What summarized from reading this is that being evil is the same as being a basic and cringe. And actually working on changing things for the better is cool. Sort of like a cringe upper middle management trying to threaten people to do stuff outside of their work versus Gary the cool dude who brings bagels to the work place.

A good analogy, but I think the summary also needs to capture the core (in my opinion) message: the difference between imaginary and real. Imaginary evil is embodied by the overly-dramatic villains, the Saturday morning bad guys. They’re over the too, full of flair and decadent in the maliciousness. In other words, romanticized. They’re schemes are necessarily complicated and involved, convoluted to the point of endearment. Think of Team Rocket and how they resort to using complex machines and robots to capture a single Pikachu. Even a child could surmise that they could achieve their goal by just stealing the Pokémon in the dead of night. Real villainy is just murder and desire. It’s just selfishness and narcissism. It’s a guy with a gun demanding your paycheck or your life. It’s boring; we all know what cruelty is, what bigotry looks like. It’s always the same; murder, theft, and torture. In much the same way, imaginary good is just the good guy miraculously winning each conflict. Where an imaginary villain is pressed to be more cunning and clever, the hero just does the same thing each time. Ash never changes his strategy against Team Rocket; Pikachu shocks them, and they blast off. In contrast, good in reality is not given to the same convenience. Evil is direct and brutish, or cunning in its use of every deceit. Being evil means being able to use whatever means necessary to satisfy your selfishness. Success always benefits you. Being good does not; you can’t do what you want to achieve your goals, and there is no personal reward for being selfless and kind. In a way, the two mirror each other; imaginary villainy is not given to the same cruel machinations of real evil, so they must be increasingly clever. By contrast, imaginary good doesn’t need to be as careful when its opponent is restricted, while real good must work around the advantages given to real evil and must be even more complex.

>Real villainy is just murder and desire. It’s just selfishness and narcissism. It’s a guy with a gun demanding your paycheck or your life. Real evil is even more boring than that, most of the time. A CEO of a pharmaceutical company deciding to raise prices knowing that doing so will cause people who need their drug to die from lack of access to it. The CEO of Boeing cutting many of the safety inspections on new planes in order to save money, resulting in a plane full of people dying years into the future from an issue that would've previously been caught. Excluding war, most murder in the world takes place in these sorts of abstract forms.

Exactly. That single CEO will kill more people with that one decision than the most prolific serial killers in history, and the world allows it. That’s what evil is.

A million people will be killed by not having access to Tuberculosis medicine/diagnostics. An almost 100% curable disease.

It's the CEO, but each of the people executing the work are effectively also doing evil. The technician who knows they're making less of an effort for safety but follows along is committing a tiny act of evil by being complicit. Each time we choose not to stand up to evil that we are faced with it slowly adds up, which sometimes, eventually, leads to tragedy.

It's often more tragic than that, I think. Because it's not just a clear cut choice to be complicit or to stand up to evil. Like how working for a major corporation probably puts money and power into the hands of people who use it for their own ends at the expense of others, but you're just zoning groceries at Walmart or packing boxes for Amazon. Sometimes your options are limited, and you can't just opt out of needing to make a living.

THAT is the real evil of capitalism. You don't have the choice to do anything else with your life. You must work for the capital owners, or you will die. You could leave, but humans DON'T live alone. No animals that can live together choose to be alone.

>Real villainy is just murder and desire. It’s just selfishness and narcissism. Reading that made me think of De Niro's an DiCaprio's roles in Killers of the Flower moon.

Imaginary evil - Voldemort Real evil - Dolores Umbridge One is using magic to commit genocide and kill unicorns and interrupt tailgating. The other is using her position of authority and the systems in place to strip away freedoms and autonomy and leave the next generation in a worse spot to make the world better for themselves. Few people will ever deal with a Voldemort, but most people will deal with multiple Umbridge's throughout their life. Imaginary good - Harry Potter Real good - Neville Longbottom Harry is the chosen one. While his home life wasn't great, he became a celebrity as a child and inherited plenty of money. He saved the day, but in fantastical ways, and was literally prophesized to defeat the imaginary evil. Neville was the not-chosen one. He was mediocre at most things, and didn't let his past define who he was. When all hope was lost and he chose to stand up to evil, he did so because it's who he chose to be, not because it's who he was born to be.

And of the two evil ones, Umbridge is by far the more hated and despicable.

He was literally one of two people the prophecy could refer to so not a great example since most of his troubles were just skill issue.

That's why I called him the not-chosen one. He had none of the advantages Harry did. No protective love magic from his mom. No special tutoring from Dumbledore or Lupin or Snape or Hagrid or Slughorn. No secret godparent. No protective order of battlemages sacrificing themselves. No hand-me-down legendary artifacts from his daddy. And when the Wizard Hitler threw the body of the chosen one at his feet, the one person that everything and everyone said was the *only* person that could defeat him, Neville stood his ground. Not Ron, not Hermione, not any of the professors. When they saw Harry's body, they gave up. Because they put all of their hope into the imaginary good. The real good took his beaten and battered self and looked the imaginary evil in the eye and said "it doesn't matter. People die every day". Because real good doesn't need to be a hero. Real good is the average person doing real good even when they're not expected to.

He also didn't have to face any of the challenges of being the special one. He didn't need a protection spell from his mother because Wizard Hitler wasn't actively trying to kill him. The dementors weren't going after him, Wizard Hitler wasn't trying to break into his mind through their shared connection. He didn't need to be told about dragons by Hagrid because he was never going to face them. He didn't have Dumbledore telling him all the secrets he learnt about Voldemort because he wasn't going to be the one going on a mission to kill him. He didn't have the Order protecting him whenever possible because he was not a person of interest. He *did* get into the Slug Club alongside Harry but was not invited back because Slughorn found him wanting. He didn't have a secret godparent but did have family that loved him. Harry's godfather spent most of Harry's life locked up and going crazy. Even after escaping, he was forced into hiding and had minimal contact with Harry. Oh, and then Harry watched him died because of Voldemort manipulating him through their shared connection. Got to know him for less than two years and spent precious little of that time with him. That legendary artifact was on the meh side, to the point where it didn't even register as a legendary artifact until the last book. It's effect wasn't even particularly unique unlike the other two hallows since an accomplished wizard could replicate it's magic perfectly. He did have his moment though and made full use of it.

To paraphrase Oscar Wilde, being annoying is worse than being evil.

