Defining Evil

DEFINING EVIL

Introduction

I practiced law for 30 years. During that time I witnessed declining consistency, failed logic, and a retreat from doing justice according to how the law applied to the facts. What happened? The rule of the Market had even invaded the courts. All too often, litigants were given the opportunity to sell their wares with little interference form the rules of evidence or the shape of the law, and the facts were treated like disposable inconveniences.
I spent 20 years trying to understand this change, which resulted in a book, Natural Selection’s Paradox. I concluded that the courts were only moving, as always, in the direction of the culture. “Reality” had not been challenged; it had been abandoned, relegated to myth status. The story that sells replaced the search for truth. The media has much to do with this evolution. We spend so much of our lives with virtual reality we can hardly distinguish the picture from the thing depicted. That is not a new idea. The Second Commandment enjoins the use of graven images. Hence, this synopsis of some of what I learned starts with God.

Defining God

Defining “God” is not difficult. All cultures agree. We find God by identifying that which we must obey. However, understanding the meaning of God challenges our most reliable perceptions. Deciding what to obey requires recognition of a purpose. The ultimate purpose is survival. How do we formulate a construct of God that will lead to survival? Theology serves no other purpose, other than as a way for some people to gain control of others through evangelism.
The God we must obey speaks the truth and we survive on those instructions. God has no meaning if those perceptions do not give us the wisdom required to adapt to the environment God provided. God must also live on the ground. To achieve that, we must start with the algorithms (rules) that God has given us to perceive the world: the laws of physics, chemistry, and genomes. As uncomfortable as that seems for many people, our understanding of how science views reality influences our definition of God, just as how God is said to view reality influences objective reality. If we abandon the quest for objective reality, religion lives on fantasy.
Ignoring god’s rules for maintaining life on this planet will lead us to extinction. Take global warming as an example. Denial of its existence and our part in it will not prevent icecap meltdown that will destroy most of today’s environments and produce temperatures our genome cannot endure. The genome defines the limits of our ability to adapt. That fact is critical to the uses of physics and chemistry. Genome-destroying waste is also accumulating at alarming rates.
To live on the ground, a religion supporting God must enshrine survival of the species as the primary value from which all ethics evolve. That value provides the basis for a sustainable morality that recognizes the necessity of harmony between people and between people and the earth.
A great many changes in the environment evolved out of technology science’s discoveries of nature’s algorithms produced. An algorithm taken in isolation, out of the context of survival of the species, may destroy the work of nature’s other algorithms. The need to identify all the algorithms and their relationship to one another places a tremendous burden on science. Scientists more often than not will avoid placing themselves in that frame. Commercial interests and deniers of uncomfortable facts often pillory those that do speak to the consequences of technology. A different ethic, the profit motive, pretends that the facts or findings of scientific discovery prove ambiguous and therefore can be ignored.

