Comment by boxed
8 days ago
I would make a stronger claim: ignorance + power + conviction is exactly equal to evil.
Mao killed tens of million of his own people because of his misconceptions about farming, economics, and ecology.
Hitler killed millions because of his misconceptions about jews.
9/11 was executed becuase of a small group that were very confused about the basic facts of reality ("god").
There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
I do think 9/11 was more a response to brutal colonial warfare and three letter agency shenanigans going back many years and less about religion..
A lot of people think that. Just a tiiiiny problem: the hijackers didn't think that. They were jihadis.
And the reason for anti-American jihad?
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bin Laden and al-Qaida talked a lot about their motivations. For one it was disgusting to them that the house of Saud bowed and scraped for the crusaders in Washington, and so was the rather arbitrary abuse of Afghanistan.
They also were under the delusion that the US was a democracy, and hence the general population could be held responsible for the actions of its leaders. Understandable if they had mainly been exposed to US/Occidental state propaganda.
Today I don't think anyone would be inclined to hold such a belief.
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[flagged]
Nice to know not everyone has koolaid in their veins.
Delusion + power + conviction doesn't always equal evil, so there has to be something missing in that equation. I'd wager it's evil.
Though this doesn't really answer the question of motivation. Few people aim to do something that they regard to be bad. (It's possible, mind you.)
Give me a counter example.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=43047395
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Ah, I was thinking of an example where you have evil without those things.
Calling something "evil" is implying an external force (often linked to religion), that I don't think should be used. It reduces the responsibility of the person doing "evil" acts.
I think the missing ingredient is simply not caring about the outcome. It could be because they don't have empathy (sociopaths), or that the society has trained them into normalising obedience to the cause (facsism / communism) or inhumanized their targets (consentration camps).
Acts can certainly be described as "evil", but I don't agree that "evil" is some type of force that affects people.
Not caring about the outcome doesn't make sense, people that are driven by something care about the outcome.
To go back to my original point, the simplistic equation falls apart if you spend a second looking for counter examples.
Sikhs give free food to any who asks, without expecting anything in return. They are deluded (they do to it please god), and need power and conviction to do so.
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Hitler cared about the outcome a lot. That's why he killed so many people. So your analysis has a pretty big flaw there.
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The People for the New American Century or the off script timezone goof by the BBC?
Or maybe the Gelatin art crew?
>There is only delusion + power + conviction. There is no other evil.
If you believe this, your beliefs are out of step with essentially every Western justice system, which hold murder to be a worse crime than manslaughter. The difference between them is solely the intention.
Not that I agree with GP at all, but you are strawmaning him. I'll steelman his argument with your example: Premeditated murder is worse than just murder: for you to commit murder, you have to be convinced you have to do it, and the power to push it through. And in case of a premeditation, the dellusion you'll be able to do it without consequences.
(I still think it's a bad example even presented like this, and I disagree with GP, but your example seemed wrong)
How does conviction (as OP used it) not align with intention? I don't follow your point here about murder vs manslaughter and how it contradicts what OP said.
It seems I interpreted their use of "conviction" in a very different way than you and others. I interpreted it as a word they chose to use because it contrasts with intention, specifically with intention to harm another person.
By "conviction", I understood them to mean a kind of blindness -- an unshakeable belief that what you are doing is right, regardless of what others may believe. That kind of conviction is orthogonal to intention to harm another person. I took the entire thrust of their argument to be that intention to harm another person is neither necessary nor morally important for evil. But that is not how most of the West sees it (as evidenced by the distinction between murder and manslaughter that I pointed out).
If, when they wrote "conviction", they in fact meant "intention to harm another person", then I agree with them. But in that case I'm not sure why they posted their comment at all, since that (namely, the thesis that intention to harm is morally important when actions cause harm) is already the accepted norm, at least in the West.
In fact it covers it 100%. Examples:
Manslaughter is when you kill someone without conviction and/or delusion. You can hit someone without the conviction that you need to kill them and they fall really badly and die.
Murder. You can hit someone in self defense where you have no conviction that the person must be killed (because for example they say you had sex with their wife, but you in fact know you didn't, it's a misunderstanding), and you don't have any delusion (you know the attacker is delusional in fact). And then you defend yourself and he dies because he hit his head badly on the way down.
By "conviction", do you simply mean "intent to harm another person"?
Because that is the only way I can interpret your examples so that they correspond with the legal distinction, which is based on intent to harm and TTBOMK never mentions "conviction". If so, we're in full agreement, since that is already the accepted Western norm and my original comment was based on a misunderstanding, and unnecessary.
But also if so: I'm puzzled why you chose to swap the natural and original word "intent" for a different word ("conviction") that is easily misinterpreted as a quality orthogonal to intention to harm, and about which an interesting but fundamentally wrong argument is periodically made (namely, that it, plus power are sufficient for evil, without any need for intent). I'm also puzzled why you made the initial comment I replied to at all, since it's then a defence of the absolutely uncontroversial status quo. It's like posting that you believe in gravity.
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