Why do people choose to be evil?

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Oh god, people-in general- are SUCH as*holes. [I'm not claiming exclusion from this]
Not exactly equivalent to evil though, no.


...I also would have to add: people can have a different definition of "as*hole".

It's a well known trait of any social species. Small groups are cooperative. Large groups schism and fight. It's why democracy doesn't work outside of small groups (even university student unions may be too large to function truly democratically) and we have a bastardised version for governments.

It's because socialising is hard work, and we can only relate to a certain number of other people. Outside that group, people aren't people any more. They're just things. Terrorists blow up buildings because the people they're fighting aren't real people to them. Burglars steal from strangers because strangers don't have real feelings. Politicians play war games that kill millions of people because they're just numbers and not real people at all.

It's not so much evil as apathy.

The flipside is where it gets interesting. A charity telling people about the tens of thousands of homeless people in your city will get far fewer donations than one that highlights a single homeless person and talks about them. We can't relate to thousands, but we form an emotional attachment to a single person in trouble with a name and a face. In essence, we don't care about thousands of people but we do care about young Mark or poor, abused Sally.

The essense of all of your answers in this thread is that "people are doing what they feel is right, and hence they are not doing evil, even though it might seem evil to you"

I disagree. I believe that the vast majority of humans, deliberately choose to do stuff that harms other people, and they KNOW it harms them, and they don't harm them for their own survival. They
harm them, because they want the unneccessary luxury of enjoying looking at other people's misseries.

THAT is true evil. And I believe the vast majority of humans share this. They are empathizing. Some are even really good at feeling empathy.
But no matter how much empathy they feel, they enjoy causing harm to other people, for the sake of fun.

A lot of people use their imagination and empathy, in order to calculate what exactly would cause the most harm to that particular individual in question.

The examples you gave in the OP are all examples of people doing what they feel is right and hence they are not doing evil even though it might seem evil to you.

I'll take an example from the OP that on its' surface looks evil:

"Most people believe torture is the right thing".

Perhaps you think this is evidence that most people find it fun to cause others harm. But the actual arguments put forth to justify torture are as a means to an end (get information to stop a specific act of terrorism), not because it's enjoyable. "Fun" never enters into it.

http://www.debate.org/opinions/is-tortu ... -justified

I am not saying that I personally promote torture to get anti-terrorism information. I am saying that the people who do so are advocating it not because they think it is a positive thing but because they think it is the lesser of two evils (the greater evil being to allow the terrorist act to unfold). Doing something that is the lesser of two evils in order to prevent the greater of two evils does not make a person evil.

I could make a similar case for all your bullet pints but the post would be too long.

http://theanarchistlibrary.org/library/ ... federalism

Why [and how] would this be fun?

If you want to look at it practically- if the vast majority of humans operated this way, given that we are a social animal and most generally rely on each other for survival in one way or another... how could that behavior possibly survive in the long term if it was common place?

How does it function as enjoyable?

Also, to break this down...

That isn't necessarily what everyone is saying.
In the least that isn't what I was saying.

What I was saying is that people doing X may not see it as evil. So in their mind, they are likely not saying "I think I will do an evil thing today, that evil thing will be X, because X is an evil thing, and I intend to do an evil thing."

Whether X is an evil thing is not universal though. I didn't actually make a statement that X [which could be anything under the sun, or beyond] is or is not evil. I was simply trying to express that not everyone will always accept that all the same things are considered evil, so what you see as evil, OtherPerson may not- so they will choose to do what they see as "right". That is why they do this thing you have labeled evil. They are not choosing to do "evil" [from their perspective]. They are choosing to do a thing which you have then, possibly unbeknownst to them, labeled evil [from your perspective].

Different from what you said above.
I stated that the examples you gave were opinions. I endorsed neither side.

What is the purpose of this link? What are you trying to address with it?

It adresses people who believe bastardised democracy or soviet style planing are the only things possible today. Not assuming you believe so, but there are people on this forum who have this belief. Bookchin explains how social logistics of large scale policy in regions that are fully democratic could work.

To the title not the OP:

1) Animal expedience or just ideological expedience in general usually doesn't cover civility but jettisons it actively. In a more organized and specific example - Mussolini supposedly kept the trains running on time.

2) Some people get something like a sexual addition to power and are fueling an imbalance.

3) Some people fear what the world would do to them if they didn't hold the world back by blunt force.

4) Some people believe that their ideas are so important or that they were born made of something so wonderful that their impact has to be made and the world needs to listen to what they have to say and do what they in particular want it to. In that game other people quite easily are just means to an end and are completely disposable. They don't get equality of the human condition.

I remember hearing also how some of the Russian communist leaders wanted to be mummified or how certain other despots have gone a long way to try to symbolically deny death or ensure some form of immortality no matter how tenuous. Megalomaniacs have some strange internal sufferings and those sufferings are, for most of their lives, wielded against the common people relentlessly.

"Keeping up appearances" is just another way of saying "faking it". People who are truly rotten at their core will do good things when other people are looking just to "look nice", and then they'll turn around and do bad things when no one is watching.

Yep there's tons and tons of mild-sociopaths throughout society that are passed off as being NT their entire lives. They appear relatively normal just cause they don't say what they're really thinking most of the time.(i.e. "fake")

Mmm. Ok that's a point- they do things but don't get caught, just appear to be in the norm [whatever that is]. That makes more sense.