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March 31, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:08
1628 The Evolution of Evil
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Alright, so here I pour my heart and soul into one of the greatest challenges of philosophy and of self-knowledge is the question of the genesis of evil.
And one of the greatest challenges is I think we can all accept that no human being is born evil, for to be born evil would be to be born without a choice, and since choice is the definition of a moral evaluation.
No human being can be born evil.
If you're born evil, you're not evil, because you did not choose it.
So, no human being is born evil, but anybody with any eyes to see around the world can certainly see that at the other side of the spectrum there are adults who are evil.
Just look up Catholic Wisconsin Deaf Boys for more.
And so, there's this challenge about how the hell it comes about.
And we can chart it up to the mystery of free will, but that's not really much of an answer.
We can't chart it up to causal factors outside the self, because that would be to remove the moral responsibility.
So, it has to have something to do with free will.
It has to have something to do with environment.
And statistically, or factually, we know this is to be the case.
Because... Everybody who's a prostitute, at least according to Dr.
Maté, everyone he treated who was a prostitute was sexually abused as a child.
This does not mean, of course, that everybody who's sexually abused becomes a prostitute, but it is a causal factor, the statistical reality of which cannot be rationally or intelligently denied.
So, the question is, how does it come about?
Now, why is this important? Well, I mean, it's important simply for completeness in the realm of philosophy and philosophical inquiry.
But, you see, as you know, we are not so much into the mere abstract philosophy here in this conversation.
We are into the practical application and implications of philosophical judgments within our own lives.
Now, there is a time Before the infliction of trauma, and that time may be prior to birth, right?
Because you can experience trauma in the womb, at least according to the research that is current, which I assume is valid since it's so widely replicated.
We can receive trauma in the womb, both physical and emotional to some degree, in that hormones and stress and so on are all released, and problems occur from there.
And... But there is a time before trauma and there is a time after trauma when change is possible and then, to my experience and the experience of many, many others that I've talked with over the years, there is a time when change is no longer practically possible.
And to take an example, There is a time before you smoke.
There is a time when you smoke before you get terminally ill, sort of stage 4 lung cancer, whatever.
And then there's a time, 12 minutes before you die, when there's no hope, when a turnaround is impossible and it may be long before then.
But even if your cancer went into full remission or started to go into full remission at that time, there would be no way to save you.
So there's a time before you start smoking, there's a time when you smoke, but before you get ill, and then there's a time when your body crosses the Rubicon, you get some terminal illness from smoking, and then you cannot turn back.
And this is really important when it comes to evil.
And the reason, you know, for those of us who had abusive or evil caregivers, or parents, we can obviously understand that they weren't born evil.
We very much would like for them to choose good, right?
And to stop being evil or choosing evil or abusiveness or destructiveness or whatever.
But it is also not healthy nor...
It's neither healthy nor rational to continue to attempt to repair the soul of somebody who no longer has a functional or effective choice to choose virtue over vice.
And at least according to all the literature that I've read in psychology, there are personality disorders which are functionally incurable.
The recidivism rate for prisoners, for people who commit violent crimes is very high.
Pedophilia, certain kinds of characterological core personality disorders like borderline personality disorder, these things are not curable.
It doesn't mean that the person is going to suffer or cause others to suffer equally throughout life, but they're not curable.
And it is essential to differentiate virtue from the potential for virtue from no potential for virtue in those around you.
You must, must, must do this, in my very strong opinion.
There are people around you who are good and you must hold them close to your heart as the virtuous treasures that they are.
There are people who are not yet consistently good but have the capacity to earn their way there.
And then there are people who you cannot turn back towards the light because they have become entrapped and entombed in the darkness and there is no recovery.
And it's really, really important to differentiate these people.
I myself had the terrible, though for me at least understandable, habit of attempting to help or save those who were beyond help and saving.
And this is why I worked on this theory that I've talked about before around restitution.
People can be saved from evil if the evils that they have done are capable of restitution.
