not really going to do much to damage Mike Tyson, whereas Mike Tyson's response is going to do an enormous amount to damage him.
And I'm sorry, I don't know any more contemporary boxers than this.
So I think that's an important thing to understand as well.
That... The initiation of force against a far superior or even equal enemy is not quite in the category of evil.
Yeah, the initiation of force is immoral, but if the initiation of force is tiny and non-damaging relative to the response that can be almost inevitably predicted, then we understand that It's more masochism.
It's more the desire to get hit or belted back or maybe you want to have a lawsuit or something like that.
But to initiate an inconsequential level of force against a vastly superior and aggressive opponent is not quite the same as real evil.
Because to me, real evil is when...
You initiate force against a helpless or infinitely or largely weaker opponent.
That, to me, is evil, right?
So, Mike Tyson, again, not to pick on Mikey, but Mike Tyson goes up, or Muhammad Ali in his prime, or George Frazier, whatever, goes up in his prime and punches a pregnant woman.
We can understand that that's Or even just slaps a pregnant woman.
We understand that that is an immorality that is greater than the weak guy going up and slapping Mike Tyson.
We assume that the pregnant woman has more capacity to be hurt and has no capacity to fight back because she is big with child.
The evil is also characterized by the disproportionality of power.
In the interaction.
I think that's something that's also really, really important to understand.
The greater the disproportionality of power or control, then the greater the degree of violence...
Sorry, the greater the degree of evil, all other things being equal.
The more powerful you are, the more evil you are doing relative to your victim.
You can scarcely say the guy is slapped by...
A 98-pound weakling, the boxer or the wrestler.
We can scarcely say that he is a mere victim of this, right?
Yeah, he's been hit and that's wrong, but we understand, right?
So, hypocritical use of ethics to cover up evil actions.
Initiation of the use of force, for sure, but most importantly, the disproportionality of power is...
It's more or less the same, right?
Sorry, the disproportionality of power is highly relevant to the question of evil.
And the greater the disproportionality of power, the greater the power the evil person has who initiates force or fraud or whatever abuse, the more cowardly the action is, right?
To attack those who won't or can't attack back is...
It's cowardly, right? So the bully who picks on the little kid with thick glasses.
It's cowardly. Now, another aspect of evil is the endless creation of the no-win situations.
Of the no-win situations.
So, for instance, what occurs sometimes between parent-child and sometimes in couples' relationship is a very common pattern where the other person, let's call her Sue,
Sue is irritable and starts picking on a barb, About the normal inconsequential nonsense that people seem to get all hung up about in relationships, you know, like you didn't put the cap on the toothpaste tube or you left a towel on the floor, you know, whatever it is that just drives them nuts, right?
For me, with Christina, Christina doesn't like it when I use the bathroom to shave or whatever, right?
I seem to leave water just about everywhere.
It's basically that I've thrown a water bomb into the bathroom for a variety of reasons, right?
Because I also do my hair in the sink, right?
As far as doing my hair goes, right?
Wet it and comb it or whatever. And so there's just a lot of water around, and she's mentioned it a couple of times now, we keep a towel there and I'll wipe down the sink because she doesn't like it.
So it's not like she picks at me, but it's something she doesn't like.
And so what happens is, let's say Bob is the husband or boyfriend, and Bob knows that she's starting to pick at him, and he knows that it's going to escalate, right?
And so the impossible situation is that...
If he points out that she's escalating and that she's picking on him for inconsequential things and there probably is something else going on, then she will escalate that much more quickly, right?
So when you accurately identify at least a pretty important potential reason as to why someone's getting angry, which is not what they're stating, and this is a generally accepted principle, right?
Or generally accepted Valid approach to interpersonal conflict that you talk about principles, you don't talk about content.
You talk about how to resolve disputes and what is really going on rather than how important is it to leave the toothpaste cap on or there's this huge raging debate about whether it's better to have the toilet paper coming over the top or under the bottom.
This is what people piss away their existences on.
So you talk about, you know, what are you feeling and what bothers you, where does it come from, how are we going to resolve this dispute, what are principles we can appeal to, and blah, blah, blah.
