What is Evil?

In a day and age where the philosophy of moral relativism prevails, the concepts of good and evil seem moot. However, just because moral relativism denies that there is anything like an absolute good or absolute evil, objective reality slaps us in the face like a cold fish on a rainy London day.

Monty Python's Flying Circus - The Fish Slapping Dance

Moral relativism stems from such philosophies as the existentialist Friedrich Nietzsche, who was a moral nihilist. In his work, Beyond Good and Evil, Nietzsche accused past philosophers of blindly accepting Judeo-Christian morality. He urged a more "critical" approach to the concept of morality, suggesting that individual perspective should have the final say on what is good or evil.

Nietzsche's approach, unfortunately, denies the traditional and tried moralities of world religions, as well as denying that any codified system of morality is acceptable. Hence, Nietzsche's ideal of the individual is one who has developed a philosophy "beyond good and evil."

Yet, despite the blinded philosophy of modern nihilism, absolute good and evil exist as objective realities. To deny objective reality leads to the abuses of political morality - morality defined by the state in order to achieve political ends. In democratic societies, state morality is tempered by the collective morality of the people. In absolutist states, we can point to such figures as Mao, Stalin, Hitler, or Mussolini, who were not only murdering dictators, but created ideologies based on state-dictated morality. As Mussolini put it, in his Doctrine of Fascism:

The right of a nation to independence derives not from a literary and ideal consciousness of its own being, still less from a more or less unconscious and inert acceptance of a de facto situation, but from an active consciousness, from a political will in action and ready to demonstrate its own rights: that is to say, from a state already coming into being. The State, in fact, as the universal ethical will, is the creator of right.

Recently I've been thinking some on the topic of the concepts of good and evil. While a philosophical treatise on good and evil would take up several volumes (and many philosophers and clergy have written them), there is at least one objective measure of evil that we can identify. This is the absolute evil of coercion for political gain. In simpler terms, this is the use (and abuse) of power in order to gain more power.

This concept of evil is old. In some ancient Semitic writings, there are fragments of a story about Satan or the adversary (the representation of evil), who wished to assume God's power (the representation of good). "I'll make everyone obey your commandments," he said, "but make me God." Because Satan wanted to take away the free will of humans, God booted him out of heaven. The assumption here is that human free will should never be abridged.

The concept of democracy is founded on the presupposition of free will. The founders of the US understood the importance of maintaining it when they included in the Declaration of Independence the passage:

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness.

The inalienable rights protect people from government power. Since these rights are an endowment or gift from God, they are not to be usurped by God's adversary, nor by mere humans. They are set in place to preserve the will of the individual.

History is replete with examples where men have assumed authority, in contrast to the will of the individual, then used that authority to force others to conform to their ideals. The Akkadians, the Old Babylonians, the Assyrians, the New Babylonians, the Hittites, the Persians, and Alexander all used brutal force to keep their conquered populations in line. The city state of Rome held a vast empire based on military might. Islam spread throughout the Mideast, Africa, and Spain at the point of the sword. Napoleon attempted to conquer all of Europe with his vast armies. We can universally claim that these exercises of power have caused incalculable pain and suffering throughout human history.

Yet military coercion is only a part of political power. Many forms of power exist, and, though these forms may not contribute as directly as warfare to human suffering, they are just as evil. For example, the French Revolution was somewhat based on the ideals of democracy, yet led to the Reign of Terror. Lenin succeeded in overthrowing the despotic czar, only to form a despotic oligarchy, which directly led to a brutal dictatorship. If we remove the warfare of Hitler's Third Reich from the equation, we can note that the political coercion of its ideology had little to commend it. These are, of course, extreme examples. However, relatively benign coercion, in order to force political will, also contributes to the suffering of a population.

This is why, in general, socialism is evil, because it is an ideology based on political coercion which stifles free will and people's inalienable rights. It doesn't matter if the socialism stems from revolutionary sources, such as Marx, or gradualist sources, such as Bernstein or Rousseau, socialism is an ideology which seek to coerce people toward collectivism, in order to create and to maintain a political power structure. In a socialist state, there are no controls which prevent government from becoming authoritarian or absolutist. In a democratic socialist state, democracy (and individual will) is given up to the "greater good" of the state.

This is also why most political propaganda is evil. Propaganda removes itself from the realm of persuasion and argument by supplanting reality with government-directed morality. While the message of propaganda may not be evil, the use of propaganda by government in order to create or maintain political power certainly is. Hence, the political propaganda trying to convince the American people that we really needed a comprehensive national health care plan, had at its core, the ideal to promote a larger and more complex government.

We can look at our current government's policies and quite easily determine whether or not they are evil. If a government policy limits the individual, in favor of the "public good," and the policy takes control of people's lives in order to promote more power, then we can be certain that it is a corruption of our inalienable rights. There is a legitimate use of power in government. However, power that promotes more power is not legitimate, nor can it maintain authority.

The founders of the US understood that the usurpation of power is the most dangerous (and therefore evil) aspect of government. They did their best to limit the evil of government by spreading the power throughout the population of citizens. Yet any government, even one as inspired and benign as ours, can become corrupted and turn its power against its citizens in order to protect its own power.

Here's just one contemporary example. Last week, President Obama took power away from Congress and implemented, by executive order, an immigration policy in line with his own, radically skewed ideology. It's obvious to anyone who distrusts politicians that President Obama did this in order to get political gain (i.e., to secure the Latino vote, and hence, to remain in power). While the immigration policy itself can't be called evil (it's merely wrong), President Obama's abuse of political power institutes illegality as legal.

Many of you will object to my use of the term "evil," perhaps merely because it sounds too much like an appeal to religion. But evil, as well as good, are perfectly sound philosophical concepts that have been thrown aside because our current culture tends to accept only the philosophy of radical moral relativism. We've labored  under this philosophy, with no real improvement in human thought, for a hundred years or more. It's time to take a look again at the problem of good and evil. It's time that we realize that moral relativism just doesn't measure up to the reality of the evil of political coercion.