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The Stupidity of Evil

Samantha Rinne

Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
Yes, you read that right. Evil fancies itself crafty, but it takes a needlessly malicious solution that just ruins everything around it.

I'm watching this movie called Man of Iron, where this guy gets promoted to a management job because he has natural charisma and raw talent. He works at a factory at the industrial level, and the coworkers look up to him. The president notices his traits and decides to make him general manager (and then later vice president). Never mind that his real talent lies in hand-on work, that he has basically no administrative skills and can barely read. He even says that he wants to go back. The current manager decides to make him look bad, by tempting with all sorts of fine things (new house, new cars, even new plumbing) and encourage him to take time away while he purposes creates trouble which in turn makes angry workers. The thing is, this manager is perfectly good at admin work but through his jealousy, he wastes a precious resource to the company and almost closes the plant. All he would actually need to do is side with the guy's wife (who was happy with the old stuff) and convince him that he would be happier where he was. But no, he wants to destroy him, because he thinks that someone wants what he has. That everyone must want what seems popular to that person, that it's worth taking.

The Dead Rat – Taoism.net

(Ultimately, they riot, and he's stuck in the center of it. The factory worker is officially the vice president of the company, but has learned his lesson and goes back to the ground floor)

I want you to think about the nature of evil, and how it does things in a way that doesn't actually serve efficiency at all. How it screws over not only other people, but actually itself. Ever been fired from a job that you were talented at because the new boss felt inferior? Or a coworker try to sabotage you? What about after? Sometimes the business goes under.
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Also, a possibly relevant song.

 

sun rise

The world is on fire
Premium Member
Whether it's called sowing and reaping or the law of karma, actions have consequences. Negative actions, sooner or later, have negative consequences. Positive actions have positive consequences.
 

ImmortalFlame

Woke gremlin
I think there is a danger is stories like the OP portraying evil as ultimately self-defeating, as I think it can instill a sense of complacency in people who become assured that evil will always somehow defeat itself.

But, that's just not true of reality.

I read a similar story to the OP recently that takes a very different view. It was a play called Sweat by the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, which is set in a working class community built around a factory in Reading, Pennsylvania. It deals with the conflict that arises between two very close families - one white and one black - when the mother of the black family is promoted from the warehouse floor, where her friends work, into a sub-manager position above her friends. Shortly afterwards, the company starts downsizing the factory, firing workers and moving jobs to Mexico, and the black mother ends up being blamed by her former colleagues who believe she should be doing more to protect their jobs (when she doesn't have any real power, and can't join the union because she desperately needed the increased pay to support her son), leading to accusations that she was only given the role due to positive discrimination and is taking advantage of it.

Things get worse when, following the union protest, the factory starts advertising for new workers in areas of the town with Hispanic communities, leading the unionized workers to begin blaming the Hispanic community for being scabs and taking their jobs at the factory. Over the course of the play, it becomes clear to the audience that everything that's happening is essentially manufactured by the factory owners (who never appear on stage) to deliberately avoid blame by making all of their workers blame each other, using race to further divide them while the owners gradually move everything to Mexico and escape with basically no repercussions, while all the characters are left infighting and blaming each other for their situations. It's a pretty powerful play, and an excellent statement on the nature of evil not as the actions and behaviours of single individuals, but as a societal ill that can be the result of corrupt and easily manipulated systems of control.
 

PureX

Veteran Member
I want you to think about the nature of evil, and how it does things in a way that doesn't actually serve efficiency at all. How it screws over not only other people, but actually itself. Ever been fired from a job that you were talented at because the new boss felt inferior? Or a coworker try to sabotage you? What about after? Sometimes the business goes under.
Excellent post, thank you.

I often get frustrated at the common practice among movie and TV writers of creating 'super villains' to increase the insurmountable feat that the hero must accomplish to be the hero. It's just a cheap trick employed by unimaginative writers, and it bothers me because I know that villain are not super intelligent or super crafty, as these lazy writers are so inclined to depict them. Real 'villains' are fools who do exactly as you say: 'cut off their own noses to spite their own faces'. They let greed and ego drive them to behaviors that harm themselves and everyone around them because they're too stupid to see themselves doing it, admit it, and change. The term "evil genius" is self-contradictory. It just doesn't happen that way. And thank God it doesn't, because if evil were that clever humanity would have long since perished.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
Just the old Peter Principle: People tend to rise to their level of incompetence.
 