You don't talk about the toothpaste tube, right, because that doesn't get you anywhere.
And so when you're in that situation where somebody's starting to pick and escalate, and you're either going to suffer through the escalation, or you're going to submit to...
Completely disproportionate emotional tension relative to the stimuli of a toothpaste tube cap or whatever, which is humiliating and only encourages further escalations.
Or you say, come on, this isn't really about the...
I can't believe you that it's really about a toothpaste tube, you're getting this angry, so what's really going on?
Oh, don't psychologize me.
It is about this. I'm just frustrated because it seems like every time, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Escalation. All right, so you're in this no-win situation, and there's tons and tons of no-win situations.
Again, to go back to something infinitely more egregious, George Bush says to Saddam Hussein, reveal your programs for developing weapons of mass destruction.
Damn it. And Saddam Hussein either does reveal these programs, in which case he will be invaded for non-compliance with the UN blah blah blah, because, you know, the United States is so into complying with UN regulations at all times.
Never abstains or anything like that, votes against with Israel.
Anyway. So if Saddam Hussein says, yes, I do have WMDs and I have programs, and they say, aha, you violated me, invade.
And if he says, I don't have any, then they say, well, you're hiding, which is against UN regulations, you're hiding them, we know you have them, therefore we're going to invade, right?
There's nothing that he can do that is going to prevent the invasion, allowing the weapons inspectors back in, giving them access to everywhere, none of that.
It does anything.
You just can't stop it. It's a no-win situation.
So the creation of no-win situations for other people is another core aspect of immorality.
Now, it is usually a precursor to evil.
It is not the evil itself.
It's the fertilizer for the black flowers of evil, these impossible situations.
And they're often passive-aggressive, but they are usually a precursor to active aggression.
And that, again, is another way of...
You need to create a moral excuse for doing the evil that you want to do.
And part of that is creating these impossible situations for other people.
So that's another aspect of it.
I'm sure you can think... You can probably think of many, many examples of this.
In your life, right?
So, I mean, to take a small example from my childhood, my mother would be annoyed if I was inert, right?
Or if I didn't think for myself, but then if I thought for myself in a way that wasn't perfectly aligned with what she wanted, she would yell at me not to think and, you know, don't think, right?
I mean, just do the right thing or whatever.
So, there was an impossible situation, right?
If you don't think, Then you're attacked.
If you do think and try to come to a conclusion, but it's not the exact conclusion that your mom wants, then you get attacked.
So you understand, right? This is the same kind of nonsense.
Cash-22s at all times.
Now, this is tied into the last point because when you have impossible situations, it always arises from a disproportionality of power.
A disproportionality of power.
And so, if I say to...
I don't know, let's go back in time.
If I were to say to Saddam Hussein, do X, Y, or Z, or I'm going to invade your country naked, right?
Obviously, I'm not going to be able to do very much other than blind several Iraqis as they come swoop in to do whatever they're going to do to me.
But he's going to laugh at me, right?
Because I have no power to invade Iraq naked, even though I am an army of one.
It's a good name. It's as good a name for the ecosystem as anything.
But because I have no power to do that, right?
And if the abused child tries to put the abusive parent into an impossible situation, the abusive parent will simply laugh and attack or growl and attack or whatever, right?
But to create an impossible situation for someone else, you have to have a disproportionate degree of power over them.
So a board that has the power to fire you can put you in impossible situations if they want to fire you or whatever.
They can tell you to increase the sales and then deny you an advertising budget.
They can do all of these things.
But if I write to the CEO of Coca-Cola and saying, I need you to increase sales but I'm going to decrease your advertising budget, he would just look at it as a lunatic and it would not put him in an impossible situation because I have no power over him.
You need a disproportionality of power in order to put people in these impossible situations.
And the impossible situations are designed to do two things fundamentally to the victim.
The first is to paralyze them so that they're easier to control and bully.
And the second is to create an enormous amount of frustration within them so that you can call them crazy.
I mean, that is a very, very Important aspect of things.
