What is Evil?

There is such a thing as Evil but it is probably completely different and initially counter-intuitive compared with the common view. Recent posts have been heading to this:

Evil is the belief that one side must prevail

How aburd that seems. Surely Good must prevail and Evil must be defeated. Those that allow Evil to prevail are themselves Evil. Sure you are either with us or against us. But as I hope to show this is actually the mentality used to spread Evil not Good.

Consider Jesus at the outset of this blog. We are told that he could have summoned armies of angels to crush the Romans but he never did. Instead he forgave those who tortured and killed him and died on the cross. Not your typical version of prevailing. Now the story continues that he rose from the dead and in time ascended into Heaven. So he did triumph in the end, but not by defeating the Romans in a pitched battle, but much more profoundly by defeating Death itself. Not getting into theology yet, but there is something odd about this story from the common perspective of winning a conflict. Jesus appears to have won by losing. He appears to have overcome Evil, not by resisting it, but rather by submitting and accepting it. How very strange.

We have had the original Star Wars trilogy on the TV over Christmas. "Give into your anger Luke" says the Emperor. But how in the traditional view can righteous anger to support the Good and destroy the Evil not be itself Good. How can refusing to feel hostility at Evil be itself Good?

So there is definitely something weird going on.

For me the obvious place to start is in the great battles against Evil we have really witnessed in History. The battle to conquer the evil dictators like Saddam Hussein, or Hitler. We note that the Evil Dictator Stalin was an ally during this WW2 period. He also invaded Poland at the same time as Hitler, but we only chose to attack Germany I presume because we could not defeat Russia so worked to form an alliance with Russia. We even formed an agreement with Stalin that USSR would add Eastern Europe to its Empire while the US would add the East. First lesson here (of common Goodness) is that for Good to win we sometimes have to side with Evil. Something very weird going on here too.

Another odd thing about Common Goodness is that everyone thinks they are fighting for the good side. For the vast majority of people the main thing which determines which side you fight for is not Good or Evil but rather where you are born. If you are born in Ethiopia chances are you will fight for Ethiopia. If you are born in Eritrea you will fight for Eritrea. If you lose to the Romans or the American you will end up fighting for them. Even the UK, which (is allowed to) think its won WW2, actually fights for the American (or "US led coalition" as its PR gurus have named it). So it is simply the roll of teh dice of which parejts you had, or what your country history has been that decides which side you are on. After that we think the enemy is the evil one. This really isn't a very satisfactory view of evil, that everyone has a different view of who is evil! A big problem with the common view.

To deal with this problem we are led to believe that soldiers who fight against the "Good side" (that is our side) are doing so against their will. For example Hitler's armies were being forced to fight, while the Allies fought willingly against Evil. Too much unreliable information has been spread about WW2 to be sure what people were thinking. WW1 is more clear. The famous Christmas Truce, initiated in fact by Germans, does seem to suggest they had a lesser heart to fight. But Entente troops like Britain were very happy to join the truce and enjoy comradeship rather than hostility with the enemy over Christmas. And it is simply not true that Entente troops were there willingly. Many were conscripted and the options available were periodic suicidal charges of the enemy lines or execution for cowardice by their own side. It would be fair to say no one wanted to be there. It would also be fair to say in this mother of Imperial battles that both sides thought the enemy was Evil. What was at stake was the continuing supremacy of ones Empire. If the Entente lost then Britain's Global Empire would fall, if the Axis lost then the Austro-Hungarian, Ottoman and German empires would fall. In the end it was the latter who succumbed and the great Evil of Western supremacy marched across Europe and the middle-east. At least that is how it must have looked to those who were defeated.

Good/Evil battles are a murky world. Alexander the Great was the first real master of having a poplar image. When he took over Persia he spread the story that he had come to liberate the Persians from the dictatorship of the Persian rulers. They were indeed powerful and brutal dictators. But this always disguises the fact that for the Persians, like any conquered people, they were now ruled by a foreign Macedonian who did not speak their language, share their values and who would try to rule his empire from thousands of miles away. And no matter how benevolent a ruler may seem, try and rise up against them and see how benevolent the Imperial Army is. The only time being conquered seems like the Good guys is when life before was more brutal. But as the US is always reminding people freedom is the best, and that means winning battles and not being conquered. Its a very confused and mixed up thing.

Its an odd thought then that in fact patriotic Iraqis or Germans may have fought for Saddam Hussein and Hitler with the same passion as British or Americans fought against them. For me they probably fought more passionately because in all the cases of "Evil Dictators" being crushed it is actually the West invading. Blitz, Battle of Britain and Pearl Harbour are the only times in over a hundred years when Britain or America were actually attacked by enemy and these are small skirmishes compared with the epic battles that have played out overseas in other peoples' back gardens. If the West really are the Good Guys they are the ones who have brought war to almost every place on Earth except of course themselves. It would be easy to wonder how selfless and giving they really are when faced with a history of almost exclusively seeking to prevail over everyone else.

So that is the complex and twisted history that we have recieved of the common battle of Good and Evil. And in all this history one thing is common whether it be Macedonians, Romans, Jews, British or Americans fighting the battles: a lot of human misery. History never records the tears wept by mothers and sisters over the bodies of mutilated husbands and sons. The hundreds of millions of people cut down and murdered in warfare far exceeds the death tolls of all other human violence. Only disease is a greater threat to mankind. One has to wonder over the millennia what all this blood has achieved. One side winning, and then the other as arbitrary as rolls of a dice.