Defining Human Nature

The form God takes impacts human nature. We are what we believe. We resort to many disciplines, from psychiatry to mythology, to explain human behavior. The genome provides the template for all the behavior that our biological makeup can produce. I find specific formulas, attempts to define cause-and-effect relationships for behavior, murky. Exceptions abound. I am more comfortable with a genetic metaphor to depict the systemic scope of human behavior. Specific behaviors fit within that framework.
Richard Dawkins, The Selfish Gene, introduced the metaphor by delineating what had always been obvious but poorly understood: The genes put their survival ahead of all else. Without them there is no life. In early life forms, individual survival molded behavior in the war of all against all.
But a surprising thing happened on the way to evolution. Somewhere along the way organisms evolved complex structures. Genes began to specialize for everything from toenails to cerebral cortexes. This permitted divisions of labor within the body, sight and sound for example, that increased the chances of survival. Such divisions of labor require cooperation. Individual survival evolved into communal survival. Societies evolved in much the same manner. Mark Ridley described the second part of the metaphor in The Cooperative Gene. Cooperation has played a major role in survival.
Even more astonishing, altruism—coming to the aid of strangers—increased chances of survival. Matt Ridley added further gloss to the metaphor in The Origins of Virtue. Empathy, Adam Smith’s “fellow feeling,” evolved as part of our makeup. Given the length of time people spent as hunter-gatherers, it is not surprising that cooperation and empathy became part of our equipment. Divisions of labor based on merit and sympathy for all those who shared the burdens of life supported the cooperation needed to survive in a world with species that hunted you.
That is the good news. The bad news is that science has overlooked the third part of the metaphor: the Outlaw Gene. The outlaw gene identifies the algorithm the selfish gene employs to frustrate the cooperative gene in an eternal struggle for men’s souls. Humanity has always faced the choice between selfish and cooperative strategies. Without it, there would be no need for ethics or morality. Natural selection would govern choices, as it does with other species.
The choice evolved from the fact that there are two basic means of acquiring the energy an individual needs. One can participate in a division of labor based on merit where everyone shares in the result. Historically, that strategy provided the most efficient and satisfying organization of society. The other choice exploits other people’s labor. Many will not wait for the development of institutions required to achieve cooperation and many want more for themselves than other people can acquire. The Civil War provides the most dramatic example of the struggle. Hundreds of thousands died when one side sought to maintain the right to exploit other people’s labor. Lincoln understood the issue as the eternal struggle between good and evil, the common right of humanity versus the divine right of kings (today billionaires). He referred to it as the same old serpent that says, “You work and toil and earn bread, and I’ll eat it.”
Slavery employs the most obvious means of exploiting other people’s labor, but a rather crude and inefficient one. It creates many conflicts and does not base divisions of labor on merit. The standard means for exploiting other people’s labor relies on class. Class defines who can and who cannot compete in any activity. Stigmatizing some people as inferior achieves that result for the short-term profits of an elite. Society as a whole suffers the denial of some talents and the loss of economic justice required for a vibrant economy. One might look at the motivation to exploit other people’s labor as the downside of human nature, which requires a moral imperative to combat it and empathy to motivate that imperative.

Deception As The Rule

The outlaw gene employs many devices for selling the negative side of the selfish gene as something positive, like greed is good. Most of those strategies rely on short-term profits and fantasies of endless wealth. The short term exposes the downside of natural selection. Natural selection cannot distinguish a long-term adaptation from a short-term adaptation in the short term. A short term in evolutionary time can last for millions of years. If the short-term adaptation uses too many resources before its elimination, the long-term adaptation may fail. Hence, survival of the species provides the only sustainable basis for morality. Our children cannot afford the luxury of short-term profits for the few.
Deception in society, the equivalent of camouflage in nature, plays a major role in sanctioning short-term profits, including exploiting other people’s labor. From advertising to political speech, the words hide the facts. What goes on in Washington has more to do with manipulating who can benefit from tax dollars rather than who or what needs the benefit of tax dollars. Modern slavery has only changed in form. Government sanctioned means of extortion provide the most lucrative, risk-free opportunity for stealing other people’s labor. Unregulated drug and energy producing businesses come to mind.
To the point, healthcare costs will destroy the economy while making one sector of it very rich. Healthcare is much more expensive than most budgets can maintain and it presently creates noncompetitive businesses that cannot afford healthcare for their employees. A tax-supported nonprofit national healthcare service where all providers are on salary would cost far less than the for-profit system with its middlemen, rampant fraud, and discriminatory coverage that excludes many.
People overlook the consequence of privatizing a public service—tacitly approved extortion. A market providing services that people do not have a real option to refuse encourages providers to “tax” customers. If the government permits providers to profit from inefficiency and unconscionable profit margins, that money is lost to other segments of the economy, effectively forcing one segment of the economy to subsidize another. If everyone were eligible for healthcare, less administrative paper work would be needed. A nonprofit organization where everyone is on a fixed income, like salaries, does not support fraudulent schemes. The government tax would be cheaper than the private tax.
The deceptions that hide these facts hold that the free market keeps costs down. There is little “free” in the healthcare market. It is heavily manipulated, subsidized, and exclusionary. For matters of public welfare, like healthcare, for-profit systems cannot actually compete with government services unless the government fails to compete. Keeping the government noncompetitive suits the goals of a victim economy that profits from people’s misery and privatizes what can only operate efficiently as a public utility. The neo-liberal economic paradigm—privatize, deregulate, and cut government spending—is the road to the industrial feudalism of oligarchies. Money rules.
Modes of deception are so prevalent people cannot evaluate the options. Did anyone really believe that conservative politicians would risk the public outcry that would result form shutting down the government? Both parties pretended that was going to happen in order to make whatever budget deal they came up with palatable.

