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Stephin Merritt is definitely the man to talk to here, with "ILAILI" and, from the new Magnetic Fields album, "I Wish I Had an Evil Twin":
I wish I had an evil twin,
Running 'round doing people in.
I wish I had a very bad
And evil twin to do my will.
To cull and conquer, cut and kill.
Just like I would, if I weren't good
And if I knew where to begin
Nietzsche draws an important distinction between "bad" and "evil". Bad is just what you are if you don't have the qualities that your society identifies as good. So, if you are living in a Homeric epic, you are bad if you are not brave, beautiful, skilled in battle... "evil" is a very different kettle of fish. Evil is a positive quality that is identified by the people who are identifying themselves as morally rather than socially good in others.
Thersites is bad, but not evil. Mezentius is evil but not bad. Turnus is neither evil nor bad, he's just very, very unlucky.
I've been bad, in the sense of being unromantically and unexcitingly a crappy human being, quite a lot. There was a point were I possibly was genuinely evil, but even then I suspect that the genuinely evil wouldn't have wanted me in their club, pointing out that I was actually just fucked up and messy. Left to my own devices, I would just have been self-destructive and pointless: it was only the fact that other people cared enough about me to put up with a certain amount of being made to feel awful or exhausted that made the condition dangerous.
So, is that evil? Possibly, but it's a highly environmental and also a particularly unprofitable form of evil. The fallout is, as far as one can tell, rather like being an alcoholic; you have to accept that you have that quality within you and try to minimise its effects.
More generally, pretty well all of us are supporting actual, genuine, honest-to-goodness evil, in the sense of a set of behaviours that fuck other people over, all the time. However, in doing so we don't necessarily get to be evil ourselves.
I'm interested that Mike Robot casts kindness as the easier choice, when this seems to me counter-intuitive. I'm not sure baout his logic, either - good people can surely also put in the hours gainign power and plotting the downfall of their enemies, no? Happens all the time.
Ah - checking the thread, Mike's identified the flaw in his own argument. Good good. Or possibly evil evil.
So, start off with what you mean by evil. For example, Praying Mantis' anecdote doesn't strike me as being about good or evil, but rather about people being ghastly and dim. There are, I suspect, far more ghastly and dim people around than there are either good or evil. I would hesitantly suspect that Deva's situation is not evil either, but rather about what people are prepared to do and to put up for each other, and the problems that are created when you bump up against their limits.
Oh, and Polythene - use of the term "PC" without being ready to explain exactly what you mean by it makes people both dim and ghastly. I imagine you are talking about hypocrisy, which is a very different animal, and one both more common to the lowlands of the West and far harder to spell. |
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