Every single person alive does evil actions at some point to survive, its what people do after to prevent those circumstances repeating in the future that determines whether they are evil people or not.

Evil people are blind people. They may become blind in a number of ways, but generally they had to make a choice to blind themselves, a willful choice they may have been induced to through education/torture but a choice nonetheless.

That choice involved repeated acts of self-violation, which doesn't hurt at all. False justification and flawed reasoning is one example of such an act. It doesn't hurt, but you become less each time, resistance shrinking, until there is no resistance at which point you no longer perceive an issue and do so any time until someone forcefully stops you. Lack of resistance to evil acts is acceptance of evil into your heart.

Your definition lacks a property of metaphysical objectivity.

Just because your feelings are hurt doesn't make someone evil. If you punish someone for murdering someone else also doesn't make you evil. In either case your definition would consider those people evil, but they wouldn't be, and that would expand endlessly to absurdity.

Your description is far too ambiguous. You may value greatly from reading some of Ilyin's works on the subject matter, and how it refutes many aspects of Tolstoy's War and Peace.

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xyproto 8 months ago | parent [-]

Interesting! I fully disagree, though.

If a person tortures and rapes someone to survive, I would say that they are evil, regardless of what they do after those circumstances. Regardless of they are repeating their actions or not.

I also disagree that evil people are blind people. They might be cowards and/or cold hearted and/or entitled, but not blind. They can see with their eyes. They can understand what they are doing in the moment.

Unless you are thinking of fight/flight/freeze responses, where people are doing something evil in this state? For this case, I might agree with you that they are "blind".

Doing evil requires people to have a relatively cold heart in the moment and/or be cowards enough to not stop doing it and/or entitled enough to prioritize themselves.

I agree about how the lack of resistance to evil acts gradually lets evil into the heart. Nicely put!

I also agree that hurt feelings is separate from evil. People can feel hurt over almost everything, on a scale from reasonable to unreasonable.

I do think that punishing someone else for murdering someone else is evil if it's done with a cold heart and/or with cowardice and/or entitlement, though. If it's for protecting society, that's different, and not evil.

I haven’t read any books by Ilyin, but as I gather he treats evil as an objective, metaphysical force—an absence of some universal good. That sounds neat, but it lets people off the hook, as if they were swept into cosmic darkness rather than held accountable for the cowardice, entitlement, and cold‑hearted choices they knowingly make, IMO.

	▲	trod1234 8 months ago \| parent [-]
		> They can see with their eyes. They can understand what they are doing in the moment. Its not about seeing, its about perception, and to change or adapt the first thing you need to be capable of doing is recognition, which doesn't happen in people who have blinded themselves. They don't perceive anything being wrong with what they are doing, and so they continue doing so, they may even structure things so they can plausibly deny these things when the reality is they did those things. You can do great evil and not know you are doing it, through structured indirection. The Nazi's started this, Mao continued it, the Stasi perfected it. The strategy is called a separation of objectionable concerns, the gist is you limit information so no one has a clear picture of what is happening, and while they all work together towards one goal, only a few people know what that is. For a concrete example, say there is a set of two or three buttons with two colored lights that light up, and your job is pushing buttons in a closed room. You are told you need to push that button, wait X minutes, then push the second button when the light is green, wait X minutes, and then press the reset and do it again. You are told what these buttons do, but what you are told isn't the truth, and you are encouraged in fact to beat your best metrics. That button unbeknowst to you operates a gas chamber, and a cremation chamber in order, and what you aren't told is 100s of people get sent into those chambers with each button press. Sure you might see workers, but few know the truth, the rest are simply told this is a transfer point and they go somewhere else, which is strictly true in isolation. Quite evil, and similar things happened during WW2. You don't know or control any of that, but you actively participate without your knowledge, just doing the job you are assigned and getting paid for it. You don't ask questions because you are just doing your job. You don't know any better, but are the decider of those people's fates. This is how separation of objectionable concerns allows great evil without you ever being aware of it. Structure and indirection. This strategy has been used almost everywhere, and worse every human has psychological blindspots which can be taken advantage of through structured responses as well where they don't perceive and can't recognize things. You see this today with misinformation, where truth may be said but everyone thinks you are just crazy despite you having incontrovertible proof to the contrary. They simply follow a fixed action pattern to remain consistent internally. One example of these type of blindspots may be tricking someone into agreeing with you by asking them a leading question, and then using a similar follow-up question to elicit the same response even when you know they disagree for the second item. By drawing the structured comparison and eliciting the agreement in the former it applies to the latter either immediately or over time. Our psychology warps us to remain consistent, and those people will soften up through repeated exposure without even noticing, and eventually change to remain consistent. This is the danger of subtle blindspots and torture techniques. Mao discovered things in the 1950s that effectively break many of the core beliefs most people hold and think to be true about free thought, and those elements have been used to people's detriment ever since. > If its for protecting society, that's different Who decides what's protecting society, and what is society to you? A thing is what it does, and a society may be based in slavery and abuse, or in self-determination, realization, and growth. Protecting the former type of society may or may not be different. That's the danger with ambiguity indirection, and the potential for deceit/lies. > That sounds neat, but it lets people off the hook. He wrote the book to refute many aspects of Tolstoy's War & Peace which promote destructive behaviors, because what Tolstoy wrote has been used in policy in a lot of places towards destructive ends. Illyin takes a very rational principled approach in addressing this very difficult subject matter, tying what he's saying to objective measures, and reiterating a lot of common knowledge at the time it was written. His reasoning follows his experience which included living through the White Army and Bolshevik uprising and famine, albeit in exile. He touches on mental compulsion and coercion as well and a lot of people have used these ideas beneficially. His material is even touched upon within the design of our modern day prison system albeit, the implementations today fail because some of the material he covers is actually ignored. The book was previously only available in Russian, but recently it was translated from Russian to English and is available from Amazon. The author lived and wrote the book around the turn of the century (1900s). He wrote it as a refutation of Tolstoy's philosophy which included a hodgepodge of pacifism towards appeasement with elements of sentimental moralism and nihilism. People can blind themselves simply by putting layers of indirection between the thing they do and its effects, and using false justification, refusing to resolve those layers of indirection down to reality (what philosophers refer to as an element of identity in subjects on metaphysics).