But if you have destroyed somebody's childhood, well, there's no restitution for that.
And also, if you have harmed somebody's childhood significantly, then to recover would add insult to injury, as I've talked about before.
So, I mean, if you're a parent and you beat up your kid for most of his childhood, and then when he's 20, you say, hey, violence is bad.
Sorry. It's like, but it's already done.
Parenting is largely over at this point.
Job is done, right?
There's not much point if you're a bodyguard throwing yourself in front of somebody who's already shot, right, and dead.
There's not much point after the fact trying to do the right thing when the job is already over and done with.
That is called locking the barn door after the horse has left.
So to renounce violence after your child is no longer subject to your power and your abuses is ridiculous and can't be considered anything more, in my opinion, than a strategy to confuse, to baffle, and to hold close those who you have abused.
And so where restitution is impossible, in my significant and deep experience, where restitution is impossible, Admission of fault becomes impossible, because in a sense, what would the point of an admission of fault be?
People become evil as a result of a catastrophic application of utilitarianism, of short-term gains over long-term pains.
To discharge the stress and anxiety of difficult feelings by attacking others, hurting others, particularly the vulnerable, is a short-term solution to the problem of stress and anxiety and personal horror.
And so people become evil because they focus on this problem.
They focus on this solution to this problem.
I feel angry, and therefore I'm going to lash out, which relieves me of the problem of anger.
And that's something that people continually do, and the tragic result of that is that they become pragmatic in the very short term.
And that results in a lack of commitment to principle.
So that at least causes significant doubt, for me at least, in people who claim to have discovered principles after things can no longer be resolved through restitution to discover principle is to me just not believable because the whole problem of evil that is said is anti-principle.
Well, let me be a little bit more specific about that.
It's anti-principle, not just in that it eschews short-term pains for the sake of short-term gains, but it is anti-principle fundamentally because evil people will violate principles but it is anti-principle fundamentally because evil people will violate principles to attack others and then use those principles when they are attacked in
That is the great tragedy and horror of UPB violators.
UPB violators, I mean, in a sense, a lion violates UPB, but a lion does not claim UPB against a hunter, right?
So in my family, when people would hit me, it's because I was bad.
But then whenever I would react violently, a horror of interpersonal violence was always on strong display.
So you attack people because they are bad, but then when they act in the same way that you do, suddenly, of course, everything becomes different.
And now, to attack others is horrifying, right?
It's a kind of ugly, vicious trap that occurs in the realm of the real anti-UPB, which is the fundamental of evil.
So, for instance, this is not to defend any of this domestic terrorism, but recently a bunch of people were arrested for planning to attack a policeman.
And this, of course, was domestic terrorism, and it was horrifying, and I agree it's pretty nasty.
But, of course, policemen attack you for not paying taxes.
Policemen attack you for having drugs.
Policemen attack you for not complying with useless, crazy, destructive regulations.
Policemen will regularly attack you for the non-initiation of force.
Gambling, prostitution, drug use, eh, you understand.
They will attack you for not putting your children in public school sometimes.
And so they can't talk about the initiation of force.
They have to lapse into pathetic metaphor territory.
So evil is that human ability, you could say inhuman ability, to deploy a universal ex post facto justification to achieve maximum comfort and dominance in the moment.
So, if you lash out at someone who's dependent upon you, if you lash out at your child, it's because the child is bad and you're disciplining.
You're trying to help them. It hurts me more than it hurts you.
This is good for you. This is what a responsible parent does.
And I warned you, right?
If I've told you once, I've told you a million times.
And so you have this justification for lashing out at a child.
When your child gets older and starts lashing back at you, then that is disrespectful.
And that is just not done.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
I mean, the true reality is that power is allowed to screw up the vulnerable.
Power is allowed to act out against the vulnerable.
And that works fine when you're 30 and your kid is 5.
It doesn't work so well, right, when you're 40 and your kid is 15 and is stronger, probably, and faster than you, then it is disrespectful to act out, the stronger to act out against the weaker.
