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Fairly often I run across the following piece of reasoning:
There must be punishment, including punishment by God, because otherwise who wouldn’t want the fun of being evil?
This occasions some side-eye and sidling away from the person in question. “Uh, if you think evil is fun and are only good because of fear of punishment, something is wrong with you. And you’re dangerous if you ever think you can ‘get away with it.'”
Now this is a difficult topic because it requires us to talk about the fact that doing some types of evil IS fun for some people. Do I have to explain that rapists often enjoy raping someone?
Many years ago, and I can’t find it now, I read an excerpt from a book whose author had been a torturer during the Lebanese civil war. He wrote, quite seriously, that it had destroyed him because torturing someone was the most ecstatic experience, way better than sex, and now that he didn’t torture anymore, the entire world was gray and lacked any pleasure for him.
Power isn’t just an aphrodisiac, it’s an amplifier… Making someone else do what you want them to do is experienced by many people as very pleasurable. That they don’t want to, and force was used, makes people feel powerful and potent. Trickery, convincing people to do something that is against their interest, is likewise experienced as a rush. Con artists (including the really big ones like politicians, Obama, for example) revel in their ability to manipulate people, then betray them.
The human condition is weak. We are at the mercy of fate, luck, our bodies, and other people from the moment we’re born. As children, this is especially the case. Experiencing power, feeling that we aren’t weak, is, for many, the ultimate rush and the ultimate relief from fear.
Hurting people for your own benefit, successfully, is to experience power.
Almost every CEO and executive and almost all politicians experience this repeatedly. And, as many studies have shown, powerful people lose empathy. So they experience the upside of their evil without feeling the suffering of their victims.
It’s not just that he doesn’t care that they die, but that forcing them to die for him is a rush.
Now you don’t have to be super powerful to get this. Find someone weaker, and use your power against them. Weaker is relative: they could be physically weaker (your wife and kids, perhaps?) or they could be stupider (be a con artist) or they could just lack will and you have plenty (see henpecked husbands who are physically stronger and earn more money) or you could have managed to get into a management position and they need their jobs and have to do what you say, or else.
There are millions of variations: no matter how weak you are, there’s someone weaker, and you too can experience the retail version of the wholesale pleasure offered to a CEO or high-ranking politician. You’ll never get the full thrills of torture and murder of a George W. Bush or Netanyahu, but you can taste from the same sweet swill.
Evil is fun. And that leaves aside that the most evil people tend to wind up stinking rich as a side benefit.
I’ve made the case for evil, and I’ve done my best to make the strongest case I can, but I personally think you’re a fool to accept it or choose evil.
The problem with evil is that, as Tolkien pointed out, it consumes itself. You can never trust another person who is evil, not completely. For now, it may be in their self-interest to help you or at least leave you alone, but if you’re ever vulnerable and there’s enough at stake, well, they’ll come for you. You must always be strong, or you must be subordinate to someone stronger than you. That person will only protect you as long as it is in their self-interest. If you need to be sacrificed, so be it.
Safety requires good. The obvious solution is to be a free rider. Be evil, but live among good people. But, eventually, they figure out you’re evil, and the more people try to free ride, the more a society becomes evil, till the good people, even if not a minority, are effectively powerless. (This is arguably where the US is. Probably a majority aren’t evil, but who cares? They have no power. Israel, on the other hand, is a country where something over 90% of the non-Palestinian population is evil. There is no reservoir of evil larger than a muddy puddle.)
But it’s not just safety. Evil people care only about others when it’s in their interest. If you’re good and live with good people, you know that when you’re sick, broken, scared, or down, someone will help.
This is, really, true freedom. The knowledge that someone is there to help when you need help means you can take risks and you can do what you want, so long as it doesn’t harm other people. If you’re in an evil society, you must always be sure to have sufficient power (money is secondary; it means nothing if you can’t protect it). Your effective freedom is vastly restricted.