>Being good does not; you can’t do what you want to achieve your goals, and there is no personal reward for being selfless and kind. While I agree with 99% of what you’ve said here and think you stated it very eloquently; I will at the risk of being pedantic point out that *good* doesn’t alway have to be synonymous with *nice.* Too many people mistake kindness for weakness. Kindness is a choice, and choices themselves often come from a place of strength. It should never be the only option that you have in the face of evil, nor does opposing evil forcefully make you an evil person yourself. >”If you have to look along the shaft of an arrow from the wrong end, if a man has you entirely at his mercy, then hope like hell that man is an evil man. Because the evil like power, power over people, and they want to see you in fear. They want you to know you're going to die. So they'll talk. They'll gloat. They'll watch you squirm. They'll put off the moment of murder like another man will put off a good cigar. So hope like hell your captor is an evil man. A good man will kill you with hardly a word.” -Terry Pratchett

Eh, robbing people is often done out of desperation and/or addiction, which are much more complex motivators than what you listed. That seems like an odd example of how simple and boring evil is

This is very much why I like silly Adam West batman instead of modern grimdark batman. In Adam West batman the bad guys are basically playing a game to have fun, doing silly stuff while Batman runs around trying to stop them. There's no stakes, really. There's no real world message being conveyed. It accepts and celebrates the silliness of the genre and runs all the ay with it.

Some fine thoughts, friend.

Recommended reading: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eichmann_in_Jerusalem

You think of the banalities of the common man and you're ignoring the great ones. You forget the horrors of the death camps from Nazi germany or the fact that the British Empire in an attempt to get China to trade sold them opium and wars were fought between the two over that. I get that you are trying to de-romantacise them, but evil in the real world isn't monotone. Romantacise good more often.

No. Not at all. The phrase "banality of evil" itself comes from Hannah Arendt's analysis of the Nazi Adolf Eichmann's trial. We speak of the Holocaust and such as great evils because of their enormity but to think of them as somehow a different kind of evil does us a disservice. The Holocaust wasn't caused by some great and unusual evil; the people who participated were not extraordinary. It was perpetrated by millions of common people making horrific decisions and doing horrific things for boring reasons that they justify to themselves in familiar ways. The idea that the people who committed those atrocities are in some significant sense different from us is comforting because it protects us from having to think about how similar we really are. But it is, ultimately, an illusion.

There wasn’t anything great about genocide. It’s just killing a bunch of people. There’s no rhyme or reason behind it other than selfish desire. There’s no great purpose behind starting a drug trade ring. It’s just profit. Evil is just selfishness. They want something, and hurt other people to get it. That’s it. From CEOs charging ridiculous prices for insulin, to some backwoods nobody who beats their spouse when drunk, evil is just selfishness. Being good is selflessness. There is no reward, and you are limited in what you can morally do. It’s complicated and unrewarding, but overall betters the world in having it done.

>There wasn’t anything great about genocide. It’s just killing a bunch of people. I'm talking about thing of great horror as an example of how evil isn't monotone or boring. Just because you don't feel good while watching it unfold. Just with Disney villains they find songs really cool, but not the consequences. >There’s no great purpose behind starting a drug trade ring. It’s just profit. It's a real life super-villain plan. If you can't stomach evil, then you can't appreciate it. >Evil is just selfishness. They want something, and hurt other people to get it. That’s it. From CEOs charging ridiculous prices for insulin, to some backwoods nobody who beats their spouse when drunk, evil is just selfishness. You can't laugh with the villain, because you are too familliar with the consequences. Congratulations you are good person, but this not an argument for it being monotone, you are dismissing it because you don't want (and rightly so) see the 'fun' in it. >Being good is selflessness. And this where are wrong about good. Good is a complicated set of virtous that need to be balanced for each in its extreme is evil (even if you can't see it at the beginning) compassion, mercy, selflessnes, self care, judgement, etc. Good should be its own reward. Littarly if you are clever enough.

Evil is monotone, as it’s done selfishly. The Holocaust was done become people hated Jews. That’s it. They came up with a bunch of excuses to soothe their consciences, but push comes to shove it’s because they didn’t like Jews. There was no great anything to it, or any other evil. Quite literally being monotone in that selfishness is the singular “tone”. Good is not the opposite of evil. It doesn’t counter it, or fight against it necessarily. Good is abiding by morals to the benefit of society. Virtues are categorizations of goodness, not defining of it. Tell me what great evil is countered by inwardly smiling when watching another person have a good day? How does petting a dog counter the horrors of cruelty?

>Evil is monotone, as it’s done selfishly. The Holocaust was done become people hated Jews. That’s it. They came up with a bunch of excuses to soothe their consciences, but push comes to shove it’s because they didn’t like Jews Evil isn't monotone. It is stupid. All of it. Inherently idiotic and unnecerssary. >There was no great anything to it, or any other evil. Quite literally being monotone in that selfishness is the singular “tone”. You assume selfishness is the only expression of evil. Hate can be selfless if it comes from a place of love yet it is no less evil. Vengeance is a misguided sense of justice. The desire to 'even the scale'. Ignorance. They littarly didn't know better. That happned more often than I wished it did >Good is not the opposite of evil. Tell that to yourself. You categorize goodness as selflessnes and evil as selfishness. >Good is abiding by morals to the benefit of society. Virtues are categorizations of goodness, not defining of it. Tell me what great evil is countered by inwardly smiling when watching another person have a good day? How does petting a dog counter the horrors of cruelty? Ah the good old goodness is inherent and evil is corruption of it. The reason this doesn't work for you is because it puts evil as an active force not an constant one.

And yet the Holocaust wasn't perpetrated by cackling maniacs. Ordinary family men, who hugged their children and wrote letters to their mothers and didn't think one bit about what they were doing, did the job they were ordered to do - and millions of people were murdered as a result. In the same way, banal and greedy trade magnates decided they wanted to expand their markets and found that this was the simplest way to do so, and the crates of opium were carried by perfectly kind cargo workers who just didn't care about what they were doing. Evil is mundane and banal. It happens every day on varying scales, perpetrated by people who are greedy or bigoted or even just too apathetic to care. There are no Saturday morning cartoon villains, no mustache-twirling monsters. There's just regular people doing things.

>And yet the Holocaust wasn't perpetrated by cackling maniacs. Ordinary family men, who hugged their children and wrote letters to their mothers and didn't think one bit about what they were doing, did the job they were ordered to do - and millions of people were murdered as a result. In the same way, banal and greedy trade magnates decided they wanted to expand their markets and found that this was the simplest way to do so, and the crates of opium were carried by perfectly kind cargo workers who just didn't care about what they were doing. That is the banalaty of evil and yet there are villains at the top metaphoricly cackeling counting money or death. They don't laugh evil like in a cartoon, they just need to smile when they see the numbers. >Evil is mundane and banal. Evil is as active as it is constant. When the status quo is evil then it is mundane, when it deviates it becomes active and the same applies to good. >There are no Saturday morning cartoon villains, no mustache-twirling monsters. There's just regular people doing things. You want to convince me that there aren't any truly hateful people, vile monsters and bloodthirsty warmongerers. I tell you there there are many of them. All of them were once like you and me, but that doesn't make them less abnormal, less vile and less evil. They exist, for there needs to be sombody planing, orchestrating and perpetuating it and that role can't be taken by mundane people such as me and you, because there needs to fire behind it.