And so there is a universal, crazy, contradictory, universal standard that is put in place by immoral people to justify everything that they prefer in the moment, right?
So when I'm angry, I prefer to lash out, and that is justified because you, the child, are bad.
When you, the teenager, are lashing out at me, I don't like that.
And by any standard, those who lash out do so because the other person is bad.
Therefore, anybody who's lashing out can always say that the person they're lashing out at is bad, but that's not acceptable to the parent.
So the parent then says, This is disrespectful.
You need to lower your voice.
You need to calm down. You need to not use violence, right?
All things which were not, in certain situations, under certain circumstances, in certain families, acted out against the parent.
It was acted out by the parent against the child.
The child reverses in teenage years, and suddenly the opposite values come in.
And the reason that that's wrong is that this is a person who recognizes the power of universal principles but uses them to justify immoral actions.
That, to me, in the same way a counterfeiter is somebody who recognizes the value of genuine money, genuine productivity, and uses his knowledge and understanding of that value to steal.
This is why thievery is so fundamentally wrong.
Because it recognizes the value of production, while at the same time denying the value of production by stealing.
This is the contradictory nature of any ethic which could be used to justify theft.
So the way that I formulate the development of immorality, the way that I look at this transition between the innocence of the child and the corruption of the old or the middle-aged, is that immorality is a progressive vice with a terminal event horizon for the soul.
And it happens, or it occurs, when you are overwhelmed with negative stimuli, internal usually, but sometimes external, but negative stimuli.
And you decide to lash out, to hurt others, in order to control or manage that negative stimuli.
Now, of course, you have to be in the presence of negative stimuli, and you, I believe, have to have a model of acting out that gives you implicit permission for this way of doing things.
So, my elder brother saw my mother acting out, and then he acted out.
Now, it required, of course, for him to be subject to the negative stimuli of my mother acting out and being abusive, and then it also required that he see that template and replicate it himself.
And that is a habit That is either going to continue or is not going to continue.
And at this point, it really does just come down to a choice.
I mean, I really do believe that.
At some point, things do come down to a choice.
And I think that the foundations of immorality, of really fundamental and perpetual immorality, can be seen in early childhood and can be seen particularly around sort of ages 5 to 12, when empathy really should be kicking in very strongly.
Because... The problem, I mean, the fundamental anti-UPB aspect of acting out is that it values empathy but only for the self.
I will feel better if I push my little brother.
I've just been hit by my mom.
I will feel better if I push my little brother.
And me feeling better, self-empathy, I feel bad and wish to feel better.
It's a UPP violation because, of course, the younger brother is going to feel worse.
So if I feel better, my mom feels better when she hits me, I feel better when I push my younger brother to the ground.
And so you're aware of your own empathy for yourself and what you would prefer for yourself.
But it cracks and breaks the empathy for others, and you're aware that the reason you were hit by the mother is because she lacked empathy for you, and therefore you are suffering from a lack of empathy and acting out of others, and in order to recover your psychological equilibrium, you then act out against a weaker person.
And that violates 16 million different laws of logic and the one fundamental law of empathy.
I'm suffering from a lack of empathy, therefore I'm going to attack others through a lack of empathy, requiring a lack of empathy.
And that, of course, is a monstrous irrationality.
And it requires a fundamental narcissism in that it is only concerned with the individual's own preferences and needs.
And other people be damned.
They can suffer in order for me to feel better.
They must suffer. They will suffer in order for me to feel better.
Now, of course, this sets up guilt.
And one of the great tragedies of The sort of roots of or genesis of evil is that the guilt that you feel for acting out against the innocent, the guilt that you feel becomes the roots of the next attack.
If I feel bad, someone must be doing me wrong.
And of course, originally that's true, right?
So parent attacks child, child feels bad.
Child is told they're doing something wrong, and that's why they're attacking.
So if I feel bad, someone must be doing something bad to me.
That's the axiom, and originally it's true.