But perhaps most important, as good as the exercise of power feels, most of the enjoyable emotions in life are oriented towards good. There’s nothing quite like the warm feeling of love. There’s nothing like true friendship, the feeling of safety it gives, and the playfulness it allows. And as for power, the power of a good community is massive. When a group comes together to do something because the members all want to, not out of fear, the feeling of being part of something larger than oneself is wonderful. (Everyone should take part in a barn raising to get a taste of this.)
The price of evil is fear. Of knowing that you’re always in danger. Perhaps you’ll be the alpha predator who “wins”, the Barack Obama or Trump (though he often seems unhappy), or the Bush Jr., but for every winner, for every aspirational evil mastermind, there are millions of predators who are sometimes the victimizer, and other days the victim. People who always have to worry about who’s coming for them next.
Of course, if you live in an evil society, many of the benefits are lost. But even there, good people find each other and create their own small groups, and even if it’s just you, there is a satisfaction in virtue that is very real. There is a peace in being good, and knowing one has red lines and, oddly, in knowing that there are things one will not do to stay alive: that there are depths one will not sink to.
In the end, evil is about wallowing in pleasures that always have sickness to them, that never fully satisfy. The ecstasy of torture or rape or killing the innocent is real enough, but there is a filth to it, which is why such people often wind up with nightmares and PTSD, despite being the powerful ones who did the evil.
Those who want evil, who think it is fun, often wake one day to find the filth they have wallowed in has consumed them.
Evil has its pleasures, but they are not worth what they cost.
(The next article in this series will argue that China has defeated the US in large part because it has been more good, or less evil, than America for quite some time.)
Jan Wiklund
To be a social animal is more rewardning, in material terms, than to be a lone wolf. For that reason evolution has since millions of years rewarded those tho are social.
But, as Robert Axelrod discovered, it only works if you meet again. Because to the social behaviour belongs shunning those who free-ride. That’s how they lose out in the evolutionary process.
But shunning is possible only if you meet again. The more urban, the more global and the less everyday organized a society becomes, the easier it will be for the free-riders to find new suckers to fleece. Only organization helps against that.
People have also a troubling ability to fool themselves into believing that one can cheat the system, or the laws of nature. The intellectual capacity is far superior to the wisdom.
To the social behaviour that are evolutionary hardwired into most people, revulsion against violence is also a mighty part. As Randall Collins discovered, violence is usually possible only in two circumstances:
– there must be a chain of command that takes the responsibility away from you,
– if a conflict has been built up and one of the parties suddenly yields to the pressure, the other party may yield to the adrenaline in his system and become over-aggressive. That is what happens in massacres, police violence and home violence.
Otherwise, even professional hitmen try not to think of his victims (because that would make him nervous) but rather on his gun, according to Collins.
But on the whole, the violent are a small group of deviants. Violence usually arises from the two points above.
Feral Finster
“Evil has its pleasures, but they are not worth what they cost.”
The rulers of the world obviously disagree.
Power is to sociopaths what catnip is to cats, what cocaine is to addicts.
Feral Finster
I should added, and the powerful do not lose a minute’s sleep over the sufferings of others. We’re just props in their play, NPCs in the only love story they ever will know – their own.
someofparts
A strange subset of this is to be a good person, good family or good neighborhood only to learn that in the larger picture you are the citizen of an utterly evil nation. The way that seems to have worked in this country is that, decades ago, the nation was at least somewhat good for the domestic population. Now, of course, the evil is loud and impossible to ignore.
It has been tempting, as the evil here has escalated, to turn to history and look for a time when the nation was not evil. That turns into it’s own demoralizing experience because, as the saying goes, the longer you look the deeper the rabbit hole goes. Eventually it becomes clear that the country was founded by evil, and that this evil was just a continuation of the centuries of evil practiced by European ancestors.
Yet, as the Roches said in one of their lovely songs, ‘When the sky falls down, we play on the ground’. It is worth hoping that when the monsters who now rule us are gone, maybe breathing room for goodness will open up for those who have lived in their dreadful shadow for so long. Maybe for good measure the Chinese could even show the survivors how to create an economy that doesn’t devolve into oligarchy.
