EVOLVING EVIL

EVIL IS NO ACCIDENT. EVIL IS A LOGICAL SYSTEM,THE CALCULUS OF PAIN, AN IRREPLACEABLE PATHWAY TO ECOLOGICAL SUSTAINABILITY. NOT ONLY IS EVIL A NECESSARY PRECONDITION FOR SENTIENCE, IT IS EVEN WHAT SENTIENCE WAS BORN FOR TO DO MORE OF, ONLY BETTER THAN BEFORE. 

(Some will scoff at the, apparently naïve, use of the concepts “evil”, “sentience”, “born for”, “better than before”, etc. We will explain them all.)

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EVIL IS NOT THE HAND OF FATE, IT’S A THEOREM PROCEEDING FROM THE AXIOMS OF LIFE.  IT IS NOT A DISASTER, IT IS A MIRACLE.  IT IS NOT LOVE’S ENEMY, BUT ITS PROGENITOR. EVIL IS ABOUT US. LOVE IT SOME, OR LEAVE US. WE JUST NEED TO HELP EVIL EVOLVE OPTIMALLY WITHIN OUR GLOBAL TECHNOLOGICAL  ECOLOGY, SO WE CAN GO ON WITH EVEN GREATER MORAL ACCOMPLISHMENTS.

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Warning: The most horrendous systems of thoughts, emotions and desires can evolve to rule, exploit, destroy, and exterminate.  We call the vast ensemble these systems of thought form “EVIL”. Traditionally, when evoking Evil, humanist thinkers are supposed to tremble, and avert their eyes, or condemn loudly and sanctimoniously, lest they be considered accomplices of Evil itself. We beg to differ, and feel it should be the other way around. Far from being some horror out there in the distance, Evil is at the very core of what it means to be human. And it is ignored at one’s own risk.

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  However, Auschwitz was more about Evil deliberately ignored, by most of the population of a country that had been perverted by intellectual fascism, rather than about Evil expressed and imposed by a few individuals. All it takes for Evil to reign is for good men to ignore it. There will always be some Evil out there. We will explain why exhaustively: such is our biology, and it had to be. But Evil thrives only when left alone, all too long. 

   In any case, those who “Evil” embarrasses too much should go read something else, because we are going to hurt their delicate feelings. Maybe such sensitive individuals sense that Evil lurks, untamed, not too far away, in the recesses of their own minds, hearts, or behaviors, ready to pounce, at the slightest provocation, so they prefer to burrow their conscience in the sands of unconsciousness, a task that requires an efforts of every instant.

  We demonstrate here that Evil was necessary for the apparition of sentient psychobiology.  No less. NO PAIN, NO BRAIN. No hell, no heaven, no love.

   In other words, Evil, far from being just an archaic nuisance best averted, was crucial for the rise of thinking, and the rise of all we are so proud of. Even to much adulated Love, Evil gave birth. Serious loving means deliberate determination to chop off the hydras’ heads. Besides those of a few lambs. 

  Evil is an emergent property. Such properties blossom when the whole is more than the union of its parts.

Emergence is a very deep meta property. One alludes to an aspect of emergence, when one evokes “Mother Nature”, a whole that is greater than the sum of its parts. Indeed emergence is the proverbial whole, more than the sum of its parts. Emergence’s existence is as deep as our knowledge of physics goes: Quantum Mechanics itself rests on it, because its conceptual core, the interference of matter waves, rests on it.

  Evil itself served as a ground for that further emergence. Sentience was mostly born to manage what we have come to know as Evil. Love came later. The full appreciation of the good and the beautiful would not have come, but for the Devil’s good offices.

  Hey, nobody said philosophy was going to be nice and cuddly all the time. The universe is rough, if one wants to live in it, it is wiser not to deny that. Philosophers have long held that principle of rudeness of the universe as obvious, and they have been hated for it. It comes with the territory.

