Calculated Evil

Evil is done through calculation, not on a whim or impulse. When we classify acts of evil, intent plays a crucial role; this is why first degree murder is punished more severely, as it involves planning and a clear intent to kill.

We see this everywhere; the evil antagonist in stories is always planning the evil deed ahead. On the other hand we have deeds with an equally evil outcome, like the death of a person, but lacking the premeditation, like a crime of passion. This is when our reasoning faculties are shut down because we're overcome by pure emotion. These crimes of passion are looked upon much more leniently and the state of emotion is seen as a mitigating factor. What I'm getting at here is that true evil comes about when there's a calculated, emotionless intent to do harm.

It's easy to think that our world would be so much better if we only think things through more. Much of the harm is done when we fail to do the right thing when it's the difficult choice to make. But that's not necessarily true all of the time. Think about a person who runs into a building on fire to rescue a child, or the one that jumps into the water to rescue someone from drowning while the rest just stands there. They don't make a conscious choice to do the right thing. When asked what they were thinking, the answer is almost always that they didn't think, they just acted.

It's too easy to say that all good comes from not thinking and all evil comes from calculation; that's not true of course. What is true however, is that we live in a world of much calculated evil. Individuals and entire nations are kept hungry through the calculations of profit. Scarcity is deliberately created and maintained to keep prices up. Unemployment is maintained to keep wages low. Things that can't be measured or represented in cold, hard numbers, do not count in our world; there's no compensation for the love of a parent for their children, no reward for the hero who rescues that kid from a burning building.

Our economy is a game of calculation and causes a lot of calculated harm. That is because the calculations are based on profits that can only be achieved in the face of scarcity. Among the individuals who are financially successful and have climbed the socioeconomic ladder, sociopathy is much more prevalent than in the general population. To do mass layoffs, you must be emotionally separated from the ones whose lifes you destroy; it's much easier when your victims are just numbers on a screen, right? When the decision is made to drop a bomb, it's never made on the battlefield but from an office far removed from the harm that's caused.

Our capacity to reason, courtesy of our frontal cortex, the most recently evolved part of our brain, has brought us where we are, at the top of every food-chain. But it's also the tool for the evil we cause others. Anyway, it's just a thought I had when I saw the below linked video, discussing some of the psychology behind this calculated evil.

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