I sat a while on this post from Searching For Dragons called “Evil: is Not a Thing?”
I can’t even excerpt it. It is at times vulgar – because it looks at something very ugly. It is gut wrenching, because it turns our attention to the truly vile, and dares us to refuse to believe it exists.
In an excellent recent podcast, Jordan B. Peterson, who has also been on Stefan Molyneux show, mentions something Solzhenitsyn said about the Nuremburg trials. The point he brought up was that some things are done are so awful that everyone who is not a monster knows they are wrong, regardless of culture. Eric Raymond once noted – I cannot find the article – that a trading methodology involving piles of goods, splitting them, moving