Why do people choose to be evil?

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* Most people dislike Welfare for the sick and disabled.

* Most people want the state to have the right and authority and even the duty, to kill its own defenseless citizens (Capital Punishment).

* Most people believe torture is the right thing.

* Most people want religion to suppress scientific facts, and want religious rules imposed on everybody.
If not religion, then Nationalism. Which is essentially the same thing.

The fact that most people want this, is based upon the fact that most countries in the world or most people living in the world, lives in countries, that adhere to at least one of these
above statements.

Take China, for instance. It has more than 1/3 of world's population, and China fulfills all these above requirements of evilness.
Then add Iran and India, and you are well above half the world's population.

How come most people deliberately choose to be evil?

Most? More like a small segment of extremely anti-government conservatives and libertarians.


Yes, those poor sweet innocent serial killers are being gassed by the dozen every day in prisons all around the world. The cruelty of it all.


Define torture. Some people consider the voicing of an opposing opinion on a forum to be ?torture?.


Yeah, well I guess all the new cutting edge technology we produce is only incidental to all of our praying.


Who exactly is saying that most people want this?


More evilness, eh?.


You?re making being evil sound like too much fun. I?m getting excited.

I wouldn't use the word "most."

And I would also be careful about lumping the entire citizenry of a country in with the actions and policies of its government. For example, there are plenty of citizens in Iran that are very pro-US, even though the US is almost exclusively anti-Iran. There are plenty of Chinese citizens that have become more and more open about their distaste for a corrupt government that ignores human rights.

And the for-against on these issues is not so cut and dry, although I think the vast majority of humanity is against torture, and a general "welfare for the needy" is a little too vague to put into pro/anti terms, but in the broadest sense you would be hard pressed to make a case that many are against it. For example, there are plenty of people here in the US that are against government welfare, but still in favor of human welfare, and giving to charity is a fundamental part of all sects of Islam (although they may disagree on who the needy are and who should be helped first).

Most people don't think or choose what type of person they will "become." Most people are happy to just survive. Most people are taught to think what they're told, whether by parents, government, teachers or others. And if you're raised by wolves, you learn to react like a wolf.

Most people don't think of themselves as evil, only as crafty wolves; in human speak: capable/successful survivors.

We're all just fallible human beings.

All of the above are opinions on what consitutes evil. For the simplicity of dicussion, you would be better off simply asking:



However, that leads to:
Do all people who do things that are generally viewed as evil necessarily choose to "be evil"?

Probably not.

Given the above example, where you have given all these examples of things that you have listed of things you are declaring evil, many people who endorse these things don't view them as evil. So they are not consciously "choosing to be evil".

From many of these individuals' points of view, they are choosing to do the "right" thing, or are perhaps being pressured into something that seems like a better choice over anything else. Or perhaps it is even easier than and alternative. Maybe some of them simply don't know anything else- that is nothing else much has yet occurred to them.

All kinds of possibilities.

Even when we look at things that are almost universally considered evil: pretty gruesome things, some of these individuals don't necessarily think to themselves that they are committing evil, or don't think of themselves as evil people, or feel that what they are doing is their inherent nature.
If you look up someone like Charles Bronson [really look into who he is, particularly things from his POV], the idea of "evil people" isn't so clear cut.

For me, this is REALLY REALLY hard to wrap my head around. I tend to have a very strong sense of fair and unfair/right and wrong/justice and injustice.

But then that leads me to think about what is fair or unfair to all individuals in a given situation. So when you think, really think about, for example, people with antisocial personality disorder- who have a sever detachment from other people and have zero ability to empathize [true inability to empathize in an emotional and natural way, as opposed to it just being assumed]... it actually gets murky.

I'm not talking about ASPD's who are serial killers, because that is actually a small percentage of those individuals. I mean the individuals with ASPD who are functional in society but do pretty crappy things to people and maybe even go half their lives without realizing they don't empathize, that empathy is a thing.


mmm. I don't know. Some of my thoughts on the matter?
heh.

That doesn't apply to the majority of Australians, and seemingly not our Canadian cousins either.

You'll understand once our re-education camps are up and running....oops.....forget I typed that.

One more thing:

...as for those who actively and knowingly understand that what they are contemplating is evil and then follow through with that action willingly? I don't know. I don't know if what they view and how they feel about it is the same.

