All That Matters

Evil Always Wins

You already know what I’m about to say, but bear with me for after the next few paragraphs I’ll go a little deeper into it.

As far as humans are concerned, whoever ignores the rules the most wins. Those unshackled by moral principles – “the most evil” – always have a huge advantage over those who are, or at least try to be, ethical.

I have previously defined “to be good” essentially as “not to harm others.” And that can also be phrased as “not to violate anyone else’s rights.” To be evil, then, could be defined as “to disrespect that which others are entitled to” – to kill (life), steal (property), humiliate (dignity), spy (privacy), etc. So it’s simple: do not do unto others what you do not want done to thine self, and you are good (pun intended). The Bible and preschool got this much right.

Though I disagree with many of our laws, by now the majority of [Western] nations seem to have gotten most of the basics (fundamental rights) correctly. Things can get much more complicated in infra-constitutional laws (which deal with specific or exceptional cases) and legislators all over the world have completely messed these ones up. If we had ideal laws in place, “to be good” would coincide with “not to be a criminal” (almost, actually, thanks to the “helping others” aspect of “right,” as I defined it earlier). That must have been the goal, but we’ve always lacked the reasoning, honest intentions, and the qualified voters, representatives and leaders necessary to reach it.

I veered a bit off-topic there, so let’s get back to it: good has constraints; evil doesn’t.

If we try to resolve an impasse based on morality and legality, we are bound to and our actions limited by them. There’s only so much we can do, as there are lines we refuse or are not allowed to cross. If we disregard legal consequences and our ethics (or simply have none), though, we can just kill someone and/or take their possessions for ourselves, even causing massive collateral damage to many other people so that we, alone, can benefit.

Bound by our own morality, we don’t do something we could because we know it’s wrong; because we don’t want to. Bound by laws, we don’t do something we should because we are afraid of the consequences – we are not willing to jeopardize all we’ve honestly built throughout our lives to do this one thing, even if it’s right (but illegal). Meanwhile, those unbound by moral or legal chains can do anything, because they don’t care about the victim(s) at all, they have a fairly good chance of escaping punishment (especially if they are part of the government – a president, a senator, a soldier, a police officer, etc.), and they know that committing one crime or a thousand is pretty much the same, since they have to avoid being caught either way, which means that, after the first crime is committed, a criminal is pretty much free to perpetrate as many others as they want.

Mostly, we don’t punish people who should be punished, we don’t persecute those who should be persecuted, and we don’t kill those who should be killed because we have no physical means to do it ourselves. Sometimes, we don’t do it because our misguided laws do not allow us to – we’d be severely punished for doing what is right or the law itself prescribes an unfair punishment for a criminal action (meaning neither us nor our judiciary systems are allowed to make actual justice). And other times, we don’t do what we should because we believe it would be wrong – even though it wouldn’t – thanks to the miseducation we received from our parents, teachers and society, from priests, the movies and the media. In the scant few cases remaining, justice is served and human life is improved.

Okay. That was the part you already knew, which I just mentioned because it would be wrong not to.

Now, let’s move on to some less obvious things about evil’s freedom and good’s bondage.

For starters, this issue is not our doing – evil’s advantages are a natural consequence of how our universe works. We cannot feel what other people feel, think their thoughts, move their bodies. If they get hurt, suffer or die, we don’t. Thus we don’t care about anyone other than ourselves, because nothing compels us to.

As despicable as many of our selfish actions are, from a narrow-sighted perspective (one disregarding what I said in Chapter I) they are logical. Primitive, organic, individual life does benefit from selfishness. The universe causes this problem on its own. Our role, as sentient beings, is to fix it.

Secondly, the extensive collective damage we cause by acting egotistically is not the only downside of doing so, because human selfishness is also contagious. It spreads and corrupts other people, potentially encompassing a whole population or even our entire species. If one person, entity or party amid an ethically-working system decides to go off-rails and desecrate our [somewhat] civilized standards, every other player involved is forced to do the same, otherwise, having their hands tied to their backs (by laws and moral principles), they are bound to be defeated. And with the “fair players” gone, the worst of all – the one who chose to set everything on fire – wins and quickly achieves absolute control.

On top of that, even if no one has ruined a certain thing yet – business practices, policies, the truth, whatever – someone inevitably will, sooner rather than later. Knowing our peers, we must assume so. And then, based on that reasonable assumption, we decide to cheat ourselves, preemptively, just to stay in the game. Otherwise those who can never be allowed to win emerge victorious once again.

