On evil and human short-sightedness

I met someone recently who had been a heroin addict. A youthful bright red-head who described falling in with the wrong influences and being “bad”. It brought to mind the old platonic distinction between doing things that are wrong because you are bad and fundamentally desire to do evil versus doing the wrong things because you are ill-informed (about what is actually good) and therefore make the wrong choices (because you pick things you think are good but which in reality are not).

The question at heart is what motivates certain actions – is it an inadequate understanding of the consequences of performing an action or fundamentally deviant motives where the individual actually wishes to do “evil”. Are there really such evil acts in existence, where even though we see the damage and understand the world of hurt we can still look into the other’s eyes and wish them death and their loved ones misery and simply pull the trigger.

I remember that scene from American History X when Derek’s younger brother gets blown away in the bathroom, leaving the other kid’s face pattered with blood freckles as he holds the smoking gun.

Although it is common sense not to question the existence of evil, even the genocidal maniacs in WWII justified their heinous crimes by referring to a good for Germany. Their ideology infected the country with a belief that such methods were necessary for a public good. Thus, there is a kernel of truth in the ultra-rational view that no evil act is carried out without some justification or reference to how it may bring about a good. Still, it is not true that evil is thus a product of logical deficiencies as if objective robots would be the pinnacle of ethics and good will. This largely misses the point that people will pretend all sorts of things are good and fool themselves into acting on perverse incentives. Nazi ideology is an example of this, as gang culture which weaves a sense of manhood around murder and aggression, or even spiking a vein may rest on the insistence that you aren’t hurting anyone else and simply flooding the body with well-deserved pleasure. Whatever these statements may be, they are not sensible attempts to get at the truth of the issue but more excuses designed to cover-up the substratum of loneliness, despair, perverse and morbid fascination.

It seems fair to say that evil is absolutely real in the moment’s immediacy – where wrath, and hatred and the desire to destroy crystallize in bullets, or the needle’s prick. But nonetheless, we humans must always weave a web of stories and justifications to convince ourselves why this makes sense, why this aims for the good – a need bred of a deep-seeded yearning for good things. And in the long-run it is hard enough to sustain these delusions. Although it is true that individuals are motivated by short-term “goods”, these often show themselves to be false goods on the long-run even though they deliver a moment of satisfaction.

The existence of evil therefore directly arises from the contradiction between our preference for short-term “goods” and their misalignment with long-term benefits. This is why most acts of violence are carried out in the moment of its motivation. This justifies why premeditated murder should be judged much more harshly than accidental killing before the law—because scheming and sustaining murderous intent betrays deeper malevolence than explosive anger. We must disagree with the Platonic formula of bad acts arise from ignorance of what “the good is” – it now seems more accurate to say that evil arises out of an excessive attention paid to the irritations and sufferings of the now along with an undervaluation of the future.

We experience things in their moment because each moment could be our last. Our senses at every instant sort through the manifold of the real and yield an interpreted slice of our environment, ready for our assessment, decision and action. This slice of reality feels all too real but it is mediated by some basic intellectual effort largely hard-coded into our faculties. Therefore, aggression, violence, contempt, hunger and pain pierce into the mantle of awareness and become the singular focus of our attention.

Reacting to this offence too immediately feels like a movement towards “the good” in so far as it may free the immediate pressure. Yet a reactive outburst may place our entire future in jeopardy, in the case of manslaughter for instance. Far beyond this tactical consideration of going to prison, abstracting from the moment’s immediacy also allows true values to surface and brings us closer to our fundamental desire to see prosperity and flourishing all around us rather than death and destruction. I like how MLK expressed this sentiment and realization by saying “the arc of the moral universe is long but it bends toward justice.”

In contrast to the false presence of a moment, an understanding of the arc of our actions let alone the arc of history requires true intellectual strain and discipline. Planted on two feet upon the ground ready to explode in rage, how is a person expected to take their irate brain and toss it years into the future so as to see, far more than avoidance of going to prison, the ridiculousness of taking offence at an insult made by someone else who is having a bad day?

Most socially devastating actions, be they violence, be they theft or whatever the crime, occur in an environment of systematic short-sightedness which venerates immediate gratification and builds the moment-up to be something which it often is not: meaningful. The culture of criminality therefore tends to thrive where people are taught to live in the now and systematically neglect living abstractly – as mediated through a sense of concept, dreams far reaching, wayward eyes that imagine a different life through the windowpane as the bus hums to work early in the morning.