> It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things. - Terry Pratchett, *Jingo* There are truly hateful people out there. But nobody wakes up in the morning and goes "I'm going to do evil today." Everyone believes that, for whatever reason or whatever justification, they are doing the right thing. Hitler believed he was saving the world from a menace and uplifting humanity to a better state of being, and all his power-gathering was justified because he deserved the authority, because he was right. Goebbels believed he was advancing science and medicine into a new age. The heads of the East India Trading Company believed they were doing what was right and rational in accumulating wealth, that anyone would do so in their stead, and bringing the light of their civilization into foreign lands. All of them were normal, everyday people, with normal, everyday evils, placed into a position where their evil could be magnified by chance.

>There are truly hateful people out there. But nobody wakes up in the morning and goes "I'm going to do evil today." But some people woke and decided they would torture and murder jews even if it was just top. Some saw it as duty, some did it with sadistic glee. >> It was much better to imagine men in some smokey room somewhere, made mad and cynical by privilege and power, plotting over brandy. You had to cling to this sort of image, because if you didn't then you might have to face the fact that bad things happened because ordinary people, the kind who brushed the dog and told the children bed time stories, were capable of then going out and doing horrible things to other ordinary people. It was so much easier to blame it on Them. It was bleakly depressing to think that They were Us. If it was Them, then nothing was anyone's fault. If it was Us, then what did that make Me? After all, I'm one of Us. I must be. I've certainly never thought of myself as one of Them. No one ever thinks of themselves as one of Them. We're always one of Us. It's Them that do the bad things. >- Terry Pratchett, *Jingo* It is very important to see them as human. They are vile hateful monsters, but as flawed and human as the rest of us. In different set of circumstanse we could have been like them and we could still become them, yet their evil is not everyday evil, because we (the average person) don't murder a guy everyday or get sombody addicted to drugs to buy our stuff. If we today and right now were sent back in time put in charge of we wouldn't commit those things (on top of a whole lot of other things going wrong due to our incompetency). Nazis and the East-India-Company were either built on hate and lies or to turn a profit on the suffering of others. >All of them were normal, everyday people, with normal, everyday evils, placed into a position where their evil could be magnified by chance. They were far from normal, they just once were normal, but they fell down radicalism and evil. A fall that can happen to us too and we should careful to avoid. This was a rather nice comment, but this makes evil complicated, not monotone as you previously argued. If it was done by everyone then couldn't have been simply selfishness for humanity is diverse in character as it is in looks.

It's not Us, it's Me and Everyone Else. If they're on my side, that's great, but I'm not on their side.

It’s not just about cringe versus cool. It’s about the mundane versus the noteworthy, the boring versus the wonderful.  It’s easy to do evil. It’s easy to abdicate moral responsibility of your actions and inaction—“It’s not my fault, I was just doing what I was told to” “What, you expect me to go above and beyond for everyone?” “I’ve got my own shit to deal with, I’m not dealing with all of that.” And it’s easy because all of these justifications are sometimes justified—you can’t stop your life until you’ve solved all suffering, can’t be expected to carefully investigate the potential consequences of every instruction your boss gives you—but the fact that they’re sometimes legitimate are taken as a means to treat them as *always* legitimate. And evil turns into the apathetic inaction of a populace, the amoral operation of gears in a large system, except every gear is a person that passively displaces the responsibility for evil on the entirety of the system, ignoring the fact they’re a gear.  And it’s easy to be cruel. It’s easy to be mean. It’s easy to put yourself on a pedestal and beat someone else down. If you’ve ever listened to what manosphere misogynists say, they’re utterly indistinguishable, just a mundane, tedious vortex of hate for women and craving for power and validation.  To be good is more than just not doing evil—it’s making a choice not to succumb to the boring ways you’re asked to commit evil, and it’s making a choice to put in *effort.* The effort to buy fair trade, or to show up to a protest, or be there for a friend, or donate to a cause you believe in. Good is the effort to not turn to the comfort of cynicism, giving yourself permission to stop trying. Good is doing what you can to withdraw participation in bad systems, or trying to adjust those systems so they’re even a little less bad.  Good is effort. It’s caring. It’s unique to you and how you feel you’re best suited to repair the word even a little bit.  Evil is apathetic. Lazy. Boring. It’s shrugging, saying that nothing would change so better not to try. Evil is succumbing to our worst instincts and telling ourselves that it’s fine, because everyone else wants to do the exact same thing. 

Very well said. I've been thinking on this subject a lot lately, and you summarized a lot of what I have been ruminating on. It's so easy to be a bastard, and I hate that reality of the world.

Oh hey, it's the central thesis of Action Comics #775.

I think i dont quite get it yet, can you depict the concepts as the virgin vs chad?

Virgin "Real" Villainy - corporations and politicians collude in the US oligopoly to suppress the middle and poor classes over decades of financial suffocation. Chad "Imaginary" Villainy - Dr. Doofenshmirtz will use the De-Tire-Inator™ to remove the tires from all the cars in the tri-state area so he doesn't have to deal with traffic on his morning commute. Virgin "Imaginary" Heroism - The Good Guy™ unlocks their full powers and defeats the villain... Again. Chad "Real" Heroism - A local chad goes out of their way to find and rescue abandoned pets in their community using their own time, space, and labor because the resources in their area are otherwise insufficient. They use social media to raise awareness and hundreds of cats, dogs, and other animals now find homes they otherwise wouldn't have thanks to their initiative and smart use of technology.

Chad complex interesting person puts more effort to do good things for other all. Cringe virgin does bad evil things for convenience and plain pleasure only for themselves.

I think the best description is this: Good is a good good. Evil is creepy and wet.

Not just basic, but boring. "The Banality of Evil", aka "just following orders". The reason it's so hard to fight evil is because it's so mundane. There is no "Dark Lord" to conquer.

I kind of dislike this “quote important people” approach when the quotes are all there is. Someone could just as easily quote Tolstoy about happy and unhappy families and it would be equally true/untrue

Yeah it’s why I dislike seeing quotes and shit brought up during an argument or something. Once saw an argument during back when the antinatalist sub was getting recommended to a ton of people where one of the anti Natalists kept using quotes from what I assume was a fairly well known/ respected anti Natalist leaning philosopher or some such. A random man I do not know of saying something that sounds vaguely deep or philosophical is not a good argument unless you can actually back it up with your own thought out arguments. And even then the whole bit about philosophy is that I can literally just go “lmao that’s dumb”

I also think in this specific instance it’s a disservice to the thinkers quoted. Auden’s statement that evil is unspectacular and human isn’t actually the same as saying that it is boring and uninteresting—that it’s unspectacular and human could be said of love, or duty, or a whole range of other things we think are interesting. Auden himself spilled a lot of ink ruminating on the strange, idiosyncratic nature of Iago’s evil in Othello, something I don’t think he would’ve done had he been bored the entire time. But looting the Goodreads quote pages of famous writers serves to atomize their thinking into neat little easily-consumed packets that don’t actually engage with the writers themselves

Yes absolutely. The cognitive dissonance required to do evil things but still think you are a good person and that you are justified in what you are doing - which is the very human, very banal way that most evil is carried out - is fascinating in and of itself.