AJ
I’ve thought a lot about evil lately as I have aged and undergone a bit of a transformation of consciousness. Some related, parallel, thoughts.
For the “evil doer” (h/t Shrub), evil and the pleasure derived from it is an enactment of a limited “good.” Consciousness that is primitive and unaware of itself sees the other as not-me, and to the extreme, that can be the result of or artifact of bad neurological wiring and/or early childhood developmental experience, which itself can reflect the intergenerational transference of such primitive consciousness, where there is only individual, separate self, and no others who can be recognized as subject, rather than as threatening objects.
So the evil doer, from their perspective, may be deriving pleasure from evil, in the sadistic case cited, as a conditional good: I am making myself safe by exercising control and eliminating the power of my threatening oppressor to harm me. That the victim is objectively weak is irrelevant: the abuse is a proxy for a symbolic enactment, of “justice,” even.
But as you point out, Ian, the underlying driving force is fear, and the fear is never sated or abated through these enactments. As the saying goes, the call is coming from inside the house. The abuser oppressor is inside the person doing the evil, and very many of these people lack the wherewithal to look inside, to learn, to confront their own fear directly and sit with it rather than activate in proxy beings and then conquer it symbolically and gain control over it by sadistic proxy.
So there is no joy in evil, but there is temporary release. But, being temporary, it becomes a solution or equilibrium that requires repetition.
Joy comes from trust, play, safety, creation, the consciousness to recognize the self in other, and ultimately, in all we sense around us (not just humans). In one word, that is love.
mago
“To see mankind committing evil irreligious acts is to realize that those who act spiritually are as rare as stars in broad daylight.” From Buddhist scripture.
Yeah, power, the acquisition and application thereof is a vast and interesting topic.
In my working life as a chef I was usually in a management or ownership position. When I was 23 I vowed to treat those beneath me with kindness after being bullied by a sadistic cook who was above me at the time. (I was soon to be his boss. This was at a natural food restaurant btw,)
Anyway out in the wider world I discovered that my kindness was perceived as weakness, and the underlings tried to exploit it, so no more Mr. Nice Guy. However, I never resorted to meanness or cruelly.
And while I preferred to be in a leadership position, it was often a two edged sword. I derived satisfaction from running the show, but sometimes the responsibility was tiring, and employees can be a pain in the ass. But that’s off topic.
Trite as it sounds, goodness is it’s own reward. One can derive personal benefit from service to others, but that assumes motivation and a mindset trained and conditioned in that way. Some people have it naturally, like those in the helping professions.
Anyway, I’ll take good over evil any day.
Ian Welsh
People who grow up in a society which regards force as natural don’t handle non-forceful leadership very well, they see it as weakness.
I noticed this in the US when I worked there briefly. Canada’s no paradise, but bosses in the US were MUCH worse. I though perhaps I had just “lucked” into a particularly bad work culture, but every time I describe the specific experience to Americans they’re “oh, no, that’s normal.”
Normal in America, I guess. Ick.
Feral Finster
Societies that have force to use see the use of force as natural.
Those who shy away from the use of power are quickly pushed aside by others who have no such qualms. Greshams’s Law applies to many areas besides monetary economics.
Troy
In university, I read the novella American Psycho. It was an informative experience. In it, the main character describes a lifestyle of emptiness. His group compete in little contests that are meaningless in the grand context of things. The main character kills, for for pleasure, but for sport. He assumes a persona of culture and taste, but displays none of that. He just moves from thing to the next, living a parody of a human life, causing one disaster after another with no recourse nor ramifications.
He describes what he owns and what he consumes with far greater detail than he can ever describe himself. He’s simply an empty suit, devouring and destroying everything in his way.
Considering, Patrict Bateman was a parody of the 1980’s/90’s nepo baby business man, we can likely extropolate that Bret Easton Ellis meant to capture American business culture as a whole within the pages.
