1:00PM
I was just reading an article talking about Hitler, Stalin, and other leaders who tried to shape society, especially in the direction of a utopia. While the article didn’t mention it, I was reminded of one principle I read somewhere: evil is trying to get rid of evil.
I found it to be a peculiar statement—that the essence of being evil is about getting rid of evil. I don’t know how fully I agree with it and yet it’s something I want to explore here.
I believe that what we call “evil” is something that makes a vast majority of humans feel bad, in the most simplistic definition. Now, perhaps it’s not about the vast majority of humans, maybe it’s just about the humans to whom one feels very connected. For me, evil has this relative quality to it. Would it therefore be evil to do something to someone to whom you don’t feel connected? Maybe we don’t need to feel very connected to that person, as a parent to a child, but maybe it will feel evil if we recognize the emotional and human capability of the receiver.
So then, how would it be evil to get rid of evil? I can’t recall how the original author put it, so I will continue to hypothesize and play. Perhaps it would be evil to get rid of evil because again, evil is relative. So I may think that someone crashing a plane into the World Trade Center is evil, while the person who is doing it may think that the Western culture is evil and thinks that crashing the plane is a way to get rid of the Western evil. Who is right about what is evil?
I think this is where I get excited to talk about how I see the world in terms of relative subjectivity. By this, I mean that most of the things we describe with adjectives are not objectively one way, but subjectively so. For example, I may step outside and say that it’s cold, whereas someone else may say that it’s warm. It’s the same temperature and yet we say two different things. I believe it’s because I feel cold and the other person probably feels warm. I think this applies to so many other contexts—e.g., that person “is attractive” seems to be “I feel attracted to that person.” However, saying it from the subjective experience can reveal a lot about our own personal beliefs and state of being, which may scare us if we don’t trust the other person with that information.
Back to the point about evil getting rid of evil. I think it probably stems from our different definitions of what is “evil” and our not recognizing that our actions may be considered evil by the other person. In training through scenarios of rejection, I have seen that very often when we feel rejected, the other person has no idea they did that. In other words, the receiver perceives it as rejection and the giver doesn’t.
1:10PM
