Why and When Good Wins

Good post but what I think makes supporting good difficult today is that there is no hegemonic ideology to work from. At one time Christianity provided a unified ideological background for Western societies and could be used for evil or good, the issue of slavery being a good example of this. Thankfully the anti-slavery Christians won out. After World War II, human rights, liberal democracy and a mixture of Christian and secular humanism provided the ideological background for people to promote good even in the face of hypocrisy by their own governments.

But what do people have today? People are increasingly nihilistic. Social Darwinist ideas are making a comeback. I often see comments online that justify evil behavior by using arguments supposedly derived from evolutionary biology and evolutionary psychology.

There is an upsurge in tribalism as people increasingly only care about their own social group. Tribalism and identity politics have always existed but it was usually tempered by some universalism like religion (particularly universalist religions like Christianity) or by some universalist ideology such as secular humanism, liberalism or Marxism. Universalism is out of fashion today as many people no longer believe in any grand narrative. Even our elites have degenerated into a myopic wonkery of the sort that sees every problem as purely technical. How can you inspire people with that?

Most of the people who comment here probably dislike organized religion but I think the decline of religious belief in the West has been a complete disaster. How can you even believe in the concept of objective good if you think that humans are meat robots that only exist to reproduce? It is no wonder that so many young people are depressed.

If you browse forums where young people (particularly young men) congregate you can see that many unhappy young people see the world as meaningless and morality as nonsense so they eventually come to the conclusion that evil doesn’t exist or that what people call “evil” is actually useful because it helps you become financially successful or successful with the opposite sex. If you believe that life is nothing but pitiless competition for material resources and reproductive success, who is to say that they are wrong? I find that most non-religious leftists have a hard time arguing against this type of thinking.

good, up to the end.

it isn’t because of “bad people”. it is because of an entirely bad system.

in this system, it is always easiest, safest, cheapest, and most rewarding to do what is evil.

we even have complementary systems of instruction-propaganda along to make you feel that it isn’t evil, because it is somehow better (think most of the field of economics).

we need to come up with a system were doing good is the default option because it is simple. right now, it is just easier to live by doing evil and fooling oneself about the nature of what we are doing.

“Good loses when people want other people to be good so that they can be evil.”

^That is just perfect.

Maybe our situation is what it looks like when the misleadership of an entire nation is sundowning.

@ Hugh

“Christian feudal Europe had slaves ….etc”

Just to be clear, the majority of human societies through history have had slaves. Nor was this limited to societies following the agricultural revolution ten thousand years ago and pre- industrial-industrial societies. Many Amerindian hunter-gatherer societies had slaves, too.

@ Chimerika

“Evil always strikes me as a short-term perspective.”

Sure. But our lives are short- term things, too.

The definition of evil needs to be broadened. For example, most wouldn’t consider this news coverage of Epstein’s alleged “suicide” evil, but I would. This is public radio? Bullshit. It’s not public in any way, shape or form. It’s private masquerading as public and it’s a water carrier for the plutocracy every bit as much as Wall Street is. Containment at its finest. The Praetorian Guard doing its job. Never forget. When the time comes, if it ever does, they ALL must be rooted out and brought to justice. Otherwise, they sprout again and again and again and again.

Justice Department Raises Questions About Jail Where Epstein Died

There are a few problems I have with this argument. Firstly, its too simplistic. Good and Evil are simple concepts that are emotionally charged which nearly precludes rational debate. Second they are inaccurate or at least easily misleading. Feeding the hungry, good. Feeding the hungry solders on their way to slaughter peasants, Evil. So now we need Oracle like knowledge to determine if some action was properly Good or Evil. Any argument that requires an Oracle is faulty on its face. Context is required in every situation to determine the difference between them.
Because we use these ambiguous terms, and yes I’m guilty of this too, we end up jumping through hoops to justify our actions and how we want the world to be.

This isn’t a model of understanding of the human condition. It’s an attempt to map the human condition to how you want the world to be. That leads us here:

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.)