When we think of Evil what we tend to think of is a victim. Someone who's voice has not been heard. Dictators are so hated because they do not listen to the will of their people. They do things by force, or by fooling people with lies and propaganda. They have secret organisations to spy on people to ensure that they are not planning to resist their power. Indeed they do all the things required of State Craft to ensure that society does not oppose them. In fact what a Dictator goes is no differemt from any individual or organisation that seeks power.

To seek power is to seek support from others.When people chose a leader to listen and marshal their wishes harmoniously, and that leader is a servant to the people, submitting themselves to the will of the many, then one might say their Good. It is very much the common view that leaders who conversely twist matters towards their own ends are Evil. In this the common view is the same as the one I propose here. Good leaders are sensitive to victims, and Evil leaders lack compassion for victims.

Now what do we have in the situation of war? We have one side seeking power over another, where the death of those who support the cause is a tragedy and the death of those who oppose the cause is unfortunate. Suddenly all leaders who lead their people into battle becomes Evil because they no longer have compassion for the enemy. It doesn't matter some may argue, because the enemy did not elect the leader. However if the enemy are beaten then they will have have the leadership forced on them. War always creates victims. Suddenly War appears to be only Evil. When the US openly states that it works towards US interests we see Evil in action. The US operates for its own interests, and that means against the interests of those who oppose it. It creates victims. All countries do this in fact, but it is surprising to see a country that thinks that it is Good openly admit the priciples of Evil.

And this problem spread. Any conflict that seeks to subdue an enemy is actually Evil because it creates victims, and seeks to impose the will of one side upon another.

Conversely then Good is not about opposing an enemy, but rather listening to them. Forgiving them, suffering them, laying down ones weapons and accepting them. This way the enemy is no longer a victim. But a new problem occurs because the enemy may themselves victimise others. However a victim with the mentaility of tolerance and acceptance of the Enemy is no longer a victim. Imagine if the Germans in WW2 had sought peace. Imagine if they had laid down their weapons, but not because they surrendered and accepted the Allied Victory but simply because they did not accept violent resolutions to conflict. What a transformation they would have undergone. No longer would they be victimising minority races. Instead they would have an open society where every voice would be heard. Oddly this is similar to what has happened but with a big difference. The path the German's took was to be destroyed, lose millions of lives and be rebuilt not as a free country but as a vassal state of the US empire. Had they downed weapons at the start, and sought peace even before WW1 how different things would have been. But there is a reason they did not. That reason is that if they had not fought they would have been invaded by Britain or Russia. In the final days of the Great Imperial Battles of the 20th Century every country had no choice but to join an empire and fight of be an empire and fight. Every country had no choice but to be Evil.

But I am thinking in terms of the recieved History. In fact no one really belonged to an empire or a country any more than they really belong to a football team. It was just paperwork and alliances and agreements and beliefs. In fact no one really had to fight. Had the Germans or British just laid down their weapons at the start Napolean would have invaded and taken over the leadership of Europe, or perhaps Catherine the Great of Russia. And the people who lead these invasions would have been the Evil ones if they did so from their own interests creating victims as they went. But were people to stand up to the Evil ones by imposing their will instead then a war would escalate and quickly we arrive at a situation of creating victims.

So we realise that when Evil people rise up and seek to impose their will on us, it is a mistake to do the same. The Good choice is to accept their will and try and work with it. Applying ones skills in greater understanding of the situation to arrive at a solution that benefits all. And if no such situation exists like Jesus hanging on a cross then we must accept this unfortunate situation. The Devil or Emperor may well dangle options like anger, fear, resistence, hatred and dreams of victory in front of us but if we take them we too move over to the Dark Side. Indeed it is by snatching these apparent fruits of the Dark Side that our adversary ever got into the situation they are in. Lead by example and stay true to the Force is the message written loud in many ancient and modern stories.

While the Children of Israel complain loudly at having lost the Kingdoms of Israel, they must also acknowledge that they were regarded as being very troublesome in History. Jesus was born right in the middle of Roman anxiety about Israel. Not satisfied with killing off Israeli prophets like Jesus they eventually stormed and destroyed the temple and eventually the Jews once again lost their kingdom. It would appear the Jews are rather repeating history given current relation in Israel Mk IV. By contrast the Etruscans were not great empire builders, but they paid their taxes, kept their heads down and went on to colonise the Mediterrean and pass on their knowledge to the Romans. History doesn't have much to say about the Etruscans but I'm beginning to think that is a good thing. History likes to record battles, victories, crushing defeats, and great figures who sought to impose their will on others. History essentially records victims and perpetrators. It records the evil that mankind has dealt to itself. If you are not well recorded in History you are likely to have lived a Good life!

So in this view Evil lies in the very desire to overcome Evil and to have ones own views and wishes prevail. Goodness feels unusual at first, but it is more interested in the wishes of others than itself, and seeks to approach situations with both eyes open, seeing all sides and not creating forgotten victims hidden in the shadows of narrow minded, blinkered views and bigotted thinking.