Amerika

What would possess someone to spend irreplaceable hours of his finite life, typing into an electronic publishing system in the hopes of reaching a marginalized, nearly-eradicated, and isolated few?

The answer is that some of us desire — more than anything else — the restoration of sanity. Civilization is the scroll on which our great deeds are written, and when it is moribund, all of those are slated to be forgotten. All that we work to achieve will be lost.

And so, the isolated writer — long over pretensions of being any more than a camera, or that which reveals what is before us but denied — embarks on a path of trying to make sense of symbols and to peel away the layers of nonsense in which humans camouflage their actual task, also burying their inner hopes and desires.

This path leads us to an ancient understanding, which is that although the fundamental crisis of the West is bad leadership left in the hands of We The People instead of the most competent, the fundamental problem of humanity is evil, or selfish personal decisions which create negative side-effects.

That in turn leads us to the question of what evil is. Naturally this will be the first target for evil itself, because like any parasite, it will hope to conceal its negative deeds and hide in a cloud of confusion created by the equivalency of evil with normalcy, or worse, with good.

In the ancient sense, evil was a disruption of natural order and balance. The ancient Greeks believed that a hierarchy of humans existed as it did among the species of nature, and that to disrupt this — to become more powerful than one ought to be, for example — led to illusion, failure and punishment by the gods.

For the Nordics, evil was more simple: illusion. That which was not true appeared more true than truth, and so people followed it to their doom. In this view, evil is like an oasis in a desert: a tempting vision which turns out to be a trap.

The Christians followed with a simpler view. There was an order of God; those who transgressed against this were following evil, and failure to remove them created a situation in which evil triumphed. On the other hand, this view got translated into “Thou shalt not murder,” from the Ten Commandments.

All of these were straightforward. How were they corrupted?

The Greeks were corrupted when the order of nature was replaced with a human order, or democracy, in which the visions of others were accepted as “natural” and therefore part of nature. At this point, hierarchy dissolved and was replaced with the notion that interfering with any other person was bad.

The Nordics fell when theories and symbols were presented as being true in the same way reality was. This turned faces away from reality, and toward the world of logic as it exists in a laboratory or on a chalkboard, which is to say “true” but only if its assumptions were true, as they steadily were not.

Corruption visited Christianity when “Thou shalt not murder,” referring to unjust killing, was replaced with “Thou shalt not kill,” which made the erroneous assumption that all lives were equal and therefore all people were blameless in their choices. Killing those who merited it became bad, a form of pacifism.

If you ask me the meaning of a word, I say “To whom? And when?” because every definition we use is based on many other concepts, most of which are encoded in culture but only if people still live who understand them. Others are easily altered by changing the words we use to define words, or the concept of society itself.

Evil walks among us. It presents itself as pleasant, kind, generous and pleasurable. And yet the goal is always the same: to alter the definition of evil so that all acts are equal, which erases the notion of evil and allows evil to thrive among us.

Tags: corruption, evil, hubris, sin