What is the Nature of Evil？
Episode Stats
Words per Minute
133.8562
Summary
The world is falling apart, and we can't even tell if it's our own fault, or the fault of something bigger than ourselves. The problem is, we don't know what's going on. We can't tell the difference between ants and carpenter ants, and the problem is that nobody can tell them apart.
Transcript
00:00:00.000
Many years ago, when I still had the honorific corporal in front of my name, I was down in the
00:00:10.260
United States at Fort Knox doing a joint military exercise with the Americans. And they had us
00:00:16.380
staying in these shacks, these two-story shacks with, you know, bedroom showers and whatnot,
00:00:23.160
that were no longer authorized to have permanent residency in, but weren't condemned. You know,
00:00:31.400
you can have the Canucks stay there for, you know, a week or two or whatever. And the reason for this
00:00:36.780
was obvious as soon as we got inside. As soon as you got up to the second story, you could actually
00:00:42.180
feel the building shifting under your weight. Particularly if you went out on the balcony,
00:00:47.700
you could feel the whole thing swaying to the left and the right. The building was just falling to
00:00:51.300
pieces. Which says sad things about the American military, quite frankly. But the reason I bring
00:00:57.860
this up is that I think this is a really great metaphor for where we find ourselves in the West.
00:01:07.960
The institutions, the society, is beginning to sway. We can feel that the structural integrity is
00:01:15.940
falling. But the problem is, we don't really know why. Now let's say this structure has an infestation
00:01:24.340
of carpenter ants. They've gone up into the beams, they're eating their holes through it, laying their
00:01:29.820
nests. The problem is, we long ago forgot our entomology. Nobody can tell the carpenter ants apart from the
00:01:40.640
the regular black ants outside. And so, nowadays, you've got these two groups. You've got this one
00:01:50.120
group, the liberals, who are shouting about how ants are fine, you need ants to eat all the dead insects
00:01:57.080
on the lawn, how they're good for it, they're healthy for the environment. And you've got this
00:02:01.260
other group screaming about how ants are evil, ants need to be banished, we need to destroy all of them.
00:02:07.100
The moral majority. And both of them are absolutely idiotic, and it all boils down to the fact that
00:02:15.580
they can't tell apart a regular ant from a carpenter ant. We've got a lot of problems plaguing us in
00:02:24.900
modern society. Pornography, for instance. But see, here's the thing, most people can't tell the
00:02:31.660
difference between the kink.com people and the casting couch. There's the video game thing. But
00:02:42.780
again, video games are not all the same animal. You've got something like Fallout New Vegas, or
00:02:49.280
Dragon's Age, where it's got a lot of catharsis, complex plot, it's got some value to it. And then
00:02:54.740
you have something as empty and meaningless as Angry Birds or World of Warcraft.
00:03:02.340
Violence in cinema. Violence in media. This is a problem nowadays. It's being celebrated in an
00:03:10.580
But to compare some schlock action movie to something like We Were Soldiers, or to mistake
00:03:21.860
something like the hostile movies, to put them in the same category as something like Men Behind
00:03:28.420
the Sun. These are two different things. They are completely different from the ground up. They
00:03:35.220
are more different than regular ants and carpenter ants. And yet, the liberals defend all of it.
00:03:42.580
And the moral majority condemns all of it. Completely ignoring the fact that we've had
00:03:47.860
violent stories in the past, except these had heroes in them. They had plots. It was justified.
00:03:55.140
These were Saracens that we were fighting in these stories. Unlike now, we just have this
00:04:00.500
orgiastic violence in all of it. The other day, I posted an article on my blog. I'm going to link
00:04:10.660
to it below. I won't go into too many details. It involves a webcomic, and to explain it, I'd have
00:04:16.500
to tell you about the backstory of these characters and a whole bunch of Dungeons & Dragons nonsense,
00:04:21.860
because it's in that universe. But essentially, people could not tell the difference in this comic
00:04:28.900
between bullying prejudice, on the one hand, and righteous standards. They couldn't understand why
00:04:41.940
a righteous cleric would not make friends with a paladin. They would make friends with a vampire.
00:04:48.100
A man with the same ethics as a paladin rejected the vampire, rejected any negotiation with him.
00:04:54.180
They saw this as prejudiced, as cruel, as not accepting of others. Perfect example of the
00:05:01.700
problem we have nowadays. Later that day, after writing that blog post, I watched the movie
00:05:08.100
Let Me In, which is about evil. And ironically, also about vampires. A link down below to a review of the movie.
00:05:18.100
Absolutely brilliant. I highly recommend the film. It really explores the question of evil.
00:05:29.300
Because here's the thing, folks. Evil does not, it's not a thing. It's not something that you can point to.
00:05:40.260
There's the saying. Most people think it's from The Usual Suspects or The Devil's Advocate. The earliest
00:05:51.620
reference to it was from the poet Beau Dallaire. But the saying goes that the greatest trick the
00:05:57.780
devil ever pulled was convincing the world that he didn't exist. Usually the people that say this are
00:06:03.060
incredibly stupid. But it's an interesting little statement. You could just as easily say the
00:06:10.260
greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing people that he did exist. Because what's our modern
00:06:18.340
conception of villainy? Why don't we skip the discussion of these insane terrorists in the action
00:06:28.020
movies? Of these ugly monstrous killers in the torture porn? And, you know, let's just go straight
00:06:34.020
to Godwin's Law. Hitler. Hitler, the most evil man who ever lived. Who was also a conscientious vegetarian,
00:06:42.900
who liked animals, who was a very sensitive painter, and happened to kill millions of people and start a
00:06:50.180
world war. This is our modern conception of evil. This ridiculous, black, vile, cruel, tyrannical sort of a
00:07:04.100
thing. And, you know, maybe you can point to a few examples like that in history. Stalin comes to mind.