Where it becomes a problem is that then when you act out against others, what happens is that you then feel guilt.
And guilt is a bad feeling, as we all know.
Guilt is a bad feeling, and it should be a bad feeling, just as a toothache is a bad feeling.
Now, when we feel guilt for having harmed others, it is so easy for the narcissistic personality to then say, I feel guilt from this person, right?
So I hit my younger brother.
He's lying there crying.
I feel guilt. I feel bad.
And so he is making me feel bad, so I'm going to hit him again.
So he's making me feel bad, so I'm going to hit him again.
So he's making me feel guilty, so I'm going to hit him again.
Repeat, repeat, repeat, right?
This is the grim tragedy of this cycle.
And it starts because there is this equation of feeling bad with being attacked.
And no responsibility for the cause of that feeling, right?
I mean, there's a difference between feeling bad because you're hit by someone and feeling guilty because you hit someone.
But that dilutes and becomes what?
Two trees growing together.
In this genesis of evil.
Now, what happens, and you understand, these are all just my theories, but I think there's some good facts, and you, of course, can decide all of this for yourself.
These are just the ways that I have grappled with the problem of evil in my life.
So, you understand, this is all just my thoughts.
I'm not saying this is all syllogistical, but I think there's a lot of good evidence for it.
And this is why you get such a cycle of violence, because people discharge against the helpless, because they are attacked by the more powerful, and then they feel guilty about attacking the helpless, which they then perceive as the attack of the helpless upon them.
So then they attack the helpless in a form of self-defense.
I hit you, I feel guilty, I feel that you are making me feel guilty, I feel that you're attacking me, so I need to hit you back again, and then I feel worse than right.
This is how people get locked into it.
Now, we've also seen, this is where the role of ideology in evil comes in, because evil must be united with philosophy, or it's not evil.
It must be united with philosophy, or it's not evil.
So, a man must, like a husband who hits his wife, must provide a moral justification for hitting his wife.
Otherwise, he's not evil.
Clearly, if I roll over and clip my wife in the head while I'm asleep, clearly I'm not evil, right?
I'm not evil. Because it was not conscious, I did not choose it, I'm incredibly apologetic, and I'm not saying that it was deserved.
I'm not saying I did it because you're bad.
I'm not creating an ex post facto moral rule that is supposedly universal, though in fact local only to my particular narcissistic preferences in the moment.
But I am not uniting philosophy with my actions, and therefore it's not evil.
A man only becomes evil when he justifies his actions through philosophy, his immoral actions.
It sounds a bit circular, right?
But a man who is not in control of his actions will feel no need to justify his actions afterwards.
I don't need to justify hitting my wife by turning over in my sleep.
Because I did not choose to do it.
But if I choose to do something, then I must justify it afterwards.
And if my justifications are both universal and self-contradictory, then that is the root of evil.
If no philosophy is involved, there can't be any evil.
A lion doesn't have to sit there and justify his attack on a zebra later.
Clearly, right? There's no evil.
Or there's no philosophy.
And, of course, I mean, people say, well, why don't people just do evil and then say...
That they're not interested in justifying it afterwards.
But human beings can't do that. We are UPV machines.
We are philosophy machines.
Human beings can never escape unless they are insane or in a coma or asleep or dead.
They can never escape the universality of ethical justifications.
You simply can't do it.
Even if they are amoral justifications.
They still cannot escape those things.
So, I can't remember what movie it was, one of these American patriot tax movies, where someone was talking, I think to David, to one of the rich guys in the banking industry, who was saying, yeah, but it's all just about getting power and gathering power.
It's all about gathering wealth.
What do you care about the little people, this, that, and the other?
He's still putting forward a principle of action.
I mean, it's the will to power, it's Nietzschean, and it's domination, and so on, but...
If a stronger power came along, he would not shrug and accept defeat.
He would rail against that person as predatory and exploitive.
Because he's on top, he justifies that after the fact.
