OK, what’s the nature of evil? How is the world without it possible?
Yeah it’s the language that’s being used that’s misleading. It would be enough to say something is bad or wrong. Also attributing abnormal human behavior to mystical forces such as ‘evil’ distracts from the real causes and ignores them. It’s a purely superstitious idea that muddies the water of the sciences of human behavior.
Evil has many natures.
It is aware of itself, and accepts the process of abuse
and senseless damage/destruction.
Bad, on the other hand, is anything which is unhealthy for a person.
Evil is a scam.
Bad is a category.
Things like rape are considered evil because it is harmful emotionally.
But the rapist made their choice, and accepted evil before acting it out.
So, evil acts start as a choice.
Corrupted choice / corrupted freedom,
is the essence of evil.
This is very brief.
But I wanted to spell it out for you, Felix.
I appreciate you gracing my thread,
but certainly you understand evil and bad already?
I wouldn’t want to have to teach you the whole thing.
And it’s kind of up to us to learn it our self.
Okay. What are they? You gave examples of acts you consider evil, but you didn’t define it.
All value-judgements, including the concept of ‘evil’ is a subjective evaluation of circumstances relative to its objectives.
If the objective is pleasure, then ‘evil’ or any word denoting a negative relationship relative to the subject’ objectives, is deemed to be ‘evil,’ or ‘bad.’
Therefore, whatever the subject judges as being beneficial, or that contributes to the attainment of an objective is judged to be ‘good.’
All value-judgements are triangulations, of a subjective conscious mind, its objectives, and how it evaluated, judges the factors, distances, circumstances separating the two.
Okay. What are they? You gave examples of acts you consider evil, but you didn’t define it.
Evil has to do with what we feel is bad.
Satyr already said it, in part.
If we didn’t have objectives / desires, there would be no evil to us.
But objectives / desires are very common amoung life forms on earth.
So I think the idea of evil is useful.
We are going to have some kind of beliefs about evil already.
It’s human to think that way.
Instead of throwing it out, i have embraced it, even though
i know it is just an idea, a category.
As long as man, as any other living being, has objectives - with self-preservation being the primary - he will always judge the world in his binary self-serving good/bad categories.
Evil will always exist to represent circumstances or wills that prevent him from attaining his objectives.
Outside this subjective/objective inter-relatioship there is no good and no evil nor bad; there is only flux - all is interactive energy.
Given that this energy is not always ordered but may be chaotic, as long as chaos exists man will fear it as being ‘evil.’
Chaos being promethean in nature - both benefactor and detractor.
It is this which Nietzsche referred to as his future Übermensch… a man who has managed to overcome his resentment of what made him possible - time, in Heideggerean contexts.
Preventing him from attaining his objectives, while consciously knowing that this is hindering or harming the person. In horror movies, often the most feared thing is a harmful human person. A human that has mutated somehow, and predatorizes the poor little humanz. The thing is, evil is a utility as an idea. We can build upon it, or we can choose to build upon something else that seems more truthful or precise.
Good and Evil are preached as wisdom from God.
So we have a crazy version of good and evil.
That leads people to reject it.
Start again from zero.
That’s true. So then, how do you judge the word evil? Is it a mere synonym for bad, or is there a difference?
To me there is a qualitative difference between merely bad and evil—a difference in the background context and imagery in which terms occur. Nature may be judged harmful. It may seem cruel. But, I don’t attribute evil to it. Evil is limited to moral agents, who intentionally do bad things knowing they are bad.
Anyway ,what you’re getting at by saying evil is not necessary still escapes me. Depending on what you are judging evil, it may never have been necessary, but that hasn’t stopped people from doing it.
God signifies a collective, including a finite or an infinite number of individuals, which is deemed to be positive - possessing all the attributes that benefit all participating individuals, making inclusion crucial to their survival.
To be ‘good’ is to adhere to collective standards, promoting collective welfare.
A collective’s ideal man is the ‘good man.’
‘Evil’ is that which contradicts this ‘goodness,’ or that denies individuals inclusion - the anti-ideal man, relative to whatever collective ideal.
In modern minds this is always associated with the Abrahamic ideal man.
A ‘good man’ is always the man idealized by either of the three variants of Abrahamism.
Islam and Christianity simply expand inclusivity, whereas Judaism restricts it to exclude those not belonging to 12 specific tribes - the chosen and those not, indicating inclusivity. those not chosen can gain access by serving those that have been chosen.
Here ‘god’ acts as a representation of the collective so as to absolve the individuals form responsibility, viz. ‘it isn’t they who judge and chose, but the divine’, outsourcing responsibility. [see denial of free-will]
Islam and Christianity expanded Judaic standards and ideals to become accessible to all tribes, all races.
All could become part of the ideal collective - members of the ‘good’ - if they adhere to the collective’s rules - god’s will.
All others are to remain excluded, due to their own stubbornness or sinfulness - servants of ‘evil.’
Here we can see how morality evolved as a method of maintaining group cohesion, imposing limits on individual options (restricting individual free-will) so as to cultivate behaviours that benefit the collective, within which all individuals gain some degree of an advantage.
Marxism and Capitalism differ in the degree and how an individual can increase this advantage.