00:07:10.980
But really, with your mundane evil, with your standard evil, it's not an evil person doing it. It's a good
00:07:20.900
person doing evil. The thing about evil, it's not seeking after evil. The idea of the black priest that
00:07:30.900
wants to kill babies because he wants to be more evil is pretty ridiculous. That's not what 99%
00:07:40.820
of evil looks like. Evil is a man who wants to go buy something for his girlfriend. So he shoots a
00:07:50.900
stranger and takes his wallet. The evil is pursuing something good. Evil is almost always pursuing something
00:08:01.700
good. Eating feels great. Eating is necessary to survive. But gluttony, when you completely give in
00:08:11.540
to the obsession for this, that's when it becomes evil.
00:08:15.220
Drugs. Drugs. Drugs are not evil. We tried prohibition. The moral majority tried shoving
00:08:26.820
prohibition down our throats. What happened? A whole bunch of alcohol overdoses, a bunch of gang
00:08:32.900
violence. Because they mistook the fact that although overconsumption, although addiction
00:08:40.260
is evil, you're seeking after the good feeling you get from alcohol to the point where you destroy
00:08:46.420
everything else in your life and can no longer afford alcohol, they mistake that for the drug.
00:08:57.700
We've lost the ability to perceive the differences in things.
00:09:01.060
And this is where we get back to the liberalism. Not being able to recognize that the vampire,
00:09:08.900
in either of those stories, the D&D comic I talked about or the movie Let Me In,
00:09:14.340
modern tolerance and liberalism cannot recognize the vampire is evil. That this vampire is exploiting
00:09:22.340
others. They're drinking the blood of innocence to maintain their own corrupt existence. And on top of
00:09:28.020
that, anybody that comes into contact with the vampire winds up corrupting their own lives,
00:09:34.100
becoming just as bad as the vampire. Let's go back to this robber. This robber comes from a
00:09:42.340
disadvantaged home. You know, had bad luck growing up. You know, he needs to show off in front of this
00:09:47.700
girl or else she's going to leave him for somebody flashier. And he's really in love with this girl.
00:09:52.100
So he goes and robs a stranger. So you or me, we call this out. We say, no, this
00:10:02.260
cocksucker is an evil son of a bitch. He needs to be locked up. He needs to be punished. He needs to be
00:10:07.140
caned. This guy's not only a danger to society and he needs to be locked up, but he is a bad person.
00:10:14.580
And he needs punishment. Where's your heart? Why aren't you more tolerant? You know, we all go
00:10:24.100
through difficult times and, and you get to modern liberalism where we can't even see evil for what
00:10:32.260
it is. We're looking for the devil. We are looking for Hitler. We're looking for Stalins. These big,
00:10:39.860
ridiculous crime lords that apparently don't love their families and aren't nice to their dogs at the
00:10:45.940
end of the day. This, this cartoon super villainy.
00:10:52.260
And the result is that we can't call somebody evil when they're doing evil things.
00:11:01.700
Oh, charity's a part of it, of course. None of us are perfect.
00:11:05.140
But that's the thing. When you start to notice what evil is, that evil is just pursuing good things
00:11:11.540
in the wrong way, you start to become far more critical about your own behavior, analyzing your
00:11:16.660
own behavior. Is what am I, I am doing, is it right? But these people, they don't analyze.
00:11:26.900
They know if they ever looked into their own souls that they'd find so much ugliness in there.
00:11:31.940
And so, as soon as we start to critique somebody else, criticize somebody else for their choices,
00:11:38.740
for their behaviors, all of a sudden, well, you know what? I could be the next one on that list
00:11:45.540
of people that are being shitty people. And since they don't want to reform their behavior, since they
00:11:52.420
don't want to atone or make amends, they just want to keep doing what they're doing. They want to keep
00:11:57.540
snorting the coke. They want to keep skimming off the top. They want to keep lying, manipulating,
00:12:03.860
just being these shitty, destructive people. The carpenter ants in the woodwork.
00:12:09.620
They tell us we can't criticize the outright criminal.
00:12:24.180
children's entertainment, children's cartoons, it can't have conflict. It can't have violence in
00:12:31.540
it. And they dumb it all down. So instead of blood or death in children's cartoons,
00:12:38.420
we have the Power Rangers. Sparks flying with each ninja kick. Nobody really gets hurt. The bad guy
00:12:44.500
just explodes into fireworks at the end of each episode. And so we've got a generation of kids
00:12:51.300
that's taught that people don't get hurt in fist fights. That violence is fun and cool with no
00:12:58.260
consequences. But that standing up for something and actually going into combat because it's right,
00:13:08.020
even when you're afraid? Well, they've never seen that their entire lives. Just sparks flying. Do a cool
00:13:14.740
ninja kick. This inability to call out evil when we see it. This inability to tell the difference
00:13:26.180
between right and wrong, between carpenter ant and regular ant. This is one of the big things at the
00:13:34.900
core of our modern dysfunction. The opposite of discriminatory is being indiscriminate. Irini out, folks.