Let me give you a couple of concrete examples:

Have you ever seen Coca-Cola advertising how its products rot the consumers’ teeth, how they damage our stomachs and possibly other parts of our bodies? Of course not. They “casually omit” those facts. They make hundreds of millions of human lives worse so that they can profit from it. If they didn’t, you would be healthier, but they would be poorer. And no one gives a damn about you other than yourself, least of all those who make a fortune out of your misery.

If a soda company were to be candid with its consumers, it would either shut down and stop producing its poison on its own or, due to honest advertisement, go bankrupt. And if Coca-Cola does its best to fool you, so must Pepsi, otherwise you would never have even heard about this one because, with all the money in its pockets and no moral restraints in its board of directors, Coke would have drank Pepsi out of existence a long time ago. It would then have become a monopoly that annually spends billions of dollars in biased researches, lobbying and bribing, zero on quality assurance and customer service, and no one would ever again be able to stop Coke from injecting whatever it wanted into our bodies.

As a second example: up until a few centuries ago, Europe’s diplomacy was based on moral principles. Religious ones, to be more accurate (which, morally, are highly questionable). Then came Cardinal Richelieu and his raison d’État.

Richelieu was the first to decide that, to empower his France, anything was acceptable. “Raison d’État” essentially means that a state deems itself entitled to do whatever it wants to improve its own standing, regardless of the means used or of how much damage is caused to any other. It’s the official adoption of human egotism as a foreign affairs policy.

France then began expanding and, through senseless murder, easily stole a hefty chunk of Europe for itself (as was pretty common in medieval Europe. I’m not saying France was the only greedy and violent party involved). Within one century, every other European state had, logically, adopted the same doctrine to be able to compete against France and survive. And to this very day morality was never heard of in diplomacy again.

Pepsi and Europe-minus-France were both forced to adopt unethical conducts to be able to fend off their competitors once Coke and France started doing so (I don’t know if Coke was actually the first among soda companies; that was an uneducated guess). If they hadn’t, they would have perished.

When people are naturally encouraged to be selfish and those who refuse to act this way not only don’t oppose those who do, or simply do nothing, but instead are forced to imitate them, we find ourselves trapped in a self-destructive vicious circle: more and more people start acting more and more selfishly, until no one is left who’s willing, or even remembers how, to act otherwise.

This “corruption’s contagion” issue is a major one not only on its own, but also because it creates another problem: it makes it hard for us to tell who is downright evil and who simply acted so, perhaps just once but still deliberately, in an attempt to stop the first one from achieving total domination (which is something we are supposed and morally entitled to do).

The only solution I can see to this issue is for us to quickly detect those who are, in fact, extraordinarily greedy and sociopathic and kill them before they directly or indirectly corrupt everyone else. Otherwise, it becomes impossible to identify and separate the two groups of people mentioned in the previous paragraph, who must be dealt with very differently if we are to treat them fairly. This may be the only way to prevent the erosion of the moral and legal principles that allow human society to exist; to prevent acts that desecrate them from multiplying uncontrollably, becoming the rule instead of the exception, as they currently are.

Dealing with those who seek their own selfish advancement at the cost of massive harm being caused to others as swiftly and harshly as possible should be one of our foremost priorities. “Swiftly” is paramount here not only because if we don’t act fast enough havoc is wreaked, but also because once one has destroyed too much they can’t possibly be punished enough for it (at least not in our current legal systems) – e.g., once someone has killed two [innocent] people, simply killing them back is not enough. If this is all we do to them, they win. Thus, they must suffer a fate worse than death. Alas, this ship has already sailed, and towing it back to shore is now infinitely harder than it once was to simply prevent it from lifting anchor. What I just suggested is what our regulatory, judiciary, and law-enforcing institutions should strive for, but these have long been corrupted themselves. Now we have far more people than we can control roaming this Earth, and after seeing so many others doing it, we are all well aware that cheating is not only the easiest way to get through life but also a perfectly acceptable one.

Thus, evil wins. And we all lose.

As a parallel thought: while malicious deeds can and often do go unpunished, the vast majority of benevolent ones also tend to go unrewarded.

As I’ve said before, by doing the right thing one gets a [mild] sense of righteousness instead of a meal, a million dollars, or whatever else they might fancy stealing today. It seems like a bad trade-off when compared to doing what is wrong, and it would indeed be if not for the fact that, if we act decently, humanity’s “global score” ends with a positive balance and we all benefit from it.