Samantha Rinne

Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
I think there is a danger is stories like the OP portraying evil as ultimately self-defeating, as I think it can instill a sense of complacency in people who become assured that evil will always somehow defeat itself.

But, that's just not true of reality.

I read a similar story to the OP recently that takes a very different view. It was a play called Sweat by the Pulitzer prize-winning playwright Lynn Nottage, which is set in a working class community built around a factory in Reading, Pennsylvania. It deals with the conflict that arises between two very close families - one white and one black - when the mother of the black family is promoted from the warehouse floor, where her friends work, into a sub-manager position above her friends. Shortly afterwards, the company starts downsizing the factory, firing workers and moving jobs to Mexico, and the black mother ends up being blamed by her former colleagues who believe she should be doing more to protect their jobs (when she doesn't have any real power, and can't join the union because she desperately needed the increased pay to support her son), leading to accusations that she was only given the role due to positive discrimination and is taking advantage of it.

Things get worse when, following the union protest, the factory starts advertising for new workers in areas of the town with Hispanic communities, leading the unionized workers to begin blaming the Hispanic community for being scabs and taking their jobs at the factory. Over the course of the play, it becomes clear to the audience that everything that's happening is essentially manufactured by the factory owners (who never appear on stage) to deliberately avoid blame by making all of their workers blame each other, using race to further divide them while the owners gradually move everything to Mexico and escape with basically no repercussions, while all the characters are left infighting and blaming each other for their situations. It's a pretty powerful play, and an excellent statement on the nature of evil not as the actions and behaviours of single individuals, but as a societal ill that can be the result of corrupt and easily manipulated systems of control.

The Mandate of Heaven is a thing for a reason. Empires that exploit their citizens ultimately cause them to stop working and stop caring. This in turn causes the state to stop producing. Ultimately, it either becomes a non-functional mud pit where there is nothing left to steal and nobody cares about anything, or people riot or it falls before then. This is not to say you should do nothing. The first case is a soulless husk of a country that takes decades or centuries to get back on track, while the latter can actually find something to live for fairly quickly.

In the above instance you cited, the play ends with no repercussions for the owners who are playing both sides of the union. But I've studied what happens with unions. They think they get off scot-free by simply firing one side or the other. But the truth is, Detroit became the way it is largely because unionization didn't promise the needed boost to business but screwed over single moms like that who would rather work a long and hard job than get sucked into the drama of endless strikes. Plus, any people laid off if the company calls the unions bluff are sometimes unable to get jobs elsewhere if the main company is the only game in town. So now we have homeless and malcontents, and the makings of criminal behavior. Detroit is now a mess, and part of it is due to strikes driving the bottom line up, union action creating constant tension, and the daily workers getting screwed and losing their job while maybe the company benefits short-term. The long term is a kettle of fish of a different color, though (yes that's a mixed metaphor, deal with it).

This is precisely why you shouldn't have an income tax or a property tax but should have voluntarily donated taxes and should collect money another way (public businesses like the post office). In this way you can get money for government without people actually worrying about it. The Tao te Ching speaks of an ideal state as one where people don't even know thet have a ruler. (This paragraph goes with the paragraph two before, I'm writing on a Kindle and sandwiched stuff in) Basically, the less you interfere with people's lives, the less tense they are. The less tense they are, the more likely they will be loyal to your business for generations. The more likely they'll last for generations. I've watched many businesses in the 20th century. Many of them replaced legacy companies by out-performing them. However, some of these after killing off a big company tried to expand too quickly and ran out of money, or lost their small-town charm, or just had the karma of killing competition eventually catch up to them in the form of anti-trust monopoly breakup. And many others have tanked because they relied on prestige of past performance, and forgot that the duty every day is to treat employees as well as the customers, because employees are related to customers and can tell stories (and can be customers themselves).
 

Samantha Rinne

Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
Excellent post, thank you.

I often get frustrated at the common practice among movie and TV writers of creating 'super villains' to increase the insurmountable feat that the hero must accomplish to be the hero. It's just a cheap trick employed by unimaginative writers, and it bothers me because I know that villain are not super intelligent or super crafty, as these lazy writers are so inclined to depict them. Real 'villains' are fools who do exactly as you say: 'cut off their own noses to spite their own faces'. They let greed and ego drive them to behaviors that harm themselves and everyone around them because they're too stupid to see themselves doing it, admit it, and change. The term "evil genius" is self-contradictory. It just doesn't happen that way. And thank God it doesn't, because if evil were that clever humanity would have long since perished.