Irrational hate, is not good. The most Evil characters from history would read that and think “yes, that’s exactly what I have been talking about.” We recently had two mass shootings. One by people on each side of the “fence”. The one thing both of them had in common,.. irrational hatred. The Antifa member isn’t mentioned very much because it inconveniences the media and the “resistance”. But that’s pretty much the model of what the Left wants when they say that we need to “fight evil.”

Jesus or Buddha or whoever were exceptional human beings because they recognized irrational hatred is harmful. Preaching peace and serenity among the violent apes on this planet might be a fools errand, but it’s inspiring. Trying to convince your “good” group of people to be intolerant only ends with mass graves.

WWII was just Evil, there was no good there. We now know how FDR tricked the Japanese to attack pearl harbor, and bullied Churchill into a war with Hitler. We also know the Allies had a secret plan to attack Russia the week after Hitler attacked. The media will never mention it, but it’s become settled history. Just like all the POWs McCain and Co. abandoned. Read “American Pravda” by Ron Unz for details and more sources. It’s well documented.

I guess my point is that if we are going to talk about Good and Evil, and to a lesser extent helpful and harmful, we should be wary of any context that requires Oracle level knowledge. That makes any kind of hate or irrational thought “problematic”.

This post addresses something I have contemplated for many years. Back in high school, I remember trying to reconcile my anti-war beliefs with concepts like pacifism and those who are conscientious objectors, etc. I liked these ideas, but I did not see how they would not lose every single time, how these concepts would not result in “roll over and let someone conquer us.” Good must not tolerate evil, must even fight evil, somehow without becoming a monster in the process, without losing sight of good. I will continue to ponder, so thank you.

Perhaps the word we are searching for is, community. Communities have cultures and a thriving community will have a political culture of norms that both reinforce ethical behaviors among individuals and enable shared or collective “irrational” righteousness, aka altruistic punishment of evil.

The culture of the community is interwoven with and depends on “hegemonic ideology” as another commenter termed it: not necessarily a specific theological belief so much as shared rituals and perhaps some social mechanisms for shaming or ostracizing deviants.

For those of us who are skeptical about the ethical usefulness of religion, there are the problems of hypocrisy and of purely ritual strictures, and even more morally serious, the possibility of disguised or undisguised human sacrifice.

I can see the case being made, though, that the left has become heedless of the need to affirm and reinforce community norms, even as it has ceded to the Right the responsibility to define those norms because the Left is so cynical and careless of religion and nationalism.

There are so many reasons to avoid these conversations, non the least the very definition of atheism, of a-theism: not-theism… no religion. But that’s for maybe if we all ever get together for a beer*. What’s really bothersome (and this thread is trending that direction) is this treatment of good and evil as if it were something alive (picture M$ creepy typefont).

One of the twelve “steps”, the first step, in AA is acceptance that alcohol is an entity, an outside force greater than ourselves, one “cunning, baffling and powerful”. That it’s alive, conscious, capable of conceiving and carrying out nefarious intent. This is where I parted with AA: it is an inanimate object, no more alive than a rock, a molecule of water or the bumper of my pickup.

There is much in this world that can be ascribed to both good and evil, but let’s not treat them as if they were some alien species running our lives.
*Or somethin’

i find it disturbing that the post posited ethical situational decision making, and everyone is blabbing on about God. is that the only tool in the drawer for this issue? or is this another one of those “common man needs things dumbed down, so all he needs to do is be obedient”?

yeah, community. culture, ethics. what we do here on earth.

where does “god” fit in at all? i don’t see this as necessary.

my own complaint is that our culture, society and ethics have made being good so difficult, that if you do you are likely to be fired from your job, turfed out of your house and impoverished. the society’s rule structure is antithetical to “goodness”. we are all trying to “get over” in more or less obvious ways. it is the mass heirarchy of interpersonal, and especially impersonal slavery and the need to now run just to stay in place for most that have made it so.

or call it what it is: capitalism. everyone is looking for a way to justify why they should be allowed a good spot on the lifeboat, and therefore why their neighbor should be tossed overboard, or at least denied food and drink for the journey. our society is evil. an impersonal evil that boils down to “just doing business”. if you are high up enough in the food chain to disbelieve this, well…your money is bribing you to look the other way about what you are doing. down here at the bottom, it is pretty obvious. one cannot have two masters, and one’s master is always the Boss. and we aren’t even approaching having oneself as master, which decisions about good and evil require us to have in the first place.

