Minthara's happy trail

That's honestly one of the reasons I felt compelled to say something about it, yeah.

There's a joke which periodically makes the rounds that goes something like this: "The United States will invade your country, ruin your communities, kill thousands, wreck your water supply, and overthrow your government, but it's okay because 20 years later they'll make award-winning movies about how sad it made their soldiers and how much damage it did to the brave soldiers' lives, now don't you feel worthwhile" and that's often refuted with the Carmichael quote of "in order for nonviolence to work, your opponent must have a conscience; the United States has none" and those are both relevant here, for different reasons and don't actually refute each other, because the individual soldiers' psychological damage is both very real AND used by the callous state for propaganda, and also doesn't excuse anything at all.

People like an easy answer. This has always been true, and I think will always be true, and it's hard for me to fault them for wanting an explanation that they can grasp thoroughly without frustration. It's something that I want. But it's really easy to place the simple answer with something that's appealing to them, which is where the emphasis on "feelings" comes in. There's further levels involved; "boys will be boys" and "oh, but they didn't MEAN it" and so on and so forth, and just... you don't have to MEAN it to ruin lives. If someone gets assaulted because of a joke you made on the internet, do you get to skate because haha, you didn't mean it, it's just a joke, bro?

I'm rambling a lot, forgive me! A lot comes down to the question of "what do you consider Evil". Moral relativism is one thing; by their very nature, "morals" are values drawn from the different cultures and subcultures one belongs to, the word comes from the same root as mores, as in Social Mores, as in "the practices that are accepted by society as Normal and Expected" and so you can't get past the fact that morals ARE relative to who you are, where and how you live and with whom, and so "evil" and "villainous" and etc can be very different things to very different people - there's a joke about the Evil Overlord sealed away for 2000 years coming back and threatening the world with the worst things they can think of, and everyone just flocking to their side because all of that sounds pretty rad, actually.

And so that's why I turn to ethics, which is also potentially relative, because it's the applied study of morals, values and more - but it also highly concerns itself with things like "even if this behavior is normalized, is it right? Is it justified? Is the outcome..."

What is evil? Why is evil? Who is evil? Is it a switch you can turn on and turn off, or is it the sum of your actions and consequences and motivations and more? Is the convenient line of "it's only EVIL-evil if you just don't CARE about it" an actual line in your worldview, or is it there so that 20 years later, you can make a memoir about how sad your actions made you feel and look how traumatized you are, and you weren't such a bad guy all along? Or is it there so you can draw a line between "evil" people you can befriend and "evil" people you can "safely" Other and make acceptable targets?

It's a complicated subject.

I remember when people would bring up "a battle between good vs. evil" as a positive theme a story or work could have, and it's like. I genuinely think the idea of "good vs evil", outside of a purely internal struggle like in It's a Wonderful Life, is one of the most harmful themes we've ever taught our kids. It's such a toxic way to think about people.