Good and Evil
Chung van Gog, 01 October 2022
There are Good and Evil in this world. I conceptualize Good and Evil neither theologically nor subjectively, but objectively in that sense that any reasonable moral system will agree that those things I designate as Evil are, in fact, evil. So what is Evil? For one, genocide is Evil. From the elementary fact that Russia is committing genocide against Ukraine it follows that the Putinist regime is Evil. Of course, this is but one derivation: an astute person could have arrived at the same conclusion in a multitude of ways. Garry Kasparov first warned against Putin in 2001. The 1999 Moscow apartment bombings were most likely perpetrated by the FSB, Russia’s principal security agency.
From the fact that the Putin regime is Evil, it follows that all who are aligned with Putinism are aligned with Evil. This includes many powerful and influential people in the West. Take, for example, Angela Merkel. Though undoubtedly a charismatic, smart, and ‘‘nice’’ person, she, Gerhard Schröder, and others have clearly aligned Germany with Putin’s Russia and thereby with Evil. This doesn’t make the former German Bundeskanzler fully evil, though it definitely makes them partly evil (I am saying this regardless of political views). In any moral theory, it is crucial to be able to conceptualize Evil as a spectrum.
As a human being, it is your duty to consistently align yourself with the Good. The Good resists Evil in any form. But you need to be very careful, for Evil is a master deceiver. Pacifism may look Good, but as Orwell rightfully remarked, if pacifism opposes a war against fascism, it is aligned with Evil. To properly understand Good and Evil, one first of all needs to understand (a) interests, (b) information, and (c) funding. They constitute the vascular system of society. Only after understanding whose interests are furthered by any piece of information, one can deduce if this information is aligned with Good or with Evil. From multiple such pieces of information (and from “tells”) one can estimate the alignment of the person spreading this information.