Eviscerating The Truth

The market as God, as the ‘voice’ we must listen to, deceives more people than outright lies because that version of God silences all discussion. Truth remains the province of those to whom God speaks, a priesthood that claims that their convictions came from God, as in the second Bush’s presidency. Any contrary opinions signify the work of the devil or traitors. Those conditions lead to inquisitions.
This has already begun. The market is held infallible when it in fact tells us very little. Originally based on supply and demand paradigms, the market only tells us what people are willing to buy regardless of how many lies they are told about the product. The market seldom communicates anything about the real costs of the means of production or the long-term consequences of using the item. Those factors are externalized¬¬, the costs passed on to future generations.
The most important facts for survival of the species are nowhere to be found in the market. The argument that the market will make anyone who listens successful and therefore the losers deserve their fate and they can always correct their error is a fantasy. The market will never maintain a safety net for the unfortunate nor tell us how to cope with the future. In the capitalist setting, the market lives off the process of turning real wealth into paper wealth, which has no intrinsic value.
The most effective means of deception changes the nature of ‘reality’ through semantic slights of hand, as in taking the “market” as a force of nature. Postmodern philosophy so useful to radical conservatives calling themselves neo-liberals, denies objective reality. (Radical conservatives control the Republican Party today while pretending that their program is mainstream.) Opinion poles of various types replace logical structures like the scientific method. All facts become subjective—in the eye of he beholder—and the market will determine which prevails. Truth belongs to those who have the influence to make the “fact” either unimpeachable or unusable.
Technologies like the Internet support an evolution that is replacing logical means of verifying the truth of the matter with individual conviction. Anyone gets to put in their two cents and few question it. Everyone is too busy trying to be heard. The number of hits on a website tells us who wins the race. Meanwhile, conservatives go about filling positions of power and building organizations to maintain it while liberals assume that expressions of majority opinion on the Internet will somehow get implemented without some on-the-ground activity. Virtual reality prevails. There is no actual debate, no actual response, no resolution, and no change. Without on-the-ground changes, the Internet provides a black hole into which communication disappears while people think they have done something.
Science’s greatest contribution gave us a way to judge facts and theories on some basis other than the authority of the powerful. Postmodern philosophy embedded in neo-liberalism has regressed by treating the truth as an unattainable fantasy invented by those ignorant of the reality of power. That ideology makes everything relative and nothing sustainable. What we must sustain is our ability to adapt to the real world, not the world invented for the pleasure of the rich, not the market for brands, nor the production of money. Global warming is real. Starving children are real. People need real work, not games played for money. The consequences of these facts will also be real. The fantasy that the market, whatever that is, will make it all come out right only supports denial, not solutions to on-the-ground threats to survival.