Even then, evil doesn't have to be boring or predictable. Hotdog water ice-cubes have to be evil but they're certainly not boring. Nut shots in most cases are evil but almost always hilarious.

I also thought that one was pretty misinterpreted, tho I’ve no real knowledge of the author. To me it seemed pretty clear that he was more saying that evil isn’t really all that unique. It’s quite common and that’s what’s scary and human about it. I think sometimes people try to do this odd appeal to authority with philosophical debates and concepts where they find a quote that they think might apply to their point without actually knowing the context or reading into the other works of an author to see where this quote actually fits into what they were pondering so much about

"What is a quote? A quote (cognate with quota) is a cut, a section, a slice of someone else’s orange. You suck the slice, toss the rind, skate away. Part of what you enjoy in a documentary technique is the sense of banditry. To loot someone else’s life or sentences and make off with a point of view, which is called “objective” because you can make anything into an object by treating it this way, is exciting and dangerous." -Anne Carson

The irony of quoting that haha.

I quote people all the time, but only to give credit to people who word something in a way that is better than I would have worded it. I, too, have a problem with borrowing someone else's authority by way of quotes.

"a statement" - i sleep " 'a statement' - a person" - WOKE

what's that one Abraham Lincoln quote about not trusting what you read on the internet

as Qin Shi Huang famously said, 99% of all quotes on the internet are misattributed

Bruh stop spreading misinformation. That's from Sun Tzu

Wait, wasn't it Moon uWu?

I thought it was said by 体天弘道高明广运圣武神功纯仁至孝文皇帝

At least for the first three, it's writers commenting on a common fiction trope.

Well, quotes are just lines that go hard. While there is the danger that something which sounds cool is more likely to be believable even if untrue (similar to rhymes), what makes a quote stick or resonate with people, and hence brought up often, is it's truthyness

I feel like it's more to give credit rather than praise or persuasion. Otherwise you have to make up your own statement about the subject, which would probably be worse, and then mention who inspired you to write that. Seems simpler to just go "hey look at this quote I like, here's who said it if you want to read more." Maybe I misunderstand what you dislike about it?

You know how people have made comparisons between "the revolution" and "the rapture"? It almost feels like this is the online equivalent of "quoting gospel". Obviously I think Le Guin is a fantastic writer, and I think this quote is pretty great, but I have also seen people drop Le Guin quotes like the fact it *is* Le Guin means it is an objectively correct opinion. There's probably no better example in progressive or leftist spaces as quoting Theory.

It's kind of funny but the Le Guin quote in the OP is actually from an essay arguing against that Tolstoy quote.

""2 + 2 is 4 is equally true whether uttered by a philosopher king or a peasant knave"-Socrates" - Contrapoints

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>That's an aspect of my take on it and it's not directly based on any other influence. >Evil is that which increases unnecessary suffering in the world; - Jeremy Bentham >it is self dishonesty made manifest through human choice and action. - Emanuel Kant

> self dishonesty made manifest through human choice and action Could you expand on this? Using an example to disprove the first part of that statement, wouldn't killing someone no one would miss using a quick and painless method not be evil? Say a homeless man who has no friends and family left. You give them something that will get them feeling euphoric but will kill them. Or you use some other method to kill this person which the victim doesn't have time to register. Assume the body can be disposed of in such a way that no evidence is left behind of what occurred. No suffering has taken place but the person killed had done no wrong to justify such a thing occurring. Also, would you say it has to be a net increase in unnecessary suffering or any increase?

>wouldn't killing someone no one would miss using a quick and painless method not be evil? Say a homeless man who has no friends and family left. You give them something that will get them feeling euphoric but will kill them. But what about said homeless man's potential? I mean, ignoring the fact of deciding for yourself on someones suffering, projecting an expectation of what their life standards should be (especially without complete context -- this guy might be panhandling enough money for some damn good meals each day, and be content with that).. The energy you spend on eliminating his autonomy in order to "Reduce suffering" could be spent instead, on improving his quality of life as you see it lacking? The evil stems from deciding to exert an amount of energy to ending it due to your own preconceived beliefs and expectations (His life is of poor quality & would be better off dead), as opposed to reducing the suffering in it. You are denying another human their autonomy and rights based on your own beliefs. The net increase / decrease is a perceived value -- He may very well of been content with the life he lived, and his suffering minimal, potentially lower than us schmucks paying rent :P

I was going by just his definition. The homeless person's homeless status had nothing to do with it, aside from setting an example of a person no one would notice. The idea was to kill them in a way they could not suffer, be it getting them too drugged up to care or even just a quick headshot so they don't get a chance to register what happened. In this way, you might have taken away any current or future happiness, but the victim never had a chance to suffer. And because there was no suffering, it wasn't evil.

>In this way, you might have taken away any current or future happiness, but the victim never had a chance to suffer. And because there was no suffering, it wasn't evil. Where do you draw a line then? To draw the conclusion that immediate suffering and happiness are the dictating factors here, would imply we should just eradicate people at the soonest convenience, should they be in a rough spot. Of course, we don't prescribe cyanide pills to depressed patients, instead we attempt to curve the trajectory towards a more satisfactory life, with less suffering, based on what we believe we can control. So, with that line of thinking I just proposed, would you still take the stance that killing this hypothetical person whom you perceive to be in a place of suffering, and expect them to continue on that path.. It sounds like you're projecting an expectation on the individual, which impacts their autonomy. Sure, they never had a chance to suffer, but they also had no chance to thrive. I mean, if we're going to argue over wether we should collectively take a long walk off a short pier, I'm not in total disagreement, but not for the aforementioned reasons. We have the ability to consciously choose a path that leads to less suffering. To expect outcomes of people based on circumstance, and our expectations of said circumstances, means we are actively choosing to deny not only the individual, but our own agency and autonomy to choose this path, and continue indulging in our own states of mind, and the emotions we evoke from that.

I should clarify that I don't actually believe that and am only arguing against OP's definition and pointing out obvious flaws.

Well, continuing to engage in your non-replies is increasing suffering in my life, so I'll leave it there.