  The demonstrations herein the following essay also make use of, and point out that, biological evolution is not just about the evolution of species, or about the evolution of groups of socially bound individuals. Evolution is not even just about the co-evolution of species, but more generally, evolution is about the co-evolution of entire ecological systems, integrated with their associated psychobiologies. Thus, to complain about Evil being highly successful is to complain about ecological balance being highly successful.

Ecoevolution, and, in particular, Evil Ecoevolution, lay at the opposite side of the explanatory spectrum from the “Selfish Gene” theory. Not only does the “Selfish Gene” becomes a secondary show, but the spirit of evolution as a phenomenon pertaining mostly to entire ecosystems, pretty much throws the “Selfish Gene” theory out of the window, as an object of vivid interest. Ecoevolution is by definition selfish: it’s the whole show, and the public and all the environment imaginable, in one. It can exhibit intelligence, that is adaptation.

  Morality evolved as the software for one ecological block. The rise of sentience is a consequence of this greatest of all ecological evolutions, the rise of a particular software. Evil protects the increasing complexity of the ecosystem, with its achievement of rising energy levels, against self destruction. Evil is intimately related the strategies that make possible to turn around the second law of thermodynamics.

   Due to Homo’s commanding presence as the top predator and destroyer of all that be, Evil and Sentience evolved as controlling software packages for the entire ecosystem. Evil also boost Sentience, enticing it enough to make it do what Sentience, which is intrinsically social, since it needs to be taught, tends not to do naturally, due to its more loving ground state. Evil is about doing what love cannot do. Evil is about doing whatever is necessary for the perpetuation of the ecology, even though it may violently contradict the natural, normal, daily, loving sociobiology Sentience was educated by.

  As the last few lines of this essay will make clear, one should not construe it as an unabashed, unrestrained apology of Evil.

The hunter gets to know the ferocious beast, but it is not just as a lover. Good hunting means good knowing. And then it ends up with the kill. Reciprocally, those who refuse to know anything about the bear, as they wander in its lair, will end up as dinner always.

  Ignoring evil is not just a moral hazard, but a form of collaboration with the worst. Those who refuse to know the exact nature of the Evil at hand, or of the Evil that directs their ways, collaborate with it, be it only by feeding it with their work, or their gullibility. There is no innocence in blind benevolence. Blind benevolence is a contradiction in adjecto. Blind benevolence is not just a silence of the soul, it is not just an impotence of the soul, it is a denial of the soul. Whether we admit it or not, some situations that one should never get into require Evil to get out of them. SOMETIMES, HELL IS THE ONLY EXIT THERE IS. True evil, the only one that could have been avoided, is in the details of how we got there to start with.

  This observation, that, quite often, devolution into hell can be completely attributed to the apparently innocent situation that preceded it, has very practical applications.

  For example U.S. foreign policy, with its very long running, multi generational entanglements with Saudi and Afghan religious fanatics, Iraqi and Pakistani dictators, and even the CIA assisted rebirth of Shiite fundamentalism in Iran (1953), implemented the very condition of a devilish situation. “9/11” has been a (relatively) small piece of hell to pay.

  Similarly, if the USA had considered the worst possible consequences carefully, it may have wanted to support its fellow sister republic and parent, France, in a timely manner, rather than to let some of the richest and most powerful elements of American business reality invest in Hitler’s criminally crazy “Third Reich”. True, this gave birth to the 50 year long “American century”. But was this piece of comfort and hubris for a few, worth 100 million killed?

   The DEVIL HIDES IN THE DETAILS OF THE CONSEQUENCES. The best moral attitude is to control risk by choosing to expect the consequences to be as nasty as they could be foreseen to blossom, and then proceeding backwards from the overwhelming desire of never visiting such a hell hole.

