Monday, April 24, 2017

The road to hell is paved by good people





If you believe in the First Principle (uh-oh, there he goes again mabel), that it is self-evidently true that all men are created equal and endowed with unalienable natural rights, then you understand that there are no good people and there are no bad people. There are just people. People who take actions which are both good and bad.

Now everybody knows that the taliban and isis are bad people, right? I mean they chop off peoples heads and machine-gun children mutilate the genitals of little girls. Bad people, right? Only bad people do bad things, right?

And you're a good person, right? You would never do those kind of bad things, right?

Oh really?

Down throughout history, from the time when Cain slew Abel to the genocide happening right this minute in Syria and Venezuela and North Korea and Bolivia and Somalia, in every case, the killers were normal people who thought of themselves as good people. When confronted with the choice of doing good or doing evil, their choice came down to whether or not they actually believed in the First Principle, whether they believed in treating others as they themselves would be treated, whether they believed in holding themselves to the same standard they held others to.

We never know when we're going to face a crisis in which we have to choose to do good or to do evil. History tells us that those who don't already know the right path when the crisis arrives will pick one that appears to be easiest or least immediately painful.

So yeah. Those guys at Babi Yar? They weren't bad people. They were just people. People who made a conscious decision to do bad stuff, to perpetuate evil.

Far better to know that you are simply a person, nothing special, and just as capable of doing good and bad as the next person. Otherwise you might not have worked out what you will not allow yourself to do, and why.


12 comments:

  1. Interesting. I need to think on that one.

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    1. To paraphrase Lone Watie, it's not for givin' answers. It's just for thinkin' about.

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  2. Are most of your daily chores such that you can put your body on auto-pilot and let your mind free to come up with such profound thoughts? Either that, or you stay up way too late at night. And I don't think it is the second.
    You should write a book. I will contribute money to help you publish. Self-publishing is not frightfully expensive. Please think about it.

    Paul L. Quandt

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    1. I used to think about robbin' banks. But it never worked out. Seriously, my brain does a lot of thinking while my body is doing other things. I have given some thought to opening a patreon account for the blog. Which might be a way to get a book written. I'll have to think on it some more.

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    2. "I used to think about robbin' banks." Robbin' banks could be profitable 70 to 100 years ago; now they don't keep much cash in them and they have all sorts of things to make it easier to catch bank robbers. Darn! Too late again. Dad blast it.

      Paul

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  3. "History tells us that those who don't already know the right path when the crisis arrives will pick one that appears to be easiest or least immediately painful."
    However, I'm not sure that I fully agree with this part. Sometimes, I think, the reason is in profit, either physical or psychological. Although, I'm open to argument on this.

    Paul

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    1. Reasoning is always a big ball of yarn. There's never one simple reason, one perfect justification. The point I'm trying to make is that we are all a single act away from joining the ranks of the monsters. If we fib about it to ourselves and say "no, I'm a good person" then we will be absolutely unprepared when the crisis comes. Maybe we'll be lucky and never see the crisis. Or maybe we'll find ourselves at Babi Yar and pick killing children over death. There are worse things than dying.

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    2. Yes, thinking in advance of coming upon a situation such as that is a good idea. One always needs to have points at which one says: This I will not do.

      PLQ

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  4. I think I'm commenting too much; your spam blocker keeps testing me.

    Paul

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    1. I had no idea there was a spam blocker. I wonder what other mischief my blog is getting up to?

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  5. Reminds me of Christopher Browning's book "Ordinary Men." That was a pretty tough read.

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    1. Really, really hard to read this stuff and think things all the way through. Necessary though. Thanks for stopping by and commenting.

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