G vs. E

Dennis Miller said something very intelligent about this whole Cho Seung-Hui thing. He said that he gives everybody a 48 hour pass after something like this. Because of the intensity of the event, people instinctively go to their "safe place" and spout whatever makes them more comfortable without much thought. I suppose I'm not different. Instinctively, I want to say you cannot prevent things like this. Arming everyone seems to be the only way to mitigate such damage. I don't know if that's right.

There's several issues here. The one that interests me is the debate about good and evil. I got into a long debate the other night about this. My friend denied the existence of evil and chalked all "evil" activities to physiological disorders. While I believe that mental illness certainly plays a large role in aberrant behavior, I don't believe it to be the sole reason. There is a difference between wicked-sick and wicked-evil. Here we get to a human tendency that leads to many a fallacy. We want to believe that all evil is illness because it infers that we can cure it. It's the same thing with Global Warming. I don't deny it's happening. We have metrics for that. But whether or not it's caused by man is open to debate. So what if 2000 scientist believe it to be fact. Science, unlike other fields of academia, is not dependant on concensus. Science is science because there is a definitive answer, regardless of what the majority of people believe. And given that, there is simply no direct nexus between CO2 production and the rise in temperature. A corrollation is not a causation. We may be causing it. We may not. All I'm saying is that the jury is still out- so to speak. When I say this to most people here, they go ballistic and I get called all kinds of names. I don't get offended because I understand what's driving it. We want to believe we cause it because the implication is that we can then stop or even reverse it. The thought that the planet will do what it does, quite indifferent to whatever we do, is terrifying.

This same motivation applies when it comes to discussing evil. You know evil when you see it. The only people who seem to dismiss it as something else, even when confronted by it, are those whose common sense has been excised by education. We have a sense of this when we say that small children can judge character in a way that adults cannot. I cannot convince anyone that evil exists. All the evidence I have is anecdotal. I don't have the metic to measure evil. But that's hardly a reason to say that it doesn't exist.

Evil is "badness" taken to an extreme just as virtue is "goodness" taken to the same end. The curse of humanity is mediocrity. When most people speak of equality, they don't mean making the weak stronger so they may compete with the strong. They mean limiting the strong so that they, in fact, become weak. According to Plato, such or morality is a slave-morality, not a hero-morality. Intensity, in polite society, is frowned upon. But intensity is the only way you excell. Before my injury, I was a world-class athlete. At the peak of my abilities, I spent several years involved with people from the Human Potential movement-- the goal being finding the common link between world class athletes. It went far beyond the physical. The difference between someone who competes at an international level and someone who's just very good is all mental. And the HPM folks wanted to find a biological marker for that difference. I was subjected to a barrage of tests. CAT scan after MRI after VO2 max. They did this for hundreds of world-class athletes in different sports. They've found nothing yet. There may be some common link that pushes us that extra ten percent. But apparently, we don't yet have the tools to measure it.

I think the same applies to evil. You know it when you see it even if you can pin it down. It exists and it manifests itself in men like Cho. It shows itself in places like Darfur. Parse it down all you want. Cruelty in action is evil and we all have to potential to behave in such a way. Our test as humans is not to eradicate the evil outside of us but to combat the resentment, the petty jealousies and cruelty inside of us that are the seeds of evil. We, as a society, did not create Cho. He is a result of his own weakness. Our responsibilty, as always, is to better ourselves.