The Casual Evil of Humanity

Typical humans have a casual evil that I think is epistemic in nature.

A typical man in eastern Russia keeps to himself and avoids politics, until one day he is summoned to either risk his life and go through hell for the chance to kill Ukrainians and steal their land, or else to go to prison if he refuses.

Does he choose prison? No. Does he hate Putin for the war? No, quite the opposite! He hates Ukrainians for making Russia invade. He’s not sure what Ukraine did wrong, or how the Ukrainians managed to make Putin invade, but…🤷‍♂

Hating Ukraine and defending the Kremlin (which he calls “Russia”) appears to be normal―according to State TV. He probably ignores State TV but he also knows what’s good for him, so he doesn’t pay much attention to anything else. And so he assumes Putin must have had a good reason to invade. He needs some hate to justify the killing he intends to do, so he hates.️

Where is his reasoning? Where is his epistemics?

But no one taught him the importance of reasoning, so he doesn’t. And he’s never even heard of epistemology.

And so he goes off to kill or be killed, trying not to reason about the morality of it. That’s the casual evil of mankind. It’s the evil of having a mind but only using it for day-to-day needs, never taking a step back to explore the bigger picture. Of trying to fit in and doing what you think is “normal” and “expected”, without trying to figure out whether that’s the right thing to do. Of letting a ingroup or a TV do the thinking for you. Of defending the status quo because “that’s the way it is”.

The man of reason, of epistemology, or even of commonsense morality would do something different. Maybe face prison; maybe risk his life to defect; maybe get fed up two years before, when the war started, and now call upon his friends in his resistance movement to help him decide what to do now.

But nowhere are such people a majority, and in Russia it’s just not part of their cultural heritage.

It is said that the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing. I propose that the man who does nothing is not a good man. That if you aren’t working toward being good, you won’t be.

Such casual evil is everywhere. Last century you kept hearing “spare the rod, spoil the child”, so you hit your child. Last century you hated the gays, because one, it was normal, and two, how disgusting; this century you hate even non-offending pedophiles because one, it’s normal, and two, how disgusting. Last century perhaps you felt the negro was inferior and welfare programs should be small and strict, lest someone undeserving receives something. This century you discuss the barbarity of killing a majestic elephant just for a couple of tusks―over a plate of chicken wings. Today your choices are endless: you can hate Trump and authoritarians, Biden and liberals, or or rationalists and neoliberals, or a thousand other subcultures.

Sometimes I myself feel hate creeping in for those who seem to thoughtlessly adopt the casual evils of mankind like it’s the most natural thing in the world (even though, apparently, it is). But logically, if I do that then I should also hate my best friend, and my wife.

So what can I do?

I quietly shed a mental tear now and then. I wish I lived in a better world. And I do what I can to try to build that world.

I have no one to do it with me. I don’t know how to be an “influencer”. When I cry, I cry alone.

“Someday,” I think. “Maybe someday.”

About 25 years ago I noticed that successful open-source projects for the public benefit were usually pairs of friends or triples. So I knew I needed to find a “partner in crime”―wait, crime? What the hell, no, I want a partner in building a better world. Why would it be “crime”?

How about a partner in the sublime? A partner for all time? Why should it even rhyme with crime?

Because we live in meme world.

And in meme world we want a partner in crime―it says so right on the meme.

Well, I want to build an alternative to meme world! Who’s with me?

🦗🦗🦗

No one, of course. No one ever told me how to find a partner. Is there even a meme for that? People just do it. That’s the casual social skill of mankind.

I don’t have that. I have the opposite. I’m afraid of people. People are awful. I’ve learned far too much about people since the days when I was five years old and supposed that I had seven friends, but I’ve also learned far less than necessary for success. In my experience, even genuinely good people (compared to the average, such as it is) are often apathetic, reflexively and unsympathetically critical, just plain confused about what that David guy is going on about, or perhaps most of all, just too busy to really think about what I have to say. I can’t blame the last group; I’m just as busy myself. And yes, there are some nice people who take the time to say that I have a good idea or two, though they may be too busy to help right now.

Certainly talk like this is no way to fundraise for my causes. And so I post this here, resting inconspicuously under my real name, where no one will see it: not my wife, not my best friend, and no one from those few groups I admire. But, in exchange, no one will carelessly dunk on it either. Maybe someday I’ll have the courage to try posting it somewhere else. But for what? No no likes a whiner. I used to cry for hours in my bedroom, and no one ever came to comfort me. And so today I’m biased toward comforting my own child when she cries―which is often. I guess I’m weird that way. When I can spare the time. There’s never enough time, never anywhere near the same ballpark as enough time. So thank you for yours.

It’s fair to ask―if people are so awful, why do I work so hard to help them?

Well, for one thing, a lot of the awfulness is cultural. So they don’t have to be awful; put a typical young Russian in a new culture and they remake themselves automatically, and sometimes it even works for the elderly. It does seem as if the typical person’s mimetic, conformal reasoning is hopelessly fixed, and maybe so, but presumably they still feel hurt when they are hurt, and happy when they are happy. A happier world is a better world, so that’s what I want. For another thing, I know I can’t be the only one like me. If I have to make the world better for a million people just so it can be better for one other person like myself, then so be it.