If he were then overturned by someone else, then he would react with rage and horror and not accept it and say, well, the stronger wins.
I'm not stronger anymore, therefore I'm going to lose my fortune.
That's not what happened, of course.
Human beings must always, always, always justify their actions to themselves.
They have to. They have to.
We can't exist any other way.
The conceptual power of our mind is so strong, and the automatic integration of our unconscious is so intrinsic to our thinking, to our way of thinking, to our being.
That we are continually spraying rules out from our actions all the time, or you could say attempting to lasso our actions with universal justifications.
Just pick up any newspaper, any mission statement, anything, anybody, listen to what people talk about, they're continually justifying what they do according to universal standards.
And so the mixing in a philosophy with action is involuntary.
It's automatic. It's going to happen no matter what.
But when you mix into your actions explicitly and obviously contradictory justifications, well, that's when you really come full flower into the garden of evil.
Now, bad decisions that we make in the moment can be recovered from.
I mean, I've made tons of bad decisions in the moment.
They can be recovered from.
If we are honest with ourselves after the fact, and do not ex post facto justify such decisions with obviously contradictory principles, a bad decision in the moment can be survived, right?
So when I was a teenager, I two-timed a girl.
Dating one girl, dating another.
And afterwards, I felt bad.
I didn't say to myself, well, you take what you get in life.
People are stupid enough to let a guy two-time them.
Too bad for them. I'm a player.
I'm cool. I'm hip.
This is the right thing to do. This is the good thing to do.
Everybody should do this. I didn't.
I was like, oh man, I feel like crap.
And worked on these sorts of issues to figure out.
Gain some basic empathy.
Regain, because I was a very empathetic kid, but regain some empathy.
The teenage years were just a hellfire of destroying.
The existing empathy that I'd been able to survive during the latency period or able to hang on to during the latency period, but that was an unbelievable trial by fire in my teenage years as I gained in power and strength.
The hypocrisy and violence that I was exposed to in this situation was horrendous, and it stripped me of a good deal of vestigial empathy that I'd retained since childhood.
And I acted in a callous, right?
I shoplifted, I two-timed, I acted in a callous.
And bad, bad way.
I don't count the immorality of my teenage years anything relative to the immorality of those who did nothing to help me.
So, society...
Right? What's that the old Monty Python thing?
I did this, but society is to blame.
Agreed. We'll be charging them to.
Well, I believe that.
I don't... I mean, I was struggling to survive in a very destructive environment and a very cold and violent, unsympathetic and alien, hostile environment, not just in my family, but in society as a whole.
And yeah, I absorbed that callousness and that carelessness and that ability, chilling ability for society to openly see a child being ravished by a she-wolf and to part and mutter and turn up the volume on their iPods and walk on as if seeing nothing.
That was society.
And I became a moral, a state of nature.
If you can get away with it, get away with it.
Clearly that's the way society worked.
That's the ethics society ran on.
Who was I to argue with society?
So it took a while for me to recover.
It took a violent wrenching of will and self-knowledge, journaling, reading, feeling, thinking, accepting the reality of the world and of my own feelings to recover from that direction.
And I, you know, when I look at evil actions of an adult, I can see, I can see, I can see how I could have ended up that way.
I really could have a couple of different choices, a lack of exposure to certain material combined with an avoidance of the consequences of my own actions for myself emotionally and for others, practically and emotionally.
I could have gone down that road.
I could have gone down that road.
In the modern world, all virtue is a close call.
All virtue is a close call.
Doesn't mean we're not responsible, because there are some things that are just so basic to virtue that we don't need exposure to Rand or Brandon or other thinkers in order to hitting others, lying to others, cheating, stealing.
I mean, these things are also fundamental.
We really don't need a lot of exposure to higher-order thinking in order to restrain that behavior and figure out better ways of achieving our goals in life.
But I can see how that road goes, which is why I think I have some useful stuff to say in this area.
So let's plunge on to the drunkenness of evil.
It is my very strong opinion that there is a time when recovery is no longer possible.