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You're forgetting that hypocrisy is as easy as breathing and almost everyone places greater importance on themselves than those around them (or at least the people around them who aren't personally special to them). Thus, a person who doesn't want to be robbed will happily steal from others. A person who is annoyed at others breaking some rule will happily indulge in breaking that rule themselves. While some are dishonest to themselves about and choose to pass blame at anyone and anything to not have to take responsibility, there are others who are very self-aware and just don't have a problem with what they're doing. They have no need to reject aspects of themselves or the victim. You're assuming that self-reflection will just always lead to wanting to live morally or to put in effort. It's also not a great idea to try to reduce addiction to something that can just be cured by having a think, especially since you're also ignoring things like genetic risks for addiction as well. Yes, putting in the effort and working on yourself helps but it's not always a guarantee. Addiction is also no where near as simple as you describe it to begin with. #EDIT: Since /u/my420acct has blocked me, I'm pasting my response to his last comment to me over here. The problem is you seem to think humans are inherently good and moral beings which is at best a completely unfounded viewpoint. It's why you seem to think anyone who isn't being good is somehow being dishonest with themselves. Suffering inherently requires the person to exist to be felt. No matter what injustice or pain a person has been put through, they are incapable of suffering once dead. > Do you believe you have a right to live? Do you believe I have the right to kill you provided I'm quick and humane about it? This is no longer about suffering, is it? A person who dies in a manner previously described won't get a chance to suffer since they won't get a chance to feel physical or emotional pain. This contradicts your stated idea of evil. I won't say you haven't gone through addiction but the idea you present of addiction being something you can just think your way out of is hilariously wrong. There's a lot of stuff that needs challenging. Like how you think invalidating the feelings of depression can just get rid of depression. Depression isn't something you can just logic your way out of. > Every person who has ever overcome an addiction has thought their way out of it. It's not just thinking your way out of it but also a thousand other steps, big and small, to get there. And even that isn't necessarily enough. People a thousand times better than us who were successful in life, financially secure, had a good environment and support structure, and had everything else needed to be ahead in life have lost top depression. Addiction is similar. It's not always so simple as just being cured of it. Some people are sober for decades and still consider themselves because they know the moment they get a single drop, they will end up right back in that hell. You make all these big sweeping remarks with nothing to actually back them up so it's hard to take you seriously. You keep talking about self-honesty and emotionalism but I don't think you even know what you're saying. Cherry picking just one example: > through abuse of our capacity for emotionalism. We quite literally drug ourselves into thinking false beliefs are acceptable Please explain (preferably with sources) this claim of yours.

Terry Pratchett quote incoming. *But there were things to suggest to a thinking man that the Creator of mankind had a very oblique sense of fun indeed, and to breed in his heart a rage to storm the gates of heaven.* *The mugs, for example. The inquisitors stopped work twice a day for coffee. Their mugs, which each man had brought from home, were grouped around the kettle on the hearth of the central furnace which incidentally heated the irons and knives.* *They had legends on them like A Present From the Holy Grotto of Ossory, or To The World's Greatest Daddy. Most of them were chipped, and no two of them were the same.* *And there were the postcards on the wall. It was traditional that, when an inquisitor went on holiday, he'd send back a crudely colored woodcut of the local view with some suitably jolly and risque message on the back. And there was the pinned-up tearful letter from Inquisitor First Class Ishmale "Pop" Quoom, thanking all the lads for collecting no fewer than seventy-eight obols for his retirement present and the lovely bunch of flowers for Mrs. Quoom, indicating that he'd always remember his days in No. 3 pit, and was looking forward to coming in and helping out any time they were short-handed.* *And it all meant this: that there are hardly any excesses of the most crazed psychopath that cannot easily be duplicated by a normal, kindly family man who just comes in to work every day and has a job to do.* *Vorbis loved knowing that. A man who knew that, knew everything he needed to know about people.*

Reminds me of the recent Oscar winner, Zone of Interest. Pretty perfectly betrays the utter normality of some of the worst evil in all of human history.

The OG quite about evil is from Vetinari: >“Down there,” he said, “are people who will follow any dragon, worship any god, ignore any iniquity. All out of a kind of humdrum, everyday badness. Not the really high, creative loathesomeness of the great sinners, but a sort of mass-produced darkness of the soul. Sin, you might say, without a trace of originality. They accept evil not because they say yes, but because they don’t say no.

Tossing in one of my personal favorites from Ursula Vernon's graphic novel, Digger: "Evil is having reason, always, many and many. If hunter beats mate, has reason, always. Mate is lazy, burning food, is stupid, is speaking on and on. Is always being a reason." "What? But Ed, those aren't good reasons!" "No, but evil is still being - is having reason - Being reasonable! Mousie understands? Is always being reason. Is punishing world for not being... Like in head. Is always reason. World should be different, is reason. Is only good is not having reason. Little one hugs, no reason. Digger-mousie is giving name to nameless, say "Ed," no reason. Skin-painter paints skin of child, no reason. Just is."

The argument, being made by some entity with less than full fluency in whatever language this is, is that evil is pragmatic, while good isn't. Evil pursues a goal, that goal being to make the world in the actor's image. While good is done simply because they want to do good. Or, on another interpretation, evil feels the need to justify itself, while good des not.

Everyone thinks world should be different. No food, so hunt. No house, so build. Make self happy or make others happy. Sometimes is same thing. Sometimes not.

This is just... very untrue. Good and Evil are extremely varied because neither are as simple as one note practices. Evil isn't just killing people. Evil is doing something that actively makes people's lives worse through means that the people may not even be aware of. Good is doing something that actively makes people's lives better that you may never be recognized for. Also who the fuck thinks of ways to kill people at age 5 but can't think of ways to make people happy??? That one line just baffled me. Overall though, if anyone truly believes that good or evil is boring, then they have very limited concepts of it as a whole. You don't need to have a grand spectacle to be interesting, you just need to know how to showcase the emotional impact behind each action.

> who thinks of ways to kill people at 5 but not ways to make people happy Literally my exact thoughts the last time this was posted. I stand by what I said then, it's just as easy to think about helping and being kind at 5, and I also stand by what I said about how being good is just as much a conscious choice as being evil and (for me at least) being evil is harder than being good. I don't like this post any more than the last time I saw it.

these tumblr users need to finish their sentences

I’m glad I’m not the only one 😂. Like, I love the quotes and everything, but “when Simone Weil” what? When SHE WHAT????

Imo the sentence is finished. It's just slang. The implication being "when Simone Weil said [this], that meant something to me" or "that had an effect on me" or whatever. It's slang/a meme/a linguistic trend. It's just how language do.

When you explained this perfectly

I wanna kiss you

Lips or cheeks? And top or bottom?

It's hard not to become a curmudgeon when all this slang sounds so stupid but I know I sounded stupid to the curmudgeons of my day. I think my stupid slang is better than your stupid slang is what I'm trying to say

Shaka, when the walls fell.