So that's one other aspect of the creation of impossible situations, and the larger the disproportionate power, the better, right?
So fundamental impossible situation or crazy-making situation in a state of society, i.e.
all societies, is that You are told things are voluntary, but you're not allowed to choose.
You are told that taxation is voluntary, and you are not allowed to choose.
You said, oh, because you can vote for your leader, it makes you an equal participant.
But it's never a two-way street, right?
Leaders don't vote for you, and so you're told that it's voluntary, but you're not allowed to choose.
You can choose your husband, but you have to choose between one of these two guys, and there's no possibility of you not being married.
So it's your choice, and it's exactly the same as a perfectly free choice, but it's incredibly constrained, and both parties are abusive, right?
So, I mean, this is why it's so hard for people to see the impossible...
The impossible situations and logical contradictions within statism, again, because so many people are brought up like this, in school as well, right?
So in school, the impossible situations are, I mean, almost infinite, right?
But one that's, I think, very important, I was just talking about with Christina the other day, which is that I mean, basically these heavy logs of ethics are dropped onto children, I mean, continually.
It may not be quite the same now as it was, although I think it's probably pretty close.
I just, I remember getting these lectures, you know, like if you were to doodle because you were stone bored in some stupid-ass class with a droning, boring Bueller, Bueller, anyone, teacher...
You might doodle in your textbook.
Or you might follow somebody else's doodle.
And then you'd be yelled at for not paying attention.
Or you'd be yelled at because you doodled.
And you'd get these huge lectures on respect for property.
Respect for other people's property.
Respect for school property.
And of course the impossible situation is you're not being treated with any respect in the school.
In other words, we should have respect for a tad at all Stupid book full of status lies, but we can humiliate and bully children because the important thing is to have respect for a book, not for children, right?
So you're not allowed to choose your classes.
You're not allowed to choose your teachers.
Your parents aren't allowed to choose your school.
For the most part, they are forced to pay for it.
But then when you have the nerve to put a happy face somewhere in a school textbook, why then, you see, what happens is you are acting in a perfectly immoral manner because you are not respecting a School property, right?
So the school that is founded upon the violations of property rights through theft from domestic citizens is then all about respect for property rights when all of this goes on.
Of course, teachers will constantly tell you that bullying is bad, but then, of course, you find out when you're not very young, but not too old, you find out that teachers will go on strike and shut down schools and have a monopoly and It's illegal to compete with them, and people get thrown in jail if they dare to compete with the teachers, and they can't be fired, and they can have grievances, and they force your parents to pay for them.
So, I mean, the teachers are all like, don't bully, but the whole goddamn profession is founded upon far more egregious bullying than ever occurs in the playground, right?
So, these are the kinds of impossible situations that you put into continually in a state of society, particularly one with this kind of education, right?
And you can't bring this up, right?
You can, but, you know, just see where it gets you, right?
Which is not a very good place, right?
Alright, let me just check my...
Keep right under KiwiW to Niagara.
Right, I can do that. I can do that!
Gosh, where did the time fly?
So... This aspect of things, this impossible situation is foundational to a state of society.
Of course, it's also foundational to religion, for reasons we've gone into before all the time, right?
So, if you don't go to church, right, then you'll get nagged at, because the empirical evidence is that you didn't go to church, right?
And so empirical evidence is very key, but empirical evidence for God is non-existent, right?
Anyway, I mean, you could sort of go on and on about all that kind of stuff, but these impossible situations are continual and persistent.
Of course, the family, right?
You have to love your family.
You have to treat your family well, no matter how they treat you.
Well, of course, that's a complete UPB violation.
And all of these things, right?
Impossible situations are all UPB claims followed by egregious UPB violations.
Respect the property of a book that has been paid for by stealing property.
Have respect for property that has stolen property.
Understand this is a complete mindfuck for any sane child.
What? And that is another example of, right, it's just designed to paralyze you and to get you frustrated and to make you feel like, you know, you're surrounded by crazy people, can't win, don't try, all the bad things in the world will occur.
Alright, so I'll pick this up a little later.
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