There’s no connection within this group but they compete endlessly. They have no compunctions nor morals. They just move on from one horrifying act to the next. They don’t acknowledge the harm they do, and if it’s brought to their attention, then they ignore it. All the horrors they’ve wrought just go away on their own.
They create nothing and take everything.
Combine this with F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, and the American upper class experience is painted. A generation and class of people, to paraphrase, are a careless people. They smash up things and creatures and then retreat back into their money or their vast carelessness or whatever it is that keeps them together, and let other people clean up the mess they have made.
ibaien
doing evil is the immediate dopamine hit, big score on the slot machine, hot mcdonalds french fries cheeseburger and a coke. doing good is the slow growth steady investment, few highs few lows, sense of calm. in an instant gratification society with dim hopes for future generations, is it surprising to see people choose evil?
and, re: managing staff, treating them badly is usually a sign that your institution expects high turnover. kindness is a long-term investment and will help select and retain good staff – if your institution is willing to treat those people well. in kitchens especially, ownership chronically underpays with the assumption that there’s another twenty cooks waiting for those poverty wages and backbreaking hours. it should go without saying that this is no longer true, and that anyone interested in having a successful business should be good to their people.
Clonal Antibody
There have been some very disturbing reports about MAID “providers” in Canada
Nat Wilson Turner
“People who grow up in a society which regards force as natural don’t handle non-forceful leadership very well, they see it as weakness.”
This is, I think, one big reason for the failure of the Russians and Iranians to communicate their seriousness with the West. Anytime they choose not to inflict the maximum possible damage, to commit the most barbaric act, the West says “what a bunch of wimps! They obviously can’t hurt us any more than they already have or they would have done so.”
Ultimately this is setting the whole species up for a very deadly lesson.
Feral Finster
@Nat Wilson Turner:
The West sees Russian and Iranian hesitation, not as humanitarianism or reasonableness, but as contemptible weakness and it only encourages them to push harder.
In the end, Russian and Iranian dithering and indecision get more people killed, more people all around. The sociopaths who rule the West understand only reward and punishment, the lead pipe to the face, over and over and over again. However, they do understand this language very well, indeed.
mago
To further expand on my previous comment, I often found being in a leadership position makes one a target for resentment, projections and jealousy. There’s usually at least one person trying to take you down. It can be tiresome.
When I assumed command of a Philly kitchen, the owner said come on hard in the beginning, then lighten up, because if you start out nice and then get hard everybody’s going to resent you. In the event, I didn’t take his advice, and it all worked out, mainly because by taking over I saved everyone’s jobs. The owner was going to close before I came along.
When I was put in charge of a Seattle kitchen I encountered a hostile staff some of whom tried to undermine me. Some quit and some I fired, but after that we had a tight crew who hung together through my two year tenure.
Interesting to think about it today. I wasn’t yet thirty years old. It was a different world then, but I’m guessing that running a kitchen is still similar to being the captain of a pirate ship.
Thermobarbaric
Nat: I too believe a “very deadly lesson” is coming but mainly for the neo-imperial, neo-colonial, neoliberal West. This lesson may very well be significant, possibly even game changing. It will certainly be a well deserved and long awaited (by ROW) comeuppance.
The US in particular is ill equipped to handle such a comeuppance since it’s a country and society that has been raised on the “winning isn’t everything, it’s the only thing” ethos for almost its entire existence, most certainly for the entire post WW2 era. The dissonance in the elites and the general population will be severe.
(OT the above mentioned ethos was also nicely expressed in the great 50s gangster noir The Big Combo: “First is first, second is nobody.” I know many many USians who believe this to be true.)
Purple Library Guy
I’m almost surprised that this piece doesn’t include the classic C.S. Lewis quote from The Screwtape Letters, where the damned soul arrives in Hell and, now able to see clearly, says, “‘I now see that I spent most my life in doing neither what I ought nor what I liked.”