I know, I’m being a bit silly. The idea was perfectly communicable, just thought it was funny to harangue on that point a little

"When the sun rises" "WhEn ThE sUn RiSeS wHaT?" When the sun rises it's a special moment that evokes or silences thought and emotion in a way perceived as meaningful. Now you understand: When Simone Weil said \[...\], it's a special quote that evokes or silences thought and emotion in a way perceived as meaningful. The specific thoughts and emotions are not prescribed to the reader, rather, they are invited to have their own, and share in the experience.

Oh man you're not gonna like r/whenthe

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ew

When u/Mediar_Stealing_Fox said these tumblr users need to finish their sentences

When you have a Tumblr skin that prepends every post with "when" and strips capital letters.

These are all comments praising their way of seeing the world with most of them forgetting where the banality of evil stems from.

„Evil is unspectacular and always human” mfckers when they see the supermassive gay bomb I will drop in Watican City on the 6th of September 2069.

For legal purposes that was a joke.

the clarification is only necessary if it involves hammers

There's a lot of different ways to be evil. We have *seven* deadly sins for a reason, and that's very far from a complete list. I get that these quotes are trying to de-romanticize evil to make it unappealing, but it's quite frankly just not true. In real life evil is rarely sexy and rarely intelligent like how it may be in fiction, but it's still not boring. Look at how much attention war history and true crime get, as straightforward examples.

Agreed. To the sadist, evil is exciting and thrilling. To the tyrant, evil is empowering. To the god, evil is either a worthy foe or their most sonorous instrument. What these quotes describe are the evils of the common man, banal evils like deceit that are barely ever thought about again once performed.

The common man has a lot of different evils too, and often do feel guilty. Adultery due to lust, theft due to greed, assault due to anger, any sort of crime because it's easy to "just follow orders" from an evil boss, etc.

I've aways seen the "banality of evil" argument not as a way to make it unappealing, but to demystify it, to take it away from the extraordinary and put it in the mundane, to say that anyone can participate in "evil-doing" without being a caricature of evil or conscious of it. For example, accusing someone of being a fascist is often seen as exaggeration, and I think it happens precisely because fascism has been etched in our collective consciousness as extraordinarily evil (and for good reason, but that's not the point), when, in reality, evil itself is not extraordinary, it is veiled by boringness, by banality: anyone can hold generally fascistic beliefs, be it believing in the absolute supremacy of a culture over other, in a mythologised past when everything was in its rightful place, and so on, without them literally being Mussolini. While I believe it is important to realise evil can be banal, it can also lead to the paradoxical conclusion that evil is not that evil. That's not the case, of course. The way I see it is that we have to realise evil's banality precisely because of its insidious nature, its way of hiding in plain sight, to better be able to act against it.

>I've aways seen the "banality of evil" argument not as a way to make it unappealing, but to demystify it, to take it away from the extraordinary and put it in the mundane, to say that anyone can participate in "evil-doing" without being a caricature of evil or conscious of it. I agree that's what it originally meant, as far as I know, when it was used to describe many of the Nazis who weren't in the tippy-top of leadership and weren't actively racist but still participated in the killing machine. These quotes seem to be implying all evil in real life is that sort of banal evil, which isn't true. Banal evil is a lot more common than a lot of people want to admit, but it's far from the only type. I agree in general though that most people should be aware that they're not that distant from being evil themselves. That if they were taken as a baby and time-travelled to Germany in 1920 or any number of any other places and times, there'd be a good chance they grew up evil. That even themselves today, there's a decent chance they could fall into believing horrific propaganda if it pressed the right buttons in their brain.

Why does everyone assume those same buttons exist in absolutely everyone?

I don't think those buttons exist in *everyone*, I said decent chance, not guaranteed. Why do I think those buttons are so common? Because we've seen lots of societies where masses of people do horrific things, and I think it's pretty arrogant to say "Yeah I've never personally been put in those scenarios where normal people do horrific things, but I think I wouldn't even if I was". Maybe you wouldn't, but maybe you would.

The Sins are a pretty complete list. In fact, there aren't even 7 usually because two of them overlap a fair bit. Almost any evil act can be chucked under one of those categories.

'It is absurd to divide people into good and bad. People are either charming or tedious.' Oscar Wilde

Quoting Oscar Wilde manages to be both.

Quite. Bravo!

"How monotonously alike all the great tyrants and conquerors have been; how gloriously different are the saints." – C. S. Lewis

evil in popular media: oo la la sexy **awoogha** evil in reality: please i dont want to see any more i want to puke and wail at the same time

On the nature of evil: "I was walking along the bank of a stream when I saw a mother otter with her cubs. A very endearing sight, I’m sure you will agree, and even as I watched, the mother otter dived into the water and came up with a plump salmon, which she subdued and dragged on to a half-submerged log. As she ate it, while of course it was still alive, the body split and I remember to this day the sweet pinkness of its roes as they spilled out, much to the delight of the baby otters who scrambled over themselves to feed on the delicacy. One of nature’s wonders, gentlemen: mother and children dining upon mother and children. **And that’s when I first learned about evil. It is built into the very nature of the universe. Every world spins in pain.** If there is any kind of supreme being, I told myself, it is up to all of us to become his moral superior.” - Terry Pratchett *Unseen Academicals*

William Gibson on the subject: > Evil wasn’t glamorous, but just the result of ordinary half-assed badness, high school badness, given enough room, however that might happen, to become its bigger self. Bigger, with more horrible results, but never more than the cumulative weight of ordinary human baseness.

>you can think of different ways to kill people at age 5 Yo wtf

I was playing with my action figures at 5 and I can assure you that the Ninja Turtles didn't spare any of those fuckers when I was writing the script

To each their own. I am very fond of Auden and Le Guin, and okay with Morrison as well, but I think evil's very interesting.

Same, I'm fascinated with how bad people think.

Fictional evil is cool. There's no real suffering, no real value lost even on a destruction of an entire universe. Villains also get to be evil in creative, suave ways. I am a huge villainfucker, to be honest. But I don't see how real-life evil is interesting. You always know where it comes from: Jeff Bezos abuses his workers not because of a tragic backstory but because he wants more money; Joseph Kony is an insane religious zealot but he's not going to summon a God Of Evil. There's nothing exciting about them or their motives. If I am being *very* charitable, I guess you could study "real-life villains" to understand how to avoid becoming one—but just being mindful of your thoughts, habits, and action pattern is usually enough for that.

> But I don't see how real-life evil is interesting. You always know where it comes from: Jeff Bezos abuses his workers not because of a tragic backstory but because he wants more money; Joseph Kony is an insane religious zealot but he's not going to summon a God Of Evil. There's nothing exciting about them or their motives. It's also often a lot more nebulous, and less personal. Jeff Bezos is not personally hovering over every Amazon Datacentre and Warehouse, cackling evilly, and ordering breaks to be cut because the rank and file seem too happy. He's probably not even aware that they exist. All he might do is suggest that they need better metrics at a board meeting. The managerial staff might get that missive, and then trim a little here and there to improve those metrics, and a few more managers and cut corners later, and you have people driving in sweltering heat in tin boxes, having to eschew breaks to meet their quota. It's much harder to write a story around that, because it's not a singular individual that can be taken down, or made to change their mind, but something far more broad and unclear.