When 70% of Americans still identify as Christian, it might still necessary. GOP operatives probably thought about being all secular and rational to sell their dreams but realized that nobody would buy it. So they strategied.

What’s strange is that at most lesser organizational levels, such as corporations, PTAs, HOAs… nobody has display their Christianity merit badge.

raise children to be gentle and humane

Isn’t that what the PTB are already trying to do – turn us into something gentle and docile? I’d settle for raising gentle and humane children with a nasty little glitch, a violent intolerance for anything that wasn’t gentle and humane. And liars too. If somebody dared try to bully or even lie to anybody, they’d be all over that guy like crows on an eagle.

Easier said than done of course.

@Mike Barry

There was a time when suggesting FDR allowed thousands of lives to be lost by not preventing an attack on Pearl Harbor was treated as treasonous. Now we know he arranged the Japanese to “intercept” confidential communications describing an attack on Japan. If the Japanese didn’t hit Pearl Harbor and take out Americas fleet they fully anticipated an American attack with everything we had. It was in effect a defensive maneuver. What we call today a “preemptive” strike.

Psychopaths have the over-expressed instinct to control which is considered by experts to be incorrigible. The Russian Fox Experiment created pet quality foxes by breeding agreeableness into them. You put your hand into the cage of a standard fox and it’ll likely bite it and escape if it can. But their special bred foxes want to be petted and loved. I don’t know of any experiments done to see how each kind of fox fares if released into the wild. I’d assume that tame foxes would be more likely to need survival training like hunting skills from a parent.

I agree with most of what you said, Ian, but I differ slightly on this:

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.

That’s true only if you define “rational” to be a synonym for “narrow, self-centered, short-term, self-interest”. If you define “rational” to include:

1) Long-term interest
2) the interest of all, not just yourself

Then rationality, I would argue, can and usually does drive good behaviors. The reason why hunter-gathering societies have appeal is that the focus of self-interest is over a lifetime, one knows that one will need the help of others at some point, and that therefore building up good will are “savings” that can be drawn upon in stressful times.

In short, don’t let the Ayn Rands define what “rationalism” or ‘reason’ is, else you will get some horribly irrational and unreasonable results. It’s also why many agnostics, acting ‘rationally’, are some of the best (as in good) people I have known.

Evil has advantages. No question. But so does good, and good, properly implemented, are greater.

I recall an old original series Star Trek episode ( The Savage Curtain ) which had Kirk and Spock (plus Abraham Lincoln and Surak of Vulcan) as “Team Good” versus a “Team Evil” of historical villains staged by the planet’s hosts. While Kirk and Spock win out in battle over Team Evil, the hosts remark that the contest only taught them that good and evil use similar means (i.e., violence) to triumph.

What Kirk maybe tried to clumsily point out at the episode’s end, is that in human society, good and evil don’t line up and slug it out in a one-on-one vacuum as the hosts of that planet had it staged: they do it in a social context. And there is something about “good” that appeals to most normal humans, causing most people to support good. Good wins out largely because of numbers. This is so true that evil usually tries to deceive and masquerade as ‘good’.

Ponderer:

There was a time when suggesting FDR allowed thousands of lives to be lost by not preventing an attack on Pearl Harbor was treated as treasonous. Now we know he arranged the Japanese to “intercept” confidential communications describing an attack on Japan. If the Japanese didn’t hit Pearl Harbor and take out Americas fleet they fully anticipated an American attack with everything we had. It was in effect a defensive maneuver. What we call today a “preemptive” strike.

No, no, and again no. Unz tortures the historical record until it screams.