And I can think of times in my own childhood when those who were doing evil to me Had attacks of conscience.
I mentioned this before, but when I was playing with a friend, I must have been, I don't know, maybe six or, gosh, eight maybe?
I was either eight or six.
Gosh, how old was I? You know, I think I was six, because I went to boarding school that year.
Anyway, so I was six, and I put down a cup of water on a cabinet, and it left, you know, one of those little temporary white rings, and I just got The living crap beaten out of me by my mother, who was, you know, obviously treasured and valued her furniture enormously, and I hope that her furniture is giving her great comfort late in life, because I hope that she will ring her deathbed with her cabinetry and all of the furniture that was so important to her relative to her children's happiness and security and safety.
And after this attack, which went on for a serious amount of time, I went to bed and of course I couldn't sleep.
I was put to bed. I can't remember.
I lay in bed and my mom came in.
You can tell. I could tell even at that age.
She fell bad. She was like, what the hell have I done?
What the hell did I just do?
And she sat there by my bed forever.
I don't know how long it must be. Probably no more than half an hour in reality, but it felt like forever.
And I felt like I could not say to her that I was terrified and enraged and humiliated and bruised.
I could not say that to her.
The only way that I could communicate with my mother in that moment.
was to pretend to have a halting breathing.
So I pretended that I was asleep and I would pause my breath and I would pretend to sob a little in my breath and my breath would catch so that she would think I was asleep and suffering.
That's the closest that I could get to communicating to her because I was too terrified to communicate anything else for reasons that we don't have to get into here to do with prior honesty about my thoughts and feelings within the family.
But that was a moment of conscience.
Where my mom must have been like, you know, the red mist cleared, and she must have been like, holy crap, this is not what I became a parent for, to beat up on a six-year-old kid.
I mean, that's not what I'm about.
That's not what I want. That's not what my dream was for my family.
At least a moment, and I can remember one, that's the one that really stands out in my mind, but I can remember a few others where people, you know, just did bad things, and there were these moments of conscience.
Where people went, holy crap.
Now, the last time I remembered that happening with my mom, oh boy, it wasn't long after that for sure.
It wasn't long after that.
And then they came no more.
And those are little windows, right?
Little windows that open up and say, don't head down anymore.
Don't go down anymore.
There are other ways.
There are other things. Other things you can do, other ways to approach these issues.
You do not have to be crazy violent.
You do not have to do this.
There are other ways, other approaches, other paths to take.
Pull up! Pull up!
You are heading into the dungeon of eternal self-loathing, where the door shall close behind you, the lights shall go out, the rats shall appear, and the key shall be swallowed by time.
But, and I'll of course never know what happened, In my mother's mind during this time, but clearly, empirically, it didn't take.
She saw that opening, that possibility, that change.
I genuinely believe that.
And she passed it by. And I saw the same thing with others, my brother and other people.
That there would be these moments where you could see genuine regret, genuine self-knowledge, genuine horror at the path being inflicted upon others.
And an opening, a window, a possibility, a vulnerability, of humility, of accepting and being honest about being out of control.
And of course, it is my genuine belief that due to the presumed automatic nature of family relationships, the fear of divorce was not present.
The fear of family separation was not present.
And therefore, even that possibility did not awaken the kind of counter-utilitarian impulse to the efficacy, the short-term efficacy of brutalizing others in the moment.
And so the choice, the window, the opening, the escape hatch, once passed by, comes fewer and fewer, and then not at all.
And the key to the dungeon of self-loathing evaporates, vanishes in your hand, the lock seals, the door seals to a smooth wall, and escape is no longer possible.
And then there is a horror and a massive regret At the escape, the turns not taken.
The escape to the light, to the air, to the birds, to the sunlight.
That not taken. There is rage.
But of course, a lack of responsibility is the route down to the dungeon of self-loathing, and therefore it cannot be your fault that you have ended up in this dungeon.
It must be the fault of others.
And then you attack others.
