Have you, in a fit of rage, ever sat down and written out the plot of a six novel story arc? Has a fit of rage ever driven you to spend a month writing a program, drawing a picture or carving a statue? Love is not the only emotion that is blind. Fits of passion are not conducive to higher brain functions. Therefore, it is a good bet that the planning involved in any of the actions that I started with is too great to be the result of a fit of rage.

And yet we accept that well planned evil is always the result of a blinding emotion. There are fits of rage and Man has been known to give into his secular passions during these periods. Do not get me wrong in questioning the emotional excuses of great evil. What I am addressing is truly great evil, not a dime store robbery. Following any act of true passion, there is another passionate response; that of regret.

However, true evil does not know true regret. The greatest evil that I have ever known was as emotional as a pocket calculator. There is greater evil in utilitarianism than there is in all the prejudice in the world. Prejudice knows limits. Tyrants have to sleep, but the tyranny of good intentions never knows rest.

What if we were to, for example, take evolution literally? It would be a process by which it is possible to perfect life. The highest law of evolution is “survival of the fittest.” Charity, spending the resources of the strong on the sustaining of the weak, interferes with this law. For the strong to be shown strong, then the strong must have both the right and the responsibility to exterminate the weak.

The weak consume more than they produce. For the greater good, they should be eliminated. Then, the less fit produce less for the resources that they consume than the strong. You have a better return on the production of the strong at the expense of the weak. And, since you are going to be eliminating this weakness anyway, should not the weak and the inferior be ‘stripped for parts’ to maintain the strong? Why not use them to find ways to enhance the already strong so that they contribute something for the resources they consumed just in being allowed to draw breath.

I will neither expand nor defend this argument because it was only my goal to show that it is evil. This, I feel, is a greater evil than hunting down a group of people because you hate them. At least you acknowledge the humanity of the people you hunt down when you stalk them. When you shed your primitive passions, entering a purely secular mind set, it is possible to mark some people as life unworthy of life. From there, you can use them in inhuman ways.

Since you are acting for the greater good, you must be eternally vigilant. Nothing must get in your way. Your goals must be pursued without rest. Believers must act without emotion and they must act swiftly as though everything is at stake.

Alone, these are noble drives. The drive to do what is truly good must be pursued with eternal vigilance, faith and without fail or exception. It is when the perceived good is actually evil that these good drives become tools of evil. And, it is not emotion that causes this corruption.

It seems that our preoccupation with assigning emotional drives to evil comes from our desire to believe that evil people are just like us. What would make you round up millions of people and march them into gas chambers? How much must this monster have hated these people to do such a thing? You believe that you would have to be driven by hate to do the same thing. It will never cross your mind that you, not being evil, never would do such a thing. Evil is not something that you can ever understand without being evil.

Why do we try to understand evil? What is our preoccupation with reasoning? If the truth is that we do not understand, is that not enough for us to admit and know? As I started out demonstrating, evil gets greater when it sheds the blinders of emotion. Let that be enough because that is the truth. With that, let me end my episode as a stand up philosopher.

This entry was posted on Monday, November 13th, 2006 at 12:01 am and is filed under Mulligan Adventures. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.