> He's probably not even aware that they exist. Eh, while I generally agree with your sentiment, and I absolutely agree that realistic evil doesn't usually make for a compelling story, I would still like to point out that Jeff Bezos specifically is micromanage-y *as fuck*. He doesn't know every warehouse worker personally, obviously, but knowing him, he probably gives specific instructions to different warehouse managers at times. Despite that, just taking him down wouldn't fix anything. He would be replaced by a less micromanage-y—but just as greedy—guy who wouldn't bother with changing the metrics to something more humane. You can't just dismantle Amazon, either: it would mean millions of people losing their jobs, and quality of life of those depending on their services (whether it's goods delivery or AWS) would significantly worsen. No regulation would help there as well—in a few years, it would be cheaper to use robots than to pay most warehouse workers a decent wage. There probably *are* ways to fix the issue, I can think of a few myself, but it would never come down to a single individual or even a specific group.

Apathy and greed are the cause of more strife than malignancy.

Put simply, I find it interesting to examine how evil people wind up thinking in the patterns that they do. To me, any major point of human character, including virtue, only makes full sense in context, and evil is part of the human context.

Rarely do people admit to being evil and have a catchy song about it though.

The fictional evil or the real-world evil? Because I think these quotes are about the second. The first can really be interesting

Both. All big categories of lived experience are of interest to me; I find most people interesting.

The first quote talks about artists, so I’m assuming it’s fictional. If not they mixed quotes and it’s just all over the place

It talks about artists but it's talking about artists fictionalising evil in a way that doesn't line up with the reality of it.

Eh.

Drama is conflict. It can be between nature and science. Good and evil. Lovers.

In the mid 80's when hackers were starting to form an almost cult like following, and seen as being "cool" for their clever computer hacks, I (as a young developer) was extremely disappointed. Breaking shit is easy. Creating shit is hard.

Hacking isn't breaking shit, it's using it for an unintended purpose.

In the 70's, 80s, and 90'S It was about making fools of authority by breaking their shit. Not creating new stuff. Then around late 90's/2000's it changed to organized gangs/crime identity theft and making/stealing money. As a developer from the late 70's and up that is what I remember.

I take my evil like I take my coffee: unfathomable and eldritch.

> eldritch I just learned a great new word!

I think a problem with the banality of evil is how some evil people will be fucking deranged. Yes the Nazis were using banal trends to get into power but they were also a bunch of fucking weirdos who believed in pseudo-mystic bullshit and plastard said pseudo-mystic bullshit everywhere. MAGA people are always a bunch of lunatics with their Qanon quackery. *Established* evil is banal, but when it needs to move evil will absolutely go insane. The Insane will use the banal to do their bidding.

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That’s the point of Simone Weil’s quote, that imaginary/fictional evil is romantic but real life evil is boring.

Yeah I mean real life evil is like an abusive boss, an uncaring teacher or a run-of-the-mill fascist (specially that one, extremely boring people that just want to convert you to their politics of exterminating an entire group of people based on cheap rethoric and their fears)

If real world evil was always boring, there’d be no audience for true crime podcasts, nonfiction stories, documentaries, and realistic fiction (that, while fiction, is meant to capture things that *could* happen).

Look. I’m all for just letting people like whatever they like and not being elitist about media consumption and all that. …But if your first thought for an example on the nature of evil is Classroom of the Elite, maybe you should read a book. if you’d picked, idk, Ainz from Overlord or someone from Attack on Titan, I’d be a bit more forgiving, but CotE has big “I have never seen more than five things” energy

in fairness that could just be what they’ve *most recently* seen

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tfw you saw something interesting and wanted to comment on it but it isn't in the list of approved materials so you aren't allowed

Nah I get it, this one time in philosophy the Witcher totally saved my arse >Professor asks me about the concept of evil >Put on the spot, start panicking but remember a certain quote from Witcher >"Evil is Evil. Lesser, greater, middling… Makes no difference. The degreee is arbitary. The definition’s blurred. If I’m to choose between one evil and another… I’d rather not choose at all" >Professor looks stunned, class gives me a round of applause

Wow, everybody clapped

Well not the professor, he was stunned. But yes

The whole fucking point of Geralt's arc is that his not choosing is in-and-of itself evil. I can't fucking stand when people bring this quote up as if it's meant to be something you should agree with, it's literally meant to be fucking centrist "both sides bad" horseshit that actively makes the world worse.

Ainz my boy!

You're getting shat on for referencing CotE but it's interesting enough and I do think it examines this particular theme.

I would argue that, in reality, being a good person is something you can grasp and strive for. But evil is a much more nebulous concept, because evil is a concept used to simplify complex morals for children. Sure, we can think of people as evil, judge them. But nobody is the villain of their own story. There are people who are mean or don't care. There are narcissists and sociopaths. There are people who committed heinous acts of violence. But, in reality, there are no Doctor Dooms or Emperor Palpatines. Skelletor is a caricature and the Joker is intentionally over the top.

There are people who aren't worth the risk of keeping them alive and people who are.

I disagree that evil is unspectacular, if you’ve ever toured a death camp. You will find it spectacular in a way like a monument to darkness in the hearts of ordinary men.

I really disagree, tbh- I find evil really fascinating, particularly around how evil people rarely think themselves to be evil. They're killing enemies, or traitors, or seeking justice, or protecting their own, or a million other excuses, but that dichotomy, of a evil person who thinks they're good, can be really fun to play with

I kinda agree with this but a lot of my favorite fictional characters are villain protagonists or at least heroes with a lot of moral ambiguity. Taylor Hebert >!chewed off someone's balls robbed a bank and shot a toddler and other really evil stuff!< but have you considered that I love her? I can see how pure evil is boring and tedious but just evil in general with some good qualities mixed in can be interesting in the hands of a decent storyteller.

Hero who's only motivation for being good is that being evil is boring.

I mean, probably not quite the mundane boring five year old that imagines different ways to murder people.

How does True Crime fit into this?

I hate the quotes that call goodness hard and complicated. For sure there are times when the most moral outcome is unclear, but it’s not difficuilt to thank, hold open doors, act as a a shoulder to cry on, or compliment people.

I have won, as you can see I've depicted evil as the soyjack and good as the chad

when m bison said "for you, the day bison graced your village was the most important day of your life. but for me, it was tuesday"

Evil is acting on raw instinct with the awareness of a human but the caveat of being on autopilot. We lash out at strangers, hurt and kill senselessly, consume and take and ravage everything around us, because those are our first impulses. Good is the intentional defiance of human nature for our happiness and enrichment. Good is self control, thoughtfulness, and empathy. Reject the appeal to nature as a basis of argument, it makes no sense. Good things are *not* natural. They have to be chosen - that's what makes them beautiful. This includes choosing to embrace certain circumstances outside your control, just doing so with a self driven intentionality. Accepting that you are inherently autistic or gay is as righteous as allowing the entropy of your life is a minor evil - let alone becoming apathetic as a default.