Well, as a writer myself, you can have an evil genius, and still make them an idiot. My own book have two villains and the third antagonist is a righteous extremist that has a good in theory goal but must be stopped. An evil genius (coincidentally, this is also a philosophy theory name) can happen but they are a genius in other ways. My first villain is a wizard who literally does the mad scientist cackling thing. But actually, he's mourning his former wife as he tries making chimeras to replace her (the story literally shows that despite his brilliance, he could actually just go to a cleric and have them perform a resurrection since this is high fantasy, but instead he wants to go to a demon to make an artificial copy of her). The demon in question (villain #2) of course betrays him, and he's left in a wretched state where he joins the party against the demon. Meanwhile the demon's entire plan involves merging two worlds in a way that will kill virtually everyone, so yeah he didn't think thing through either. Both of them are accomplished in their own right and by most standards brilliant. But they nonetheless suck because they've decided to do stuff that is self-destructive.

The wizard is actually fun to write because of how depraved his life is, and how everything down to the way he had sex to his home defenses (stuff like traps around his bathroom and bedroom) basically hurts him, until he actually realizes stuff and changes things. He never really becomes a good character but being a slightly less evil mad scientist who finally stops generating such terrible karma.
 

ImmortalFlame

Woke gremlin
In the above instance you cited, the play ends with no repercussions for the owners who are playing both sides of the union. But I've studied what happens with unions. They think they get off scot-free by simply firing one side or the other. But the truth is, Detroit became the way it is largely because unionization didn't promise the needed boost to business but screwed over single moms like that who would rather work a long and hard job than get sucked into the drama of endless strikes. Plus, any people laid off if the company calls the unions bluff are sometimes unable to get jobs elsewhere if the main company is the only game in town. So now we have homeless and malcontents, and the makings of criminal behavior. Detroit is now a mess, and part of it is due to strikes driving the bottom line up, union action creating constant tension, and the daily workers getting screwed and losing their job while maybe the company benefits short-term. The long term is a kettle of fish of a different color, though (yes that's a mixed metaphor, deal with it).
I think blaming the unions for a problem they were reacting against is misguided. The issue isn't that simple - it's a symptom of the system that people are forced to live within. Unions are necessary because, without a voice, workers are routinely exploited by their employers. The fault lies with the forces who have the power, who made the decisions that negatively impacted these people's lives, and who themselves exist within (and willingly manipulate) a culture that ultimately rewards them and encourages their behaviour. It's not as simple as "sometimes bad people do evil things but these things will inevitably come back to haunt them". More often than not, the people who have power will remain in power, and the people most negatively impacted by their actions will never see justice. Karma just doesn't work - you have to make sure to punish and react against evil when we see it, not just assume it will all work out in the end.

This is precisely why you shouldn't have an income tax or a property tax but should have voluntarily donated taxes and should collect money another way (public businesses like the post office). In this way you can get money for government without people actually worrying about it. The Tao te Ching speaks of an ideal state as one where people don't even know thet have a ruler. (This paragraph goes with the paragraph two before, I'm writing on a Kindle and sandwiched stuff in) Basically, the less you interfere with people's lives, the less tense they are. The less tense they are, the more likely they will be loyal to your business for generations. The more likely they'll last for generations. I've watched many businesses in the 20th century. Many of them replaced legacy companies by out-performing them. However, some of these after killing off a big company tried to expand too quickly and ran out of money, or lost their small-town charm, or just had the karma of killing competition eventually catch up to them in the form of anti-trust monopoly breakup. And many others have tanked because they relied on prestige of past performance, and forgot that the duty every day is to treat employees as well as the customers, because employees are related to customers and can tell stories (and can be customers themselves).
Ignoring for a moment that this simply isn't true for the vast majority of major corporations who are essentially immune to collapse, here's a question:

Who is most negatively impacted by those companies falling apart?

Is it the CEO's who, most likely, will still walk away millionaires and just start new business ventures; or is it the thousands upon thousands of lower-level employees who desperately depended on the small income they made as part of that company and who never actually made any of the decisions that lead to those companies falling apart and share no blame whatsoever for them doing so?