Denying Our Humanity

The denial of objective reality, forces outside of our control or beyond our understanding, will result in denial of our humanity. The outlaw gene’s greatest challenge, defeating its greatest enemy, requires it to defy evolution, to suppress the empathy that endless time and experience has taught us. The ability to feel what others feel, to imagine ourselves in their place, provides the social glue that makes collective action possible. The realization that we cannot make it on our own has all but disappeared in the glorification of the “self-made” individual. On the ground, the most efficient automobiles cannot compete with public transportation for fuel efficiency. We may survive together. We will not survive alone.
Empathy, like some parts of the genome (dominant-recessive genes), is suppressed by certain environments. If one’s only means of adaptation constitutes an unprincipled competition for money, the ethics based on survival of the species, the ultimate fellow feeling, will wither and die. The signs of that death are everywhere. Talk radio is, for the most part, all about denying inconvenient truths, usually with distractions based on nonsense like the President was not born in America, and proselytizing the conviction that others do not deserve our support. Taxes only support life’s failures, so no more taxes. Collective solutions promote failed communism. Huge sums of money are employed by an elite for propaganda to discredit empathy in very subtle ways.
One effective means of suppressing empathy I observe as the American Pathology: making it big is the goal of life. No matter how small the chance (lotto fever) or how cruel the method, one must, as the saying goes on the street, ‘get rich or die trying.’ In that context, no one wants to mess with anyone’s money game. Win some lose some.
The algorithm that underlies abandonment of empathy evolved from the environment our tools created. We no longer adapt to the world that designed our genome. We adapt to our own tools instead. The use of water provides a good example. Before pumps and dams, we could only use the water provided by rainfall or natural dams with no capacity to increase the amount of water supplied by rainfall. Now we pump water thousands of years old from thousands of feet underground. Adapting to the pump instead of to the annual rainfall will soon exhaust water supplies far beyond what rainfall can replace.
By the same process, adapting to the wrong thing, money has become the measure of value. When we were hunter-gatherers, we worshiped animals because they were the source of survival. People had to adapt to the limitations nature placed on hunting, which required a good deal of cooperation. One also knew when they had eaten enough. Today virtually everyone survives on money as his or her only resource. Hence, people worship money and there is never enough. Spending has no limits. Money is God’s reward and the indication of His love. Those without must have sinned. You are on your own with or without fault. Games played for money have no space for ethics, mutual support, or empathy—the attributes needed to prevent another inquisition.
Abandoning the search for objective reality includes the search for objective evil. The market as judge abandons any attempts to eradicate evil. All life-styles and opinions begin as equals in the competition for acceptance. There are no bad ideas or unacceptable behaviors outside of the parameters for what can or cannot be peddled. The market as God has led liberals into a trap. So concerned about excluding anyone, they refuse to accept responsibility for the power to condemn much that is evil because they are afraid to call it that for fear of offending some part of the market and therefore leave final judgment to those with the power to control the market—just what the outlaw gene relies upon.
All algorithms are not equal. Some ideas injure our ability to adapt to sustainable environments. Some relationships damage people. The refusal to brand them as evil, like the stock market when it gambles with other people’s money, gives liberalism the appearance of weakness and moral bankruptcy while conservatives condemn much that does not deserve condemnation in order to look resolute and to deflect the realization that they actually support some evils liberals avoid addressing. The resolution between inclusion of all people and exclusion of evil lies in the search for objective reality.
Reality based on power has destroyed many civilizations. The ability to adapt requires feedback based on acceptance of the algorithms we do not control. We can control evil if we recognize the algorithms that either destroy the ability of individuals to survive through collective action or destroy sustainable environments. High on the list of evils sits the outlaw gene, the enemy of democracy. Democracy can only exist within a rule of law—a shared understanding of nature’s rules and a collective recognition of the rights and duties of individuals. Without an appeal to a standard independent of power, oligarchies rule according to their interests.
Objective reality is frustratingly elusive. We only know what we observe and that only through interpretations of the energy we receive. We know the world through the constructs we invent (everyone is an artist) by interpreting energy. Those ‘mirrors’ of reality are all we have of what is real. Mathematics, language, art, and music provide means of adaptation and the success of that adaptation provides the only way to judge the mirrors. Non-sustainable adaptations, no matter how profitable in the short term, cannot succeed. Abandoning the search for the most adaptable mirrors will result in forced acceptance of the mirrors that serve the outlaw gene.

The Means Of Production

We seem impotent, unable to change the things that obviously will destroy us. Whatever one thinks about Marx’s views, one thing he understood prophetically was the impact of the means of production on society and its values. The invention of the assembly line changed people more than any philosophy. We cannot sustain present means of producing housing, food, electricity, or transportation yet capitalist means of production have become so entrenched that we would rather die than change our lifestyle. Herein lies the great challenge that requires more, not less government involvement. Without regulations that end harmful means of production, competition for lower prices will continue the production of toxic waste and harmful practices. Also, only government can finance the drastic changes in means of production necessary to maintain the ecosystems our genes require. We have to start by recognizing, not externalizing, damaging practices.

