How to increase (and decrease!) the amount of Evil in the World
The psychiatrist, M. Scott Peck, defined evil as ...
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1) abrogration of personal responsibility (narcissistic moral evasion)
2) consistent, destructive, scape-goating behavior; often subtle
3) excessive, albeit usually covert, intolerance to criticism
4) pronounced concern with public image
5) intellectual deviousness
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A even broader, yet simpler, definition is that evil is anti-life -- whether in body or spirit -- and Peck even shares the story of his 8-year old son who said, when asked what evil is, that evil is "live" spelled backwards.
Destruction of the life force, whether by killing someone's body or their spirit, is wrong -- it is evil. In a moral calculus, an individual may choose to attempt to destroy the body or spirit of another in order to avoid the personal suffering of pain or fear or guilt.
For instance, if you commit a big crime and there was a witness -- then, if you are evil -- you will attempt to kill the witness, so as to avoid having to be afraid of guilt. A non-evil person wouldn't kill a witness after being caught in the act.
A non-evil person would bear the pain and fear of guilt, instead.
For the evil, personal feelings are more important than anything, even the sum total of all of the lives of all of the human beings on planet Earth.
For the non-evil, human lives (including your own!) matter more than your own personal feelings. Your feelings are NOT your god, your feelings are NOT so important that they are even more important than human life itself.
Because evil is repulsive to others, it can only thrive by either deception and/or corruption.
Deception prevents the conscious acknowledgement of evil acts themselves, corruption prevents the proper evaluation of evil acts already acknowledged to have truly happened, but without full explanation. The true corruption is corruption of thought (wrong philosophy).
Deception
The key way to increase the amount of deception in the world is via organized lying (propaganda).
To aid in the process of organized lying, it'd be good to control communication so that only communications that do not violate "community standards" are allowed. Social media giants, by actively curating content, have gone a long way toward helping to increase propaganda.
It helps to increase the amount of evil in the world.
Corruption
Another way to increase evil is to corrupt judgment by introducing artificial obscurity in the realm of ideas. An example would be Eastern Philosophy, which doesn't distinguish sharply between good and evil.
In a recent Godzilla film, an Eastern woman declares that "slaying dragons" is a Western concept and that, in the East, they sometimes even worship dragons.
Other movies also reference the difference between Eastern and Western thinking, such as a Godfather movie where it was declared that the Mob would be adopting a new paradigm of efficient brutality of Eastern origin -- though euphemisms were used instead of plain language.
The life-destructive nihilism of Eastern thinking is captured well by the recent film, The Joker. Understandably, viewers declared that they were, after leaving the theater, a little more scared about being out in public.
There had even been an instance of a copycat killer who dyed his hair and attacked a theater.
Real-life Example
In order to increase the amount of evil via deception, one thing you can do is create long laws. If you hide travesties of justice inside of 2000 pages of legal text, it prevents people from discovering what you are up to by passing those "long laws" in the first place.
One example of such a law -- one increasing the amount of evil in the world -- is the Affordable Care Act (ACA).
The ACA created an arbitrary position, Pharmacy Benefits Manager (PBM), which recently allowed for intentional medical malpractice (a PBM refused to fill doctors' prescriptions for the safe and effective medicine, hydroxychloroquine).
Because PBMs do not have a license to practice medicine, they have no business, whatsoever, interfering in the practice of medicine and the healing of patients. The complex law that was created and known as the ACA, is what it is that allows for them to get away with more "life-destructive" evil than they could otherwise do.
Before ACA, people could not interfere with the practice of medicine. That was between patient and doctor. It was too plainly evil to be doing that, to be acting so as the prevent the healing of others.
Now that ACA has been passed, people can interfere with the practice of medicine -- even to the point where it causes people to die. The ACA has made it possible for there to be much more evil in the world.
In 2020, big changes are being made so as to increase the sum total of evil in the world. Patterns of behavior are being regimented, depersonalized and dehumanized, so that nameless, faceless people can commit crimes against you -- violating your rights without accountability.
This is only even possible because small, incremental changes which increased the evil in the world -- long laws like ObamaCare, bad philosophies like existentialism, etc. -- were either accepted or at least sufficiently tolerated by Americans.
To reduce evil and increase good, we can take steps which decrease deception (increase transparency, accountability, and unfettered communication) and also steps which decrease corruption of thought (increase the proper human philosophies which humans can hold in life).
In US education, we can restore the correspondence theory of truth, for instance (the one Aristotle taught).
This would be a pleasant counter to the kind of one-sided indoctrination of psycho-babble which passes for "instruction" in Ivy League schools today -- such as Critical Race Theory and Marxism ('sciences' which are based on "feelings" rather than being rooted in facts, like geometry and geography are).
In short, people are either kept from the truth (eg. big tech censorship), taught they can't tell what the truth is (eg, authoritarian medical elitism), or they are taught that an actual error of thought (eg,. Critical Race Theory, Marxism, etc) just happens to be the truth.
The outcome of that is: more evil. The solution to that is: a return to timeless truths.
Humans have the capacity to become smart enough to sort the true from the false. This present a problem for evil (something which requires deception or corruption to thrive).
For evil to win, it either must take steps to prevent humans from acquiring that capacity (clouds thought with wrong philosophy) or it outright lies to people, either by omission (hiding rules out of plain sight in 2000-page laws) or by commission (falsely declaring sea level is rising uncontrollably, or masks work against COVID-19, etc).
Things can be set up so that less deception and corruption is possible and, importantly, as the year of 2020 shows us, things can even be set up so that more deception and more corruption is possible -- so that more evil is possible.
Even the societal goal of a free-and-fair election is being compromised right now, as transparency of vote counts and the verification of votes themselves (votes from dead people?) is being made impossible -- right before our very eyes.
Sources
M. Scott Peck. (1983). People of the Lie: The hope for healing human evil. Simon & Schuster. New York: NY. Page 129.
Godzilla: King of the Monsters. (2019). Available: https://www.imdb.com/title/tt3741700/
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Dr. Ilene Chen : Myth is our compass. It's something my mom used to say. She believed our stories about monsters and dragons, could help us find the Titans, and restore our connection to nature.
Mark Russell : Wait, your mother? You're second-generation Monarch?
Dr. Ilene Chen : Third. It runs in the family.
Mark Russell : That's incredible! I don't suppose your family has any tips on slaying dragons, do they?
Dr. Ilene Chen : Slaying dragons is a Western concept. In the East, they are sacred. Divine creatures who brought wisdom, strength. Even redemption.
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