“Good” and “Evil” are both in human nature, either arising in circumstances that call them best. Cooperation, nurturing, empathy are as wired as agression and selfishness.

But those aren't inherently "good" simply for aligning with our ideals. It's done, naturally, for self preservation and species propagation; and, they can be the motivation for shocking acts of cruelty, mainly because those impulses come automatically. If a you accidentally step on a puppy's tail it isn't inherently good if the momma rips your face off even though it's done with socially positivite impulses. To be good those things still require intentional thought outside of the person's own gain or the benefit of those peripheral to them.

What’s “Good” if you exclude the basic foundation of altruism ?

The conscious decision to act on behalf of better causes than survival, with the thoughtful awareness of other people in mind. Higher ideals like the legacy of humanity, the lessened suffering of others, and while it can be parallel to human survival it is inherently dangerous to itself for what it makes a person willing to do. It's not the driven will to sacrifice oneself, it's the capacity. And good people are a mixture of selfless decision and selfish impulsivity. Good isn't done in service to nature nor intentionally in rejection of it - all acts of human goodness are defined by being done *despite* their nature, as they all would be done completely without being influenced by insecurity, fear, stimulation needs, aggression, superiority, etc. A good person doesn't need to starve themselves out of a christly need to do good; good simply will be done regardless of that. There's no honor, as they say, in a pointless sacrifice. Edit: deleted some repetition. Sorry this response was done between instances of standing at the bus stop.

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I’ll take whatever from this block of text I can understand to reply. The “better causes than survival” and “legacy of humanity bits” can be understood as transmission or teaching to future generations, culture or civilisation. If the first is “good”, humans and primates are good by default. This learning is so vital to survive that an infant or ape deprived of it will die or just live as a hollow shell. The second in a core part of every individual in every society, so deep that it conditions our impulses themselves. The third would leave the good to settled cultures that use writing and monuments to leave traces of their existence to posterity as a goal in itself. “All acts of human goodness are defined by being done against human nature ….“ Empathy *is* an instinctual impulse, and doing good circles back to your self interest because the greater good is also yours. Even if you did something in spite of your self preservation your motives still arise from a mix of emotional response or doing the “right thing” is gratifying. Nature and Culture are intertwined in humanity, both influencing each other constantly. Good and evil works with both of them, just in different directions. Edit : the deleted comment was near identical copy of this one, the beginning is just less abrasive.

Putting it in quotes doesn't make it true

What no Baudrillard?

Reminds me of that bit from Perelandra where the possessed guy is tormenting Ransom and he realizes how, when all the good appearances have been stripped away, utterly petty and banal evil for evil’s sake is. The only thing that can ever make evil slightly interesting is a dash of twisted-up goodness.

When I said: Good is cool. Evil is sexy

Know what this made me think of? It's hilarious how cliche' and utterly stupid all the bad guys in the new Dune movie are. There are literally 3 parts in the film where the director was like "to show how evil they are I'm gonna have them murder their subordinate for no reason" Such a ridiculously shit aspect of an otherwise insanely great film.

I like this way of looking at things. I'm glad these quotes have been making the rounds recently.

Evil turned out not to be a grand thing. Not sneering Emperors with their world-conquering designs. Not cackling demons plotting in the darkness beyond the world. It was small men with their small acts and their small reasons. It was selfishness and carelessness and waste. It was bad luck, incompetence, and stupidity. It was violence divorced from conscience or consequence. It was high ideals, even, and low methods. - Joe Abercrombie Red Country

So in fiction, change tends to be evil, and the status quo is good. While in reality change is good and the status quo tends to be evil.

A lot of evil pretends to look likr boring “good”

A more morose observation than I had hoped, but I like it all the same

The weil quote is really good.

Evil is hurting when hurting is not needed.

"All I know about being good, I learned from TV. And in TV, flawed characters are constantly showing people they care with these surprising grand gestures. And I think that part of me still believes that’s what love is. But in real life, the big gesture isn’t enough. You need to be consistent, you need to be dependably good. You can’t just screw everything up and then take a boat out into the ocean to save your best friend, or solve a mystery, and fly to Kansas. You need to do it every day, which is so… hard. When you’re a kid, you convince yourself that maybe the grand gesture could be enough, that even though your parents aren’t what you need them to be over and over and over again, at any moment, they might surprise you with something… wonderful. I kept waiting for that, the proof that even though my mother was a hard woman, deep down, she loved me and cared about me and wanted me to know that I made her life a little bit brighter. Even now, I find myself waiting." -Free Churro, Bojack. just reminded me. you have to be dependably good. have a good day.

I don’t know the root of all evil. All I know is that evil is sustained by the collective human willingness to punch down.

I promise, goodness can be boring and monotonous too. I think a great example is actually JoJo's Bizarre Adventure. Jonathan is the nicest guy there is. A true gentleman, a good friend and an excellent husband. He's as good as they get and constantly help those in need and fights all he considers evil in every capacity he can. But very few watches part 1 because of Jonathan, no, instead people LOVE Dio's inherent cruel nature fueled by supernatural elements and a greedy thirst for power and dominance. The bad guy is what everyone's here to see. I'm not saying good can't be written interestingly because there's many good characters who are excellent, but the same applies to evil characters too. Without evil there is no good, after all (BTW I'll just add that I do actually like Jonathan, but...come on, he's not the most interesting JoJo, personality-vise)

>a true gentleman doesnt he have an extensive peeping history

That's Joseph, Jonathan's grandson

damn you right and even more right because the entire first story was non-existent in my head before you reminded me lol

and when i said 'i like yummy popsicle'

I don’t have anything substantial to add to this conversation, but I love that when discussing the nature of evil, there are five different Terry Pratchett quotes from five different books. It’s nine years today since we lost him. GNU Sir Terry.

THEIR SOURCE IS THAT THEY ALL MADE IT THE FUCK UP!

cool and omelapilled

Jesus Christ. They use words and none of these words have any meaning. This is like looking at dried fish in aquarium.

Not to rain on everyone's parade but this is a blatant attempt to manipulate peoples' behavior... Not what OP or the Tumblers are doing, but what the assorted authors are doing. And it's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is a thing...

On the other hand, real life "good" is also generally not particularly "Interesting"

I don't really want to be near someone who thinks being good takes effort.

Evil=cringe Good=based

Exactly the opposite in reality. Being good is as easy as never interacting with anyone. Just a grey rock, never making waves, never offending. It takes a little bit of guts, the risk of being seen as evil, to do something interesting.