We live in a degraded Age. This isn’t to pretend that what came before was good in all ways, but all too often we deny the power of good. We think evil is smart, so good loses. Or we deny that good and evil even exist, claiming they are spiritual or metaphysical constructs with no impact in the world.
Raping someone is evil. It is always evil.
Torture is evil. It is always evil.
Feeding a hungry person is good.
Protecting the weak is good.
Healing the sick is good.
Kindness is good, and cruelty is evil.
This is not to say violence is never justified, or even killing.
Good must fight evil.
Those who refused to fight in World War I were right. Those who refused to fight the Nazis were wrong.
But here’s the important part: Good is Powerful.
When you refuse to do certain things like rape and torture, people want to be part of your group.
When you are known to be kind and take care of others, people want to be part of your group.
“Rational” evil people, who will rape or torture sometimes, and who will only help another person if it’s in their self-interest, are not trustworthy. When you need them–actually need them–they will not be there for you, AND if it’s in their interest to do terrible things to you, they will.
Good people, actual good people (and not those who pretend), can be trusted.
Anyone truly rational would rather be with good people.
But goodness can’t be based just on rationality. Rational people sell out. Rational people don’t help when they think helping isn’t in their interest. Rational people will be cruel to get what they want if they think they can get away with it.
Good, like any virtue worth having, must be something people do even when it is not in their self interest.
This is why people think good is stupid. Individuals are better off “free riding”; being evil and getting good people to help them. Groups, however, including the individuals in them, are better off if the group and the people are good.
Which is why good people have to also have an irrational hatred of evil. A complete intolerance for it. A “you get one chance and if you don’t reform you’re out” policy. (And out means either ostracism or death.)
Because rational people have to know that if they aren’t good, irrational people will fuck them up.
It is when good people refuse to enforce the norms of goodness, when they let people like those who run most of our societies today free-ride on the basic goodness and peacefulness of other people, that societies and groups turn terrible.
Good wins, but only if good believes in and enforces itself.
Evil, faced with actual good, tends to lose, because the good group is better to be a part of.
There are, of course, caveats and edge cases and “in group vs. out group,” but this is fundamentally true, and why, as long as they actually believed in their own ideology, hegemonic philosophies like Democracy and Human Rights and in older days Confucianism (despite its flaws) and even Christianity (before it became a state religion and turned evil) tended to win.
Evil has advantages, no question. But so does good, and when properly implemented, good’s advantages are greater.
Good loses when people want other people to be good so that they can be evil.
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