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Evil absolutely exists. Pretending it doesn’t is a device of people who have some vested interest in ignoring it, or people who are so limited by their own comf
by whythre 3y ago
Evil absolutely exists. Pretending it doesn’t is a device of people who have some vested interest in ignoring it, or people who are so limited by their own comfortable experience that they have never been confronted by it.
I have been reading Team of Rivals, a deep dive book about Lincoln’s presidential cabinet during the civil war. It is amazing that many of the men write about how, after having personally witnessed slavery, they then vigorously oppose it. (Seward, for example, goes on a trip to the South for vacation and basically comes back hating slavery because it is so clearly wicked).
I imagine human sacrifice, death camps, gulags, they all evoke similar responses. ‘Societal good can only be reached through mass slaughter of the undesirable’ is the subtext. That should be repulsive to any with a functional moral core. The amount of suffering enacted by the Aztecs as they killed their neighbors children… I can’t imagine.
- ElemenoPicuares 3y agoIn the real world, evil is a morally lazy concept for people unwilling to consider that some abhorrent behavior that adults must be held accountable for also has root causes that we might have some culpability in. Pretending bad behavior happens in a vacuum shirks out duty as stewards for our society, pushing all responsibility of it onto the people who have to deal with the worst of it. Personal responsibility is the start, not the end of addressing the bad things that people do.