That NCGR Meeting: Are Some People Purely Evil?

8 Responses to “That NCGR Meeting: Are Some People Purely Evil?”

1. Daeshii says on 5/17/06 at 3:37 pm:
   

   Once upon a time, I had a conversation with a gf about this topic, and we decided — and I swear we were sober — that there are only four kinds of people in the world:

   Absolute Evil (Hitler)
   Absolute Good (Mother Teresa)
   The Catalysts (anyone who can assist in the creation of the first two. They can be good or evil (sometimes both), but not to the extreme)
   The Pawns (anyone who is just mowed over by the first two)

   Now, it is just a theory, but in my experience, it’s pretty much well founded. I am a catalyst and have spawn both good and evil. My girlfriend was Absolute Good, to the point that I couldn’t see how we were friends.

   Ahem, I’ll quit blogging in your blog now.

2. Stephanie M. says on 5/17/06 at 5:10 pm:
   

   Absolutely, yes. Some people are just evil. Firsthand experience tells me that.

   Evil people have their uses. Sometimes, havoc needs to be wreaked.

3. Shannon Block of Hollywood says on 5/17/06 at 5:15 pm:
   

   I can really see this perspective that some people aren’t meant for goodness or do-goodery this time around, especially in terms of Karma, cause-and-effect, and the Oneness that masquerades as a multiplicity of phenomena.

   Things such as Good, Evil, Destruction, Creativeness, etc. are all dependent on perspective. However, what the question seems to pertain to particularly is the kind of individual that commits acts that a majority (despite time or place or most cultures even) would view to be destructive. This Evil, that a collective understands to be ill-will from a person who never appears as anything but a Sadist, can still have Value. And, does this Value balance it? Does is imbue it with some kind of “Good?”

   Despite how incomprehesible or reprehensible the crime…..and that individual may have not had the means or the will to prevent it, doesn’t that somehow make them innocent? In this paradoxal balance, is there really more of one than the other?

   I mean, I know I come from a limited perspective most of the time–no matter how hard I want to think I’m being fair (yes I have Mars in Libra). Being human and all, I just can’t see how some events I perceive as awfu,l will, in the end, be the most beneficial to the most people.

   Anger can whittle perspective down to a fine point if I let it, as in:
   “I’m right and good and THEY are Bad and Evil for doing these things to me/myfamily/things-that-are-mine!”

   Beyond just my own ego-nature and Judgements, there are other perspectives—I try to keep that in mind. I might think people are Evil or Part-Evil or All-Good and yet, beyond all I could ever come up with to try and understand why some people don’t do what I would have done, there’s always some unforseen view. And it’s this, invisible viewpoint that can offer wisdom to my anger-fear-induced blindness.

   Wisdom/Perspective that offer, like a mirror, a reflection. This can suddenly shift my entire ideology of evil-good, or it can at least transform my Anger into Calm and non-judgement.

   The Vajrayana Buddhists call this the “Mirror-Like” Wisdom and it’s meant to transmute anger and judgementalism. I can see how it’s applicable here.

4. Nia says on 5/18/06 at 1:42 am:
   

   I don’t know. It’s hard to say.

   You have people like Charles Manson with a heavily loaded chart who is the son of a hooker who has no time for him and gets abandoned and passed along to care homes where he gets sexually abused and then when he grows up bingo he’s a psychopath. And it’s hard to say what that means whether he was pure evil inside from the start or whether he was created that way because his nature and his environment mixed in a particular manner.

   I’ve worked with adults who were sexually abused as children and their stories are absolutely horrific so I have a hard time not thinking of the people who abused them as evil. However most abusers were horrifically abused themselves as children, so….

   I know people do evil things but I’d still like to believe that there is some good in everyone, somewhere.

   Was Hitler evil or just misguided? Are people who plant bombs terrorists or freedom fighters? And so on and so on.

   Absolute Evil is hard to pinpoint just like Absolute Good (which I am not so inclined to believe in, either).

5. Laura Elizabeth says on 5/18/06 at 6:46 am:
   

   Yes, there are evil people. It is a term that gets used too easily, just as the word love does.

6. Toni says on 5/18/06 at 9:02 am:
   

   Yes, I think some people are just BAD and soulless through and through. I would hesitate to use the word evil, because it’s the extreme and used far too readily, but some people do embody it. I would also like to point out (pettily) that Mother Theresa wasn’t all good. She accepted money from druglords and mobsters and said the greatest threat to world peace was abortion.(!)

7. Marly says on 5/18/06 at 10:22 am:
   

   I think there are evil people. But truly truly evil people I think are rarer than we imagine. On the other hand, there’s a reason we say that “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.”

   I don’t fault Mother Theresa for taking money from druglords, man. There’s plenty of “decent” people out there who don’t give to charity and if a druglord or a criminal wants to give money to a good cause, what the hell, you know? The money itself ain’t tainted. Now if they’re asking for something in exchange for that $$, well, yeah, that’s unethical. But the Jewish Sages do say: You should try to do good with your good inclination and with your evil inclination also.

   I don’t know if any of that makes any sense. I’m kinda tired right now.

8. silverfoot says on 5/18/06 at 2:15 pm:
   

   i don’t believe there are any real absolutes… and i think ‘good’ and ‘evil’ (like ‘justice’ or any other moral value) are things we humans construct, which are heavily influenced by the culturally and historically specific moment/s or era/s in which they are created.

   we might agree that murder is an evil act. but we might disagree on how best to correct that act - whether the death sentence is an appropriate moral response, or just two wrongs trying to make a right. we might even be able to find a moral justification for the original killing - and that is pure ideology at work. it’s ‘okay’ to kill if it’s self defence, or in war, or if the victim is someone the majority doesn’t care about (say, a criminal. or in other eras, various minorities).

   Napoleon is credited with saying that history is merely an agreed upon fiction, and i think that is largely true of our contemporary society as well.

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