In the overwhelming majority of cases of major company collapses, it's the latter.

So that's not justice, and it's not fair. By and large, companies falling apart disproportionately negatively affect the people who depend the most on them and have no role in mis-managing them, while the people who profited the most and made all the wrong decisions will walk away with little repercussion whatsoever.
 

ImmortalFlame

Woke gremlin
Well, as a writer myself, you can have an evil genius, and still make them an idiot. My own book have two villains and the third antagonist is a righteous extremist that has a good in theory goal but must be stopped. An evil genius (coincidentally, this is also a philosophy theory name) can happen but they are a genius in other ways. My first villain is a wizard who literally does the mad scientist cackling thing. But actually, he's mourning his former wife as he tries making chimeras to replace her (the story literally shows that despite his brilliance, he could actually just go to a cleric and have them perform a resurrection since this is high fantasy, but instead he wants to go to a demon to make an artificial copy of her). The demon in question (villain #2) of course betrays him, and he's left in a wretched state where he joins the party against the demon. Meanwhile the demon's entire plan involves merging two worlds in a way that will kill virtually everyone, so yeah he didn't think thing through either. Both of them are accomplished in their own right and by most standards brilliant. But they nonetheless suck because they've decided to do stuff that is self-destructive.
If I may offer constructive criticism, as a writer: don't you think that just weakens those villains as characters? A villain who makes stupid, self-destructive decisions isn't as interesting from a story perspective as a villain whose means, motives and actions align.

A character can be self-destructive, but even then there should be motive and rationale behind that. A character who is self-destructive entirely by accident is just a fool. They're the kind of characters who serve better as comic relief, not meaningful threats.
 

Samantha Rinne

Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
I don't think that's the case, looking at it months later. Just as a perfectly good Jesus is boring (I connect with Jesus not from people saying he was perfect, but by understanding what it is to be without sin), a villain's character flaws read flat if they are perfectly villainous, with no sense of anything else.

As for the latter criticism, there is rationale. He (1) wants to prove to other scientists "they thought I was mad" that his ideas are of worth so he is basically driven by personal pride. These experiments were in fact responsible for his wife's death, but they also brought both his former wife and his new girlfriend together with him, so they are not intrinsically evil. It's just his drive to do so at all costs that's the problem. (2) He believes that raising her would take her out of any enjoyment in the Afterlife, so he is motivated to instead cross the line and play God by creating an artificial soul with the help of a demon (despite the fact that as it turns out, such a thing can't be made by demons). (3) He also is motivated by paranoia which in turn makes his house unsafe enough to fail OSHA regulations, and by fetishes enough to make him stuck in sexual relationships that are painful.

A monolithic evil without any consideration of how it affects the person involved didn't really work for this story, while this one was at least kinda funny. Also, the genre I am going for is equal parts fantasy/Lovecraft horror/romance/comedy, so someone shooting themselves in the foot is within bounds.
 
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Samantha Rinne

Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
Not really. That choice of words is in reference to the collective act of certain behaviors.

"That which involves personal harm to others in return for (temporary) personal gain."

That is, evil people as a whole are those who scheme to for instance defraud or embezzle someone else.

Suppose you were to embezzle all the money of a company, for instance. You get maybe 2 billion? And then it goes under, leaving you without a job (even if you manage to get away with it completely. However, the money involved to run the company will over the course of years of you giving your best service, and the company might generate as much as 6 billion, of which as a good worker you are sure to get a cut. Now, if they are not paying you a good cut, it is them who are committing evil against you, and you ought to leave.

Evil is not an entity, it is the sum of entities engaged in evil.
 

