there is no such thing as ‘evil’, but as close as we can come to calling someone evil would involve identifying the disparity between intent and action… so yeah, you’re sorta right. but really this quality ‘evil’ only amounts to incompetence, which is what we call that rift between one’s beliefs and one’s actions. in the context of this thread, this rift was identified as the incompetence of any individual or state that believes these three things in unison: that the structure of their current society is not conducive of excessive conflict, that partaking in such conflict purposely is immoral, and that those who do have objective knowledge of ‘right and wrong’ (of which there is none) also have the freewill (which doesn’t exist) to choose one or the other. it is these three systemic errors in reasoning that combine to produce the sum total of such egregious incompetence. now if anything were ‘evil’, it would be this.
but there’s more. what here appears to look like an excess of power as it is usually understood - the ruthlessness of a society that holds itself together even while these three fundamental errors are operating… and how this seems to demonstrate a body that is strong enough to incorporate its errors without jeopardizing its vitality - it is really a total absence of power in that this society demonstrates that it needs to lie in order to function. and here is where the problem of ‘intent’ is raised, and how what is most simply just a kind of incompetence now becomes something gross and contemptible.
that so many centuries have been spent in designing the erroneous theoretical and philosophical background against which western capitalism has evolved, is quite frankly astonishing. if it stood only on social darwinism and had the courage to accept the logical consequences of this premise, it wouldn’t be so contemptible. but it had to not only create an order in which a minority could live and prosper off the productive energies of a majority, but also devise carefully thought-out ideological trappings which would help it sustain itself against what would result from pure anarcho-capitalism. such things as ‘equal opportunity’, ‘moral right and wrong’ and ‘freewill’ would become cornerstones to this process. finally the glaring incompetence reveals itself to those who have greater insight into the machinery. these three fabrications aren’t just lies, but useful lies to a system that is so weak and with such cowardice, it cannot prosper without them. if it stopped holding to these lies, social darwinism in its purest and most volatile form would take life and quickly eliminate those who’ve relied on such lies to sustain their places of false power.
anywho what i’m saying here won’t make much sense unless you are able to assess great spans of history, their social and economic structures, and the respective ‘philosophies’ that backed them through their development. there is a very distinct pattern or direction of thought from platonism to analytical philosophy; the first comes into existence to back the aristocratic contempt for materialism… the last comes into existence to destroy that entire lineage of lies.
disposing of the myth of ‘freewill’ is a surgical strike against the status-quo and, ironically, frees those who are oppressed by such tyranny from being subject to the operant conditioning of guilt… something that is critically important to the status-quo for keeping those who are subordinate to it, under control.
it really is a big deal, dude… i mean as far as the social sciences are concerned. get the idea of freewill out of the heads of people and western capitalism will suffer a tremendous blow. greater attention will be paid to those environmental factors/circumstances which statistically produce crime and conflict, than ever before. and that’s precisely what the capitalist/conservatives don’t want to happen.