Conclusion

The keyboard for typewriters was invented for a machine that took some muscle to operate, not the quick touch of computer keyboards. The present keyboard is so entrenched in our means of production that no one suggests that we change it to something more efficient. This example describes the basis of our impotence. Innocent short-term strategies also lead to adaptations to the wrong thing, adapting to the necessity of making money. Accounting systems function like the keyboard problem. So much is not included in the calculation of profit. Waste can appear profitable. Resources can look expendable. Labor may seem too expensive. Money seldom reflects the real costs of dollar profits.
Capitalism is a miserable failure because it cannot be sustained. It has succeeded in producing huge amounts of virtual wealth for some people at a disproportional expense to real wealth and to the needs of human nature—most dramatically, the need for community. The war of all against all in the pursuit of paper wealth defies an accounting system that recognizes human needs. Only collective solutions, shared wealth and services, can provide the efficiency and community needed to survive

Will the Failure of Capitalism Produce Socialism or Feudalism?

Many have concluded that capitalism has beaten all its rivals. “Destroyed” provides a better characterization of the result. Capitalism out-produced the competition and smothered it with goods and services. Definitions of capitalism reveal little. It is usually associated with market hegemony. I have developed an algorithm that describes its fundamental function: take as much in resources from the earth as possible with as little labor costs as possible. I label that algorithm the ethic of the machine.
Capitalism used technology as its primary means for transforming resources into money. Turning real wealth into virtual wealth (capital) is the business of capitalism. The capital created provides the means of accelerating the process as government prints more money to reflect, for example, the conversion of trees into lumber or the conversion of government debt into bank assets.
Profits increase with scarcity (higher prices) or expansion (“growth”) or lower labor costs (through automation, outsourcing to cheaper labor markets, braking unions, etc). Hence, conservation and collective bargaining are dirty words in the lexicon of capitalism. The more oil companies pump, the more they make. The lower the wages paid, the more money they can keep.
The unintended consequences of the ethic of the machine render capitalism a suicidal strategy, a short-term fix that cannot be maintained. The few centuries capitalism has been around do not permit a conclusion that it has stood the test of natural selection. Resources are finite and work is necessary for people’s health. Present generations perceive the ethic of the machine as beneficial because technology temporarily suspended the Malthusian trap. (Population growth rates exceed food growth rates.)
The malaise and the chaos now exhibited worldwide have their roots in the ethic of the machine. The exhaustion of resources and the diminishing rewards of labor make it obvious that industrialized countries cannot maintain present modes of production and consumption while those not industrialized continue to face the Malthusian trap. Because few will face up to those facts, present strategies for “conservation” either produce counterproductive results by trading one cause of resource depletion for another or merely provide yet another industry using the same old means of production. Meanwhile, corruption in government increases as money itself becomes the basic resource in the “service” economy. The government now prints money to cover things like interest on money. Inflation can make most of us poor. Just look at health care costs.
Engineering fixes govern everything from agriculture to satellites and now embrace genetic tinkering, changing life itself. More unintended consequences lay ahead. While technology can create all kinds of adaptations, only a science that clearly understands natural selection can determine which of those adaptations will serve the survival of the species. In the atomic age, a less comprehensive test of technology’s impact will not do.
Present trends indicate an overpopulated future, one short of even the most basic needs (such as water), with ever more scarce and expensive fuel and food supplies and poison everywhere. The question is: How can we adapt to the future? The principle problem is the lack of imagination required to see where we are going. We are what we adapt to. Once we adapted by hunting. We worshiped animals and did not waste them. Now we adapt to making money. We worship it and respect little else. Greed and waste have reached levels not imagined by kings.
Capitalism certainly will not arrest the suicidal means of production now so profitable in terms of creating virtual wealth. Yet, much is being done to preserve it and to continue discrediting socialism, ignoring the fact that all capitalist economies have found it necessary to redistribute wealth and provide social services. From the beginning of WWII to the present, the military located its bases in poor parts of the country and provided millions of jobs and many benefits. The tax code subsidizes many activities. Capitalism’s most dramatic failure, the Great Depression, was followed by a permanent wartime economy—the Cold War to the War on Terrorism—a very narrow form of socialism financed in part by the international sale of weapons that keep falling into the wrong hands.