Valjean

Veteran Member
Premium Member
"That which involves personal harm to others in return for (temporary) personal gain."
So harm that returns permanent gain, or harm that returns no gain is not evil?
That is, evil people as a whole are those who scheme to for instance defraud or embezzle someone else.
Does evil have to involve harm to persons, or can it also be harm to nature?
Suppose you were to embezzle all the money of a company, for instance. You get maybe 2 billion? And then it goes under, leaving you without a job (even if you manage to get away with it completely.
If you had two billion you wouldn't need a job, or you could start your own company and take any job in it you wished.
However, the money involved to run the company will over the course of years of you giving your best service, and the company might generate as much as 6 billion, of which as a good worker you are sure to get a cut. Now, if they are not paying you a good cut, it is them who are committing evil against you, and you ought to leave.
Are you living in the '50s?
hysterical.gif
$6B companies don't share the profits with workers. That would violate their contract with shareholders -- to minimize costs and maximize profits. If a worker agrees to work for X, and the company becomes hugely profitable, the profit belongs to management and shareholders. Cutting the worker in would be unethical, by current business standards. If productivity per worker doubles, that profit goes to management -- the worker has already agreed to work for X.

The tax structure and business regulations used to encourage companies plow profits back into the company, and to cut workers in on profits. Workers were even free to unionize if their company was stingy.
No more. Companies are penalized for pro-social policies.[/quote][/quote]
 

Samantha Rinne

Resident Genderfluid Writer/Artist
Nope. I don't really need to know how big modern companies work anyway. I'm using a theoretical of a simple, poorly designed startup. Which is what I know about because I own my own business, and it's pretty small.

I know, it's possible to embezzle money from a company if it happens to be structured poorly (for example, let's assume I know absolutely zero about franchises and major corporations, and we are talking about an internet startup where someone owns the whole thing). So, since my ignorance about major corporations is showing, let's assume this $6 billion company is a sole proprietorship that relies on an accountant, because the guy is an inventor of some service (he opens an online business for ummm pet therapy done anywhere in the world) and terrible in keeping records. The accountant is hired outside his company, and while he has billions, it's all about to change because the accountant thinks he can defraud the guy and the money won't be missed. After all, he makes money every second or so. Just one problem. He kinda immediately knows who stole his money and that guy is fired and arrested before he can spend a cent of it. If he had left alone, on the other hand, gradually, that guy would see profits year after year, as the guy pays him well to manage his money (absurdly well).

Harm is harm, but if you don't gain anything out of it, you're more pathetic than evil.

I'm not sure it makes a difference whether it's humans or nature. But humans are more likely to have a clear cut guide to when you're harming them (stabbing someone's leg, for instance, they kinda let you know). With nature, you would think cutting down trees and burning stuff is a bad thing. But ash can fertilize soil, and not cutting trees can overcrowd them, and create messes like the devastation in California. In short, nature isn't as easy to figure out when you're helping or harming. I know for a fact that high-minded ppl decided they were going to save the world by recycling. They ran out of U.S. spots to recycle so they shipped it by boat to China. It ended up in our oceans. Nice job, ********. Way to save the planet.
 
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ImmortalFlame

Woke gremlin
Nope. I don't really need to know how big modern companies work anyway. I'm using a theoretical of a simple, poorly designed startup. Which is what I know about because I own my own business, and it's pretty small.

I know, it's possible to embezzle money from a company if it happens to be structured poorly (for example, let's assume I know absolutely zero about franchises and major corporations, and we are talking about an internet startup where someone owns the whole thing). So, since my ignorance about major corporations is showing, let's assume this $6 billion company is a sole proprietorship that relies on an accountant, because the guy is an inventor of some service (he opens an online business for ummm pet therapy done anywhere in the world) and terrible in keeping records. The accountant is hired outside his company, and while he has billions, it's all about to change because the accountant thinks he can defraud the guy and the money won't be missed. After all, he makes money every second or so. Just one problem. He kinda immediately knows who stole his money and that guy is fired and arrested before he can spend a cent of it. If he had left alone, on the other hand, gradually, that guy would see profits year after year, as the guy pays him well to manage his money (absurdly well).
Again, your example ASSUMES incompetency on the part of the man defrauding another. In such a scenario, sure, the person committing the fraud would get their comeuppance, and I'm sure that there is a large amount of fraud cases where this kind of thing happens.

But it's not reasonable to expect this to always be the case. There are undoubtedly accountants out there who are exceptionally gifted at gaming the system, avoiding suspicion, and avoiding prosecution. These types of people do exist - people who are actually GOOD at manipulating people and society for their own ends, and bringing them to justice often takes far more than simply waiting for them to make mistakes.

Again, you have to remember that the victims of such crimes tend not to be the wealthy or powerful or influential - people who can actually do something about it - but the vulnerable. They're people who the criminal knows they are more likely to get away with ripping off.
 
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