And that is the rest of your life.
You become toxic.
You become terminal, viral.
And so, for me, evil is a kind of drunkenness.
And we have to accept...
I have to accept in my life that evil people cannot recover.
Because if I accepted that they could recover, I'd be out there trying to save them.
Right? Like a doctor doesn't give up on a patient who can live.
And after spending a huge amount of time trying just that.
Decades. With many people.
And recognizing that there is a time when any choice that may still exist is entirely theoretical.
And that the practicality of choice has ceased to exist.
And so I began to view evil like drunkenness.
Like a kind of accumulating drunkenness.
You know, like you take a drink and you wait 12 hours and the drink is mostly out of your system.
And you have to kind of keep drinking.
But in my mind, evil actions are like highly intoxicating drinks that take weeks or months to leave your system.
You act out against some innocent, you brutalize, you yell, you verbally abuse, you put somebody down.
And that is like taking a shot of very powerful liquor that stays in your system.
For months. If you take another shot in those months, you get drunker.
And if you take another shot, you get drunker still.
And after a certain amount of time, years of doing this, you cannot become undrunk.
It becomes self-replicating in your system.
You can no longer become undrunk.
Your actions are toxic and destructive fundamentally.
I remember thinking about this, oh gosh, probably close to 15 years ago.
When I was listening to a friend of mine's wife talk about a friend of hers who had, you know, one of these just terrible, terrible moms, destructive and verbally abusive and horrible, horrible person.
And she had explicitly not invited her mom to her wedding, but her mom showed up with a bunch of friends and disrupted the place and just yelled and, oh, it's just horrible.
I just remember thinking, my God, this mom is in her 60s.
And I do remember thinking at the time, hmm, so that's what most likely my mom's going to be, right?
And after a certain amount of these kinds of actions, there is no turning back.
You cannot become undrunk.
Now, we all understand, of course, that somebody who does something immoral when he's drunk is not specifically responsible for the immorality.
But is responsible for getting drunk, as we understand, right?
If you hit a dog while you're driving drunk, you are responsible for hitting the dog while you're drunk.
And the primary responsibility is for the getting drunk, right?
In that, if somebody...
I mentioned this before, right?
If somebody puts some kind of drug which you cannot detect in your coffee, which effectively makes you drunk, but you don't know it, and then...
You hit the dog, then the person who put the drug into your coffee would be morally responsible for hitting the dog.
And so evilness is the bad decision, not just to act badly, which we all do, but the wretched decision to justify that after the fact, through reference to universal morality.
To justify it after the fact.
According to universal morality.
And the reason why that becomes so toxic and such a self-looping system is that when you justify something after the fact, I hit my kid.
My kid was bad. That's why I hit my kid.
I'm being a good parent. The problem with that is not what it does to the past.
It's a problem. It's not the problem.
The problem is, oh my friends, what that does to the future.
Ex post facto justifications open a terrible gate and accelerator down to these darkest dungeons of dismal self-regard.
When you justify something after the fact, the reason why it's so toxic And so dangerous to yourself and to others.
It's that ex post facto justifications are not about the past, fundamentally.
They are not apologies for the past.
They are permission for the future.
If you hit your kid, the good parent does hit his kid, but the kid doesn't listen.
Well, that's not about the past, fundamentally.
What that is, is permission to hit again in the future.
That's why these ex post facto justifications are so dangerous, because they become deterministic justifications and enablers of future immoralities.
That's why it's so dangerous to justify your actions with bad ethics, because it creates a future.
It creates your future.
It robs you of the choice in the future.
We only have the choice about the ethics we accept.
We don't have a choice about what happens to our life after we accept those ethics.
We have a choice whether to smoke or not.
We don't have a choice about making smoking healthy for us.
And we have a choice about which ethics we will accept.
We don't have a choice about how the ethics we accept will affect our behavior.
If we accept that a virtuous parent hits a disobedient child...
Then, without a doubt, those headings will continue.