Not only do we get a “lesser” reward for doing what is right but, as the old adage goes, “no good deed goes unpunished.” Or as Machiavelli put it (in my own, preferred version of his words in English), "He who abandons what is done for what ought to be done rather brings about his ruin than his preservation, for a man who tries to make a profession of goodness in everything necessarily comes to grief among so many who are not good." That’s because we don’t just actively cheat, but we also take advantage of people when they “selflessly” do something for us as well. Instead of being thankful and humbled, we see good-doers as weak and abuse them. When we help someone else, we learn that doing so is not worth it because things tend to become worse for us, since living among narrow-sighted predatory animals we are then considered and treated as fools by our peers. As a consequence, we stop doing what we should continue to.

As Edmund Burke (widely attributed to) once said, “All that is necessary for evil to succeed is that good men do nothing.” And that’s exactly what good people do when they learn that doing what is right is in fact harmful to them: nothing. They stand by and watch grimly as the world tears itself to pieces, hoping death will come soon and send them anywhere except back here.

That downside of good-doing means that to do what is right we must sacrifice ourselves. To improve things, we who want them to improve must suffer in exchange – we must “take one for the team.” We must accept to lose something, to suffer in stead of others, to expect no reward and, in fact, to be severely punished for it because, given our rotten nature, misguided views and ensuing irrational laws, that’s what is going to happen.

Sacrificing oneself sounds terrible and it is just as bad as it sounds. But given the status quo, that’s the only way available for us to do what we must and fix the existence we ourselves have ruined. If [many] more of us decided to do what we know is right, ignoring criminal laws and greedy imbeciles’ self-serving opinions, our sacrifices would become less taxing as things started changing and our general behavior began to improve. And if enough of us (the vast majority) ever manage to think and act more selflessly and compassionately, the benefits of doing so will then become obvious, as happening much more often such acts’ effects will directly affect all of us. This would make those required sacrifices negligible (we’d no longer be censored, assaulted, kidnapped, tortured and/or murdered for saying/doing what is right) and teach us the opposite of what we have all been taught: that cheating (which includes tricking, scamming, stealing, murdering, etc.) is not the way to go.

Think about that example I provided in Chapter I in which you stole an apple from a guy, causing all sorts of problems for him. When acting egotistically, we cause a lot more damage than the material one. But when we act selflessly, we also generate extra benefits. If you stop to help someone change their car’s tire, you’ll spend time and energy doing so – from your individual perspective, you’ll lose both, exchanging them for nothing. But you’ll feel good about helping. Maybe not good enough to justify the effort, but it’s a start. The person you helped, on the other hand, will have saved themselves the time and energy you spent aiding them, they might be very relieved (in case they didn’t even know how to change a tire), and their view of mankind will improve. Everything we have to endure will suddenly make a little more sense to them. Even if only temporarily, our existence won’t seem like a hopeless endeavor to the person you aided. And when they get back home, whereas the guy you stole an apple from unleashed his rage on his daughter, the person you helped will be nicer than usual to theirs. They’ll tell their family about the stranger who helped them, causing their spouse and children to feel a little better and more hopeful as well.

If we ever manage to help more than we hinder – even though doing so will always require some sacrifice from us – we’ll also be frequently benefited by the help of others. And if enough of us do it often enough, the net result of acting righteously is positive both on the collective and on the individual level.

If acting as we should becomes the rule, whenever you find yourself in need of assistance the odds are someone will show up to provide it instead of everyone leaving you stranded to die on your own as usually happens. And even when you don’t need any help at all everything will be much easier anyway, because then the rest of the world won’t be actively trying to screw you at every turn.

Memetic Faith

Every creed, be it Christianity, Islam, neo-Nazism, communism, patriotism, or any other works the same way: they are memes – contagious intellectual viruses that spread exponentially, just like a biological infection, but via ignorance. As more examples, we have political correctness, fake news, and “Trumpclaims.”

Most of the time, we are wrong about something because we lack information, intellect, and/or memory. Our opinions are often flawed, but we share them with others believing otherwise, accidentally infecting and perverting their view of the world. Usually, those mistakes of ours don’t turn into memes because they are not contagious enough – we mostly talk about things we are notoriously not experts in, so no one takes what we say too seriously; we tend to state it aloud when we are not entirely sure of something that is relevant; and most of what we say is simply not interesting enough for people to repeat it to others. So, most of our verbalized mistakes don’t spread. They tend to die within a single listener, doing little damage. But we also have people who deliberately create tantalizing lies and then go around telling them to anyone who’ll listen, as if they were actually true. Since most people don’t bother thinking for themselves and never question the information they receive, they believe anything they hear, however absurd it may be. And the more absurd any piece of information is, the more excited people get about sharing it with others, and the more they do so. Once such a meme is created and Patient Zero is infected with it, it doesn’t take long before we have millions of people believing that the Earth is flat, one more actor winning an election, yet another disarmament campaign going on, or a new cult of pee-drinkers being formed.