  The best moral attitude is certainly not in claiming that Evil does not exist. Or in claiming that man is Evil (Christianity’s theory of Original Sin), or that, to do away with Evil, the perception of that Evil universe should be extinguished (Buddhism’s Nirvana, the way of the Swastika: see no evil, do no evil). If Evil did not exist, none of us, poor devils, would exist, either. But that does not mean that Evil is good on the face of it (as all too many literal interpreters of the Qur’an have it). Evil is a resort, true, but a last resort, thank God.

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ABSTRACT

EVIL EVOLVED BECAUSE ECOLOGICAL HARMONY REQUIRED IT.

In the long run of hundreds of millions of years, ecological harmony evolved sentience in the family hominidae. Looked at it that way, EVIL WAS A PRECONDITION TO SENTIENCE (without ecological harmony, sentience would never have had the time to evolve).  In its most fundamental way, evil is the dynamic stabilization program for the survival of advanced evolution. (One should remember this when brandishing tough, or even Evil means to prevent nuclear weapons’ proliferation: EVIL IN THE SERVICE OF HARMONY IS NO EVIL. Thus, because an Islamist nuclear bomb is more destabilizing than an Israeli one, it may be acceptable to use evil means to prevent the former, while treating the later with benign neglect. The calculus of Evil is a subtle thing.)

Evil behavior is the part of psychobiology which entices higher animals to enjoy enforcing ecological sustainability by behaving ferociously, and even cruelly. Verily, it is not just species which evolve.  On their own, individual species are constrained in how much they can evolve without the co-evolution of other species up and down the life energy chain. At some point, killing plankton becomes a greater crime than killing particular people (because, if all the plankton dies in an acidic bath, courtesy of the USA and its Chinese factory, we all die, and most the species with us.)

ENTIRE ECOLOGIES HAVE TO EVOLVE AS ENTIRE BLOCKS. They could not do otherwise.  In particular, MINDS ROSE AS STEWARDS OF THE LAND, AND AS MODERATORS, AND MANAGERS, OF LOWER SPECIES, NOT JUST IN THE SERVICE OF EGOISM OR ALTRUISM of the species that carry them.  Conscience, and sentience, did not evolve just to obsess about food, love, sex, reproduction, and even self preservation.

Minds have much more sophisticated purposes than just contemplating the universe. Minds also insure that the reproduction of others does not get out of control. (That is still another evolutionary reason why male lions kill cubs, besides the allegedly well known one that biologists have invented, that they want to foster their genes, or more prosaically, and quite obviously, that they want to become main significant other, and have sex; from our point of view, lions have evolved, not just to love lions, but to kill lions, too; a good proof of this is that, when his own cub is becoming a lion of his own, the dad, far from being proud, will kill him too.)

SEX AND LOVE IMPLY EXPONENTIAL GROWTH OF “TERMINATOR” SPECIES.  EVIL AND ITS MINIONS RESTRAIN THE PROLIFERATION OF TERMINATORS BEFORE IRREVERSIBLE ECOLOGICAL DAMAGE IS DONE TO THE ENTIRE BIOLOGICAL SPACESHIP EARTH.  In other words, EVIL IS A THEOREM, the demonstration of which nature made.  L’ENFER C’EST POUR LES AUTRES (Hell is for taking care of others).

In truth, it’s not just minds, that enforce biological sustainability. Other species, by necessity, were always devised for co-evolution and ecology stabilization. (Too nasty a microbe cannot exist, because it would kill its host, for example, and be a contradiction onto itself!)

Conscience and sentience have a divine purpose.  Out of them emerge the Gods, complete with Hell. As we will see, there are very good reasons why all religions have heaven and hell. Reasons that we were too unsubtle to gather explicitly before, but the time has come.

Wanting to know the Gods better, humankind always did, and will always do, because having those Gods are nothing else than the leading principles we need to organize our minds. The Gods keep us company… They are the highest principles we have, humanized so much they become our best friends. And they are not to be spurned. Nor is the Devil. Not only does He makes sense of them, and helps define them by greater contrast, it even gives them life. So I claim.