If you accept and justify that after the fact with that ethic, the future is clear, the future is mapped out.
And that's what people, I think, mean by determinism.
The philosophy we accept is the future we create, down to the last detail.
The philosophy we accept, the philosophy we make up, the philosophy we use to justify our actions is the future we are creating, down to the last detail.
And when my mother justified her attacks on her children, she created a paranoid and self-destructive future down to the last detail.
And I do believe, I do believe, that it is after the point where honesty would result in suicide that people can no longer change.
It is when a true honesty about the nature of one's own being, one's own choices, and the results of being alive and acting in the world, if you were genuinely honest about that, if you're truly evil and you're genuinely honest, I think you would just kill yourself.
I really do. If all of that stored up empathy towards the innocence that you had violated over the years, the destructive horror that you had been to others, if that all came in on you at once, I mean, you just jump off a bridge. And it is in order to escape that, that people stay in this drunken state of ex post facto justifications, and it's why they can't get out of the closed loops of their future.
They just become like one of those little toys you see in the mall, those little wind-up cars that rolls around a little square forever.
They just roll around that little dungeon forever, thinking they're achieving things in the real world.
They're just rolling around the only rationalities of their own hatreds.
So a continual series of ex post facto tequila shots of justifications creates a state of perpetual drunkenness.
Now, it is my view that people in this state of irrational and immoral intoxication, people in this state, they don't have a choice anymore.
They don't have a choice anymore.
That does not mean that they are not responsible for putting themselves in a state where they have no choice.
If you take 10 shots, you can't choose to be a good driver.
But if you get into a car and drive, you're still making the choice to drive badly.
Even though you no longer have the choice to drive well, you're still putting yourself in the position where you're driving badly.
And so, if choice was something that were available to us from here to eternity, then I think we would never, it would never be responsible to disengage from the evil, to disengage from evil people.
It would never be. Because they could always be saved.
Just as if every patient could be saved by some medical procedure, it would be immoral to ever give up on a patient.
Not immoral, but it would be wrong.
But if we accept that people move beyond choice, once they have taken the ex post facto shots of irrational moral justifications for long enough, they are no longer in a state where honesty is possible.
Well, they are still responsible for the evils that they do, but they are no longer capable of change.
Because to change, to accept, would be like asking somebody to regrow an arm they've cut off.
Somebody without an arm is not responsible for not having an arm in the moment, but they are responsible for having cut off their arm.
And we have to accept that even though they're responsible for having no arm, they don't have the choice to regrow that arm.
And if you slowly kill off your empathy by hurting and abusing others, and then creating the conditions to repeat it with ex post facto justifications, well, you've cut off your arm.
And we don't say to somebody in the moment, you're responsible for having no arm because you could have regrown it.
No. You're responsible for not having empathy.
You are responsible for not having empathy, for being hostile and destructive and abusive.
But you can't change now.
And that is the challenge.
Because if we focus on the moral responsibility, it's easy to get sucked into the illusion of change.
It's hard to assign moral responsibility to people who can't change, right?
We understand that. But, of course, the reality is that we can absolutely assign moral responsibility to people who can't change, because they're responsible for ending up as someone who didn't change.
And so to assign the moral responsibility is to, I think, correctly identify the toxic label.
To then not hang around with the expectation of magical, virtuous, glowing change, I think is self-destructive and irrational.
And most fundamentally, if people follow that staircase, that ever more slippery staircase down, To the dripping, rat-infested, decaying, moss-eaten dungeon of self-loathing, the lock the door seals behind them to a smooth wall.
The light gutters and dyes, the lack of air.
They're trapped down there. We can't get in.
We can't help them.
We can stand outside this rocky bubble and pound to no effect.
To no effect. But I don't drive in a car with drunks.
I don't drive in a car with a drunk.
And I don't put my head and my heart and my soul in the hands of the self-destroyed.
I no longer loathe them for what they are, because they are beyond choice.
But I still consider them responsible for having ended up as they are.
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