Memes are also hereditary (although I might be extrapolating the original memetic theory here). See how you think social/economic equality is a good thing simply because your parents told you so, or how you believe a free, unregulated market is the way to go instead, for the same reason. It takes a long time for us to free ourselves from being misguided as a child, because we all fully trust our parents and teachers at our tender ages. Given that we only become able to think once we turn 12, and only start thinking about what’s important once we are 30 or so (while hardly ever actually doing it because we are too busy working, paying bills and raising children), most people die without ever solving that problem – they die without ever reaching their own conclusions. And so long as they live, those people will keep spreading the memes they were infected with as children, compounded with the ones they are constantly fed by politicians, the media, “influencers,” etc.

People who eventually manage to stop and re-think what they’ve been told are bound to find out that much of what they “know” is pure nonsense.

Let us now focus on religions, which we might as well call “religious memes”. I’ll use a real one as an example, to establish my point. Let’s go with Islam, since it pisses Muslims off when infidels say anything about their beliefs and I want to help them get over it.

Consider how Muslim women are treated in Islamic societies. I’m vastly ignorant about the details of the subject, so I will just summarize my understanding of it with “they are stoned in the middle of the streets if some part of their legs, arms or hair is revealed from beneath their burqas.” I think that’s mostly a metaphorical “general vibe,” literal only in Islamist (extremist) societies (I just checked, and only about 5% of all Muslim women are legally forced to wear hijabs, burqas or other such garments. In the vast majority of cases, these are worn due to social and religious pressure; not legal).

I think anyone reading this, regardless of whether they are a feminazi, a republican dinosaur, or sane, will agree when I say that that misogynistic mentality, even if somewhat metaphorical, is irrational and abhorrent. And yet Muslims in general defend that women ought to be treated like that, simply because some ancient imaginary man supposedly said, according to a long-outdated anthology of unknown authorship, that they should be treated that way. It’s much like Christianity’s legends about boy-wonder Jesus or their rather irrational ten commandments: they’re all just bedtime stories. I am confident, though, that the majority of Muslim men don’t really believe that forcing women to unnecessarily hide their figures is correct or justifiable – I assume they generally love, or at least minimally respect, their own mothers, and that the vast majority of them are not gay as well. That restraining and potentially violent treatment is illogical, unnatural, and obviously unfair to any reasonable human being.

Let me open a parenthesis here: drastic measures such as the one mentioned above were probably once established under the premise that sexual desire leads men to act stupidly and harm others. And this premise is valid. But the solution for this particular flaw in our nature is not to limit people’s freedom – which inevitably generates anger – but instead to increase their wisdom. It’s not to institutionally force people to act against their will, but to teach them why they shouldn’t act in certain ways and provide them with an education and an environment that allows them to behave decently. The adequate solution is not to control people, but to teach them to control themselves. And then to eliminate those who, despite receiving all the necessary support, turn out incapable of doing so.

Back on track: however absurd, religious memes are all around us. And they spread like any other meme: by word of mouth. By word of ignorant mouths. But how do religions survive after people find out that their teachings make no sense? That their tales are obvious lies? How can they last thousands of years? How do they thrive and become so powerful?

Unsurprisingly, through fear.

Imagine we have two Muslim men. Imagine neither of them believes that women should be forced to hide their whole bodies from sight, or that every Jew must be decapitated. Neither. Theoretically, that means they should have no problem with letting the women around them wear bikinis, or with having a beer with a guy with two ridiculous curly locks of hair dangling down from his temples. But no – they will behave “Islamically” and spit on any woman wearing a skirt or circumcised man they run into. Why? Because the first Muslim believes the second will treat him as an infidel if he doesn’t act that way, and vice versa.

What holds any religion together is the fact that each of its members is afraid of the others. A man cannot risk saying to another member of his congregation that their sacred text is irrational for fear of being attacked, just like he, himself, is religiously compelled to attack anyone else who says the same. If he dares to try, that man might fend off one or two of his fellow cultists, but the rest of their flock would swarm him to death.

People who “believe” in any of that religious crap are not all lunatics. Many of them are simply under implicit threat and frightened.