The Golden Rule — to acknowledge the other by not allowing double standards between you and them — is found in various forms in every major culture in history. It is the cornerstone of culture. The losers who exploit it to rig the game doom it (themselves) to destruction.
Evil seems to be going beyond what is necessary, such as killing an animal that you’re not going to eat, inflicting unnecessary pain on another or taking more than your fair share. It’s a question of balance that engages the heart and mind.
Try replacing the word supernatural with natural and the word natural with subnatural (privation). And yes I know it triggers the naturalistic fallacy. I still need to articulate that whole situation.
If the only absolute is self=other … there can be no absolute evil/privation.
We are not talking mere abstracta. And quite frankly neither was Plato.
There exists no objective categories.
Good and Evil are terms that must be defined before determining whether they are neccesary or not.
If you were to define existence as an evil then clearly it would be neccesary.
However, until a definition is provided the question is meaningless.
All value-judgements are triangulations, relative to an objective…
This means every value-judgement represents how a subject relates with an objective.
Good/Bad refer to positive or negative relationships.
The more objective a subjective evaluation becomes the more in harmony it is with the objective world, within which it orients its objectives.
Since the objective world - existence - is a state of dynamic interactivity experienced as change - Flux - this orientation requires constant revalidation; constant reaffirmation.
So, consciousness is fluid, not fixed; a process, not a thing.
In metaphysical context good/evil refers to universal absolutes.
Their reference, whether the subject knows it or not, is in relation to cosmic order and chaos.
Chaos = lack of order - randomness, not complexity - hidden, occult order.
An organism, being a product of order and reliant on order, would highly appreciate order, particularly order that exceeds its own.
This it calls beautiful, or inspiring, or divine, and it inexorably attracted to it.
It would come to worship an imagines absolute state of complete order, as a god, and would experience its attraction to it as ‘love’ - engulfed in its certainty, its all-encomassing comfort.
To such an organism the antithesis of this imagine state of absolute, complete, final order would be ‘evil…an imagined absolute state of disorder, chaos.
An incomprehensible, counter-intuitive state since an organisms’ brain can only conceptualize and perceive what is ordered.
Order = patterns that can be interpreted as things, with particular traits.
For this reason, the idealistic idea that chaos is really complexity is very comforting, implying absolute order awaiting to be revealed, discovered.
Also implying that man can become god, in the absence of god.
All is knowable, meaning omniscience, if not inevitable, is possible.
So, ‘evil’ in our postmodern/modern, Abrahamically indoctrinated context refers to chaos.
Which, if considered relative to Orphic cosmogony, is accurate…sicne chaos is from where perceptible existence, and life, emerges, and is made possible.
Choas, properly defined as an absence of order - Yin/Yang, in eastern philosophy - is what makes life and consciousness possible, but it is also what threatens and dissolves order, including life.
From chaos we come and there we return - cosmic cycles.
Linear time is how an organism experiences this movement from near-absolute order, emerging out of near absolute chaos, moving back to the state it emerged form.
Absolute = immutable, indivisible, singularity.
The process can never be finalized - can never be completed - so existence has no beginning and no end.
Yin always has Yang, and Yang always has Yin - an imperfection making perfection impossible.
This is what has been called “the fallen state”, in Abrahamic superstitions.
They are unable to understand that if absolute order or disorder (chaos) were possible then existence would end, and life would be superfluous.
So, if ‘evil’ refers to what lacks order - chaos - then it is truly necessary for life and consciousness to emerge, and for free-will to be necessary.
What meaning would ‘good’ have if there was no ‘evil’?
These dualities - rooted in how organisms process data, using the binary method - are how conscious beings make sense of the world - interpret the world - using themselves or some external phenomenon as their standard.
Ironically, the Nazis attempted to impose an absolute, unnatural order on the world and failed miserably. Nature rejected it. The West embraced creative chaos and triumphed.
Not what I mean here.
Necessary would mean “baked into reality at the most fundamental level of logic; absolutely required to be the case with zero exceptions”
Inevitable would mean “based on this particular locale / space in which we find ourselves, errors being as they are, certain outcomes will tend to obtain regardless of larger-scale fundamentals”
So basically, earth is fucked by being full of idiots. But there is nothing in the universe itself which says “earth must be full of idiots”. Most likely we are just a a juvenile stage of development, or some set of more or less random factors over time have come together to produce the outcome that most likely the person you next meet IRL is an idiot, rather than someone who actually cares and tries to do his/her best to figure out what is right and wtf is going on in this place they happen to find themselves living.
Hence the error of Fascism, which is the false equation between the nation/culture/society/people/language/land/folk on the one hand, and the government/administrative state/legalistic bureaucracy on the other hand.
Idiots fail to distinguish between those two things.
But then again, the Americans and their Jewish and European partners, pre- and post-WW2, were more than intelligent enough to already know this. Even the Soviets weren’t that silly.
So what does that tell you about the official story of things?
Hint: I’ll refer you back to General Patton’s statement about WW2, shortly before he was assassinated by his own team, “We defeated the wrong enemy.”
Oh, too many thinks going on here? Uh oh, ok, um I guess just retreat back into comfy Lala land.