Other restricted forms of socialism have followed. Corporate control of politics has generated a government that allows the privatization of profits while socializing costs. Present socialism in America guarantees the profits of the elite while nickel-and-diming those who remain unemployable as a consequence of automation and of exporting manufacturing to cheap labor markets. Extortion in the pricing of things like drugs enjoys tacit government approval. Corporate subsidized conservative talk shows tell outrageous lies to entice people to turn off any empathy they might feel for the victims of corporate profiteering at the expense of labor. The money tribe is financing a war on labor.
There are two fundamental choices for adapting to the future. One pools resources, determines divisions of labor based on merit, shares the product, and regulates everything based on what will serve survival of the species—including the preservation of the kind of labor we were genetically designed to do and the equitable distribution of wealth. This is the form socialism must take. The other choice creates a caste system wherein one class acquires the right to expropriate other people’s labor.
The efficiency required to survive requires a reinstatement of the commons, the pooling of resources. The most efficient automobile when multiplied by millions will never achieve the efficiency of well-designed public transportation. People need work more challenging than walking dogs. Health care is everybody’s problem and should not be a source of profit for middlemen. A victim economy has arisen to help fill the void left by exporting manufacturing.
The Civil War continues in America. The South lost only the military phase of it. For anther century white supremacy continued through terrorism. The Civil Rights acts of the sixties drove white supremacy further underground. White supremacy1 has even bigger plans for the future of servitude—the destruction of government by political means that will allow the money tribe to make most of us pay outrageous prices for everything from water to health care while accepting minimum wage employment.
The issue raised by the continuing civil war turns on how we will adapt to the resource shortfall and population surplus destroying our land and cultures. Will it take the form of a just socialism or create an industrial feudal society with the new lords and ladies of money and the new serfs, a marginally employed work force. That dynamic defines the struggle now going on in Washington and state houses that the people are currently losing to corporate greed.
Instead of responding to the shortfall in resources with greater efficiency and sharing, a struggle for control of government revenues for the benefit of those not satisfied by their first one hundred million dollars moves on. This insane contest will destroy the economy as it destroys the resource base. The struggle reduces life to a contest for who gets to die last. Diminishing returns and reduced purchasing power, compensated for by debt, will produce fewer and fewer lords and ladies and more and more demoralized workers. This is the stuff of the French revolution.
The core problem is that we are not adapting to the world that ultimately supports us. Instead, we adapt to the games played for money that capitalism uses to distribute wealth. Only a broad form of socialism can support people while they move from games to sustainable production. The efficient cannot compete without a level playing field. Subsidizing waste and pollution undermines the function of supply and demand pricing. We need regulation of resources, means of production, and consumption that foster efficiency. Wall Street’s gambling with other people’s money must also stop.
Unfortunately, many only profess support for democracy, but actually prefer class distinctions masked by the philosophy that money provides the proof of God’s love. Under the religion of money, survival of the fittest is a Darwinian struggle for money. Any help for individuals by government compromises the proof of God’s love. Any limits on the means of making money interfere with God’s laws. No need to worry about the consequences of such a philosophy. God will save the faithful in the rapture. This is a formula for chaos if not extinction that has tied government up in knots. We do not have too much government. We have too much of the nonfunctioning government that always emboldens corruption.
The foundation for the follies described here I term natural selection’s paradox.2 Natural selection does not distinguish short-term adaptations from long-term adaptations in the short term. Therefore, if the short-term adaptation uses up too many resources before it fails, the long term-adaptation cannot succeed either. Virtually all policy today is set in short-term contexts. Corporate profits are measured quarterly and stock market prices change daily. The only sustainable ethical foundation for overcoming the paradox employs survival of the species as the primary value. That judgment requires a scientific method, not the fictional narratives that once gave us comfort.

1. “White supremacy” is a metaphor for the right of one group (class) to exploit the labor of another group. Literal slavery was the most obvious manifestation of this drive by some to steal other people’s labor, which I refer to as “The Outlaw Gene.” Racism, suppression of women, and criminalization of nonconforming behavior merely provide apologies for greed. Lincoln understood the purpose of the Civil War. He viewed the right of labor to the fruits of its toil as the point of the war.
2. For a complete exposition of the paradox see Natural Selection’s Paradox: The Outlaw Gene, the Religion of Money, and the Origin of Evil, by Carter Stroud.