If we wish to understand the processes of political destructiveness, we must begin to perceive that contained within all forms of evil is a powerful sense of goodness, that evil DERIVES FROM A SENSE OF GOODNESS. This does not mean that all goodness leads to evil, simply that a certain kind of PASSIONATE, INTENSE ATTACHMENT TO A CERTAIN SENSE OF THE GOOD is the source of mass murder.
Re:sudden thought
« Reply #1 on: 2003-05-08 07:50:59 »
Nice to see you again Walpurgis.
We could possibly resolve this paradox by working on the semantics of good and evil, but this thought reminded me of a similar interesting aphorism I had read in an older post:
<quote (Arcadia)> The Principia Discordia jokes about the 'Party for the Perpetual War On Evil,' as one of the main branches of the 'conspiracy.' The joke is, if everyone stopped vigilently fighting against evil, I guess about 70% would disappear, since about 70% of evil is generated by people trying to fight evil. (Dada) <end quote>
I think rhinoceros has it. The big problem here is that evil is subjective, and a lot of evil is generated by people attempting to fight what they think is evil. A good example is the war on drugs. Yeah, it looks good on paper, but in the real world is actually increases crime, fills up our prisons (taking up the room that should be reserved for real criminals) and gives the state another oppurtunity to expand it's power. That's just one example, there are many more.
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