I see evil constantly all around me, but there are varying flavours of it, and some are more natural
than others; I've noticed the dystopian novels of the past seem mostly to cover caricatures thereof.
Firstly, the very nature of the world is evil, but colloquially it hardly merits the label; it can't
be helped regardless, beyond mankind's continued domination over nature. Some people idolize nature
and ignore the endless, violent suffering; the slow eating of live animals, by yet other animals; or
the omnipresent disease and germs which passively try to kill all. Many of these people enjoy man's
bringing nature to heel while decrying it as foolish or misguided. By this definition, man is evil.
I well recall when someone was horrified at the realization that humans eat the flesh of animals for
it to boil and dissolve in our bodies; I realized I could either be horrified by my nature, or laugh
at it, and I chose the latter. Man is different. Civilized man has grown to cease with torture and
to reduce suffering. Regardless, from man's view, reality is his, as it should be. I choose to see
most livestock as biological machines, who exist for man's use, and for no other particular reasons.
Man is less evil than animals because of empathy, I suppose. Many animals lack it; even those which
show it lack it to the depth of man. A more moral world is one with more human control over nature.
Many flavours of man, to use the term loosely, are closer to nature than others, and correspondingly
closer to this base evil; these are the men who steal, rape, commit gruesome acts of violence for no
reason, and who generally love an excuse to destroy while avoiding retribution. Sure, as a man, I'm
regularly shown by my mind the extreme acts of violence and destruction of which I'm capable, as all
is a weapon in this evil world, but I never partake in it, because I'm able to resist. Clearly, not
all men are able, and basic observation is enough to distinguish which flavours of man are poisoned.
There are intelligent men who display a particularly vicious and higher form of evil, however. They
use their intelligence primarily to manipulate others into horrible acts, and have been known to use
the lesser men as weapons against their enemies. These higher forms of evil will now hold my focus.
These evil people talk in terms of possibilities, and rarely reality. They use language as a weapon
while simultaneously chipping away at its usefulness. A common method of manipulation is redefining
words in an attempt to change common perception. Such evil people love to play the victim, and will
attempt to rally support by making claims with words implicitly redefined. An example is ``choice''
redefined to ``infanticide'' and another ``woman'' to ``man''. When someone makes an arguement with
words redefined like this, it's neither a mere difference of opinion nor viewpoint; it's just a lie.
Such evil people love the subjunctive, and will argue that since something isn't impossible, then we
could behave as if it were possible, and should. They argue so with basic objects, and they only so
argue to chip away at the shared reality through which men communicate. In programming terms, these
people see common interfaces, and try to destroy them, to make everything more costly and difficult.
The proper way to deal with such a man is to treat him like a ``philosophical zombie'' and, since no
zombie feels pain, to harm him until, almost miraculously, understanding of language returns to him.
Such evil people are a far greater threat than the lesser men of lesser evil, if for no reason other
than the higher men of higher evil see them as weapons and argue for their diaspora. The lesser men
are generally too stupid to twist words and reasoning to argue for their inclusion, but these higher
men can argue for rats not in but a single cradle, but all of them, everywhere, except conspicuously
those cradles in which those evil men place their children. Always shoot a traitor before an enemy.
George Orwell in ``1984'' caricatured evil with his ``inner party'' and wrote of an evil that saw no
race or sex, only perfect adherence to its creed, but evil is made of more than mere creed; the evil
I see, the higher evil, is obsessed with the sanctity of its blood, which makes it very easy to see.
While nature itself is evil, I so suppose denial of nature can become a far greater form of evil so.