For starters, how did Marshall’s alledged ‘leak’ (which was actually contrary to his actual strategy) matter when the Pearl Harbor attack had already been planned (plans began in early 1941) and approved (November 5th 1941) before the supposed leak occurred (November 20th 1941)? And where is the evidence that the supposed leak made any difference whatsoever in Japanese military or diplomatic planning?

Where can Unz point out the Japanese saying “Holy Crap! The Americans are going to attack! We’d better hit them first!”. He can’t because that didn’t happen.

Yes, the Americans knew that something was afoot and that conflict was highly likely. They just didn’t think the Japanese would have the audacity to hit Pearl; the Philippines and SE Asia were thought to be more likely targets (read David Kahn’s The Codebreakers if you want to read some of the actual decrypted Japanese messages; and I challenge you to find anything that said “we’re going to attack Pearl Harbor” in them–you won’t because the decrypted texts are *still in code*–what they actually contain are discussions about a supposed marriage which are being planned and the hope that the marriage will result in ‘a healthy baby boy’. The US codebreakers who broke in JN25 had to then make sense of what the ‘internal code’, so to speak, was saying).

Nor would FDR have need to have those battleships in the Pearl mud to achieve the goal that Unz says he wanted–if, say, two days before the attack, the whole fleet puts out to sea and puts as much distance between them and the Japanese carrier strike force as possible, then the Japanese would have ended up hitting an empty harbor and the airfields, killing civilians and military personnel alike, and the public would have been just as outraged and FDR could have had the war Unz says he wanted *and* the fleet, which I would suppose would have been a more preferred result. Finally, both Marshall and FDR were primarily concerned with Europe, not Japan, which showed in the actual wartime planning. War with Japan was going to be the secondary theater if it occurred at all. Stephen Ambrose’s Rise to Globalism I think contains the most accurate summation of how US military and diplomatic policies intertwined before, during and after the war.

@StewartM

That comes from Revilo P. Oliver. Head of a 175 member “secret research group” during WWII.
http://www.unz.com/runz/american-pravda-secrets-of-military-intelligenc

The dates are different than what you cite. According to Oliver it was January 1941 the the message was sent for Japan to intercept. Oliver maintains that the Germans didn’t fall for our provocations and that was why Japan was used. His narrative seems to follow other authors as far as the facts were concerned. His accusation that FDR arranged the intercept purposely was apparently known /revealed only to him. I think it fits, but it is a judgement call.

The most ancient notions describe good as ‘wisdom’, and evil as ‘destruction or chaos’.
Later societies inserted ‘God’ and ‘society’ into the mix so that those who rule would have a convenient means of destroying those who would reduce their authority and greed.
‘Society’, ‘the nation’, ‘Religion’, ‘the tribe’, ‘the family’ can be particularly odious as they can encourage people to ignore others because they are defined as not really fully human. To me ‘humanity’ is an act of imagination, and those who are wise can see the humanity in strange people: can see and welcome the wisdom of others. Most people wouldn’t recognize and welcome the wisdom even if it looked like Keira Knightley. This explains why the Arts are so valuable: they provide timeless presentations of people and societies that we could otherwise never know or understand.
The Mists of Avalon discusses this at length, with Gwenhwyfar terrified of the world to the extent that she can’t leave castle or cloister walls, and Avalon abandoning the fight for wisdom and humanity to retreat into the mists of legend.

Lyndon B. Johnson: “If you can convince the lowest white man he’s better than the best colored man, he won’t notice you’re picking his pocket. Hell, give him somebody to look down on, and he’ll empty his pockets for you.”

The weak and stupid are have always been easy to manipulate through self-serving lies and vaporous terrors. Evil people always use fear and chaos to manipulate. Those that seek to use these means instead of patiently educating are always evil (trump, unz, bigots of every stripe, any corporate whore).

Voltaire: “Those who can make you believe absurdities can make you commit atrocities.”
H.L. Mencken: ‘Nobody ever went broke underestimating the intelligence of the American public.’

‘Rationality’ is a tool, and ‘Wisdom’ the art. Read Plato’s destruction of ‘sophists’, those who reason with pretty, but false arguments.