There was recently a thread which reported a teenager burned a wing of a dog home, killing [I think?] over forty dogs and injuring sixty? The responses in the thread ranged from expressing sadness to wishing the kid was burned alive. I actually can't go back and read the thread because reading the reactions was extrtemely upsetting. Meeting horrific things with equally horrific reactions is something I don't understand- so my point is: . I don't think I view things like the thread I was talking about like some of the other people who responded, and NOT AT ALL COMPARING THEM TO EVIL PEOPLE [so they are NOT evil] but using that as an example of saying I can't see the world like other people. I don't understand how someone who knowingly commits evil things views the world. There is no way for me to understand if they see it the same way

I'm more concerned about the ISIS re-education camps. Abandon all knowledge yeah who enter there and swallow the Koran whole. Then start learning how to behead people. THAT is evil.

+1

Sociopathy is more common than people think. Human beings are selfish by nature, and while some people learn to suppress this and be decent human beings, others are almost completely self-centered, and only get along with other people to keep up appearances.

To me, a person is "evil" when they go out of their way to screw over other people just so that they can achieve success. "Good" and "evil" are merely concepts invented by humanity, and are not universal forces. Most non-human animals are neither "good" nor "evil", they do merely what they need to do to survive. Dolphins are an exception, because they are one of the only non-human species known to murder one another out of sheer spite.

So, question:
What is the difference if the outcome is the same?

Well, from a Lutheran perspective (and I was born and raised a Lutheran) I'd say it's because human nature is basically bad and rotten. So many people support bad things because that's our nature. I could get into Christ and his redemptive sacrifice, but I don't want to derail the conversation so early on.

Choose?

A snake be a snake, and it's born that way.

You are Javert

[youtube]http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uU1w5LHBr3c[/youtube]

Last edited by Stannis on 13 Sep 2014, 2:19 pm, edited 2 times in total.

It depends on where you live. Per science the 20 most peaceful societies are relatively small and people share instead of collect goods. Humans by nature given a relatively small population with the ability to share instead of collect are peaceful cooperative social animals, not unlike the Bonobo whom they share a similar empathy gene with.

There is never any robbery in my neighborhood, or aggressive violent crimes reported in several decades so statistically speaking I am relatively safe to leave my doors open in the day and night and feel safe, but I don't cause I watch the news. No that's not true, it's just a joke; I don't cause my wife is too scared, to let me do it, but she weighs 115 LBS and I am a 230LB martial artist, so she has more reasonable realistic fears than I do. And yes, at night I would reasonably lock them, anyway, as I cannot reasonably defend myself against even a very unlikely conflict scenario sleeping.

But if I believed the news and the human conflicts that are real in unbalanced unhealthy societal environments as imaginarily applied to my social environment, I would be barring up the windows and doors. But no, it does not apply to my greater balanced societal norm in a relatively healthy societal environment where I live that is more the norm of a healthy socially cooperative human environment; one of getting along with each other, with little harm done to others.

Inherently humans are socially cooperative animals, not selfish animals. It's only culture that makes them selfish. In other words by nature it is a myth that humans are selfish. But no, put a culture designed to accommodate high populations of humans not evolved to live in that type of density of population and the problems of aggression, violence and crime will come. That's just the way human nature works too, as well as for unhealthy social environments for other social animals too.

So to put it into other words, and a shorter number of words, it is culture that can produce evil overall, as humans overall are empathic, sharing, and cooperative social animals not unlike the Bonobo primate that is the only primate that shares a similar human empathy gene.

They also enjoy free sex, yes, both species, overall, inherently as such, but that's a topic for another time, and place, perhaps. And repressing or oppressing that part of human nature, subjugating human beings for loss of reproductive freedoms, is also unnatural per human nature, and a source of much world conflict. In fact, the more sexual repression and oppression that occur in a society are directly related to the so-called darker nature in the world, i.e. conflicts in the Middle East where women stay covered up and 'bonded' as such.

Freedom of expression in all ways is the way for peace. Repress or oppress any element of human nature, and subjugate human innate freedoms and there you have the real source of so-called evil human behavior that actually causes harm per non-consensual acts of harm.

Love and peace is the way of the unrepressed and oppressed human being, per lower population density too. Screw that up and one might, and yes does get so called evil.

So to put it even in shorter terms, what many think is evil, per sexual freedom and such as that, is actually the real good not the evil. And that is the core of all human conflict since the beginning of agriculture. Screwed up priorities, to meet insane requirements of population density per the way humans are truly evolved to be.

Location, location, location; my house is almost paid for, and hell no, I?m not moving, out of a low rural density area, where people enjoy a economic prosperity that is at a level great enough for secured subsistence, as I simply understand inherent human nature, and what inherent human nature can be if repressed and oppressed.

Rats do the same thing, as indicated in studies, but they too, are social animals even without that empathy gene that the Bonobo and humans share.

This is a bit offtopic, but.... People are inherently "evil", not much as they have the actual will to make a concious choice.

I quoted the word evil, because it depends on how we define it, I could change it for "People are inherently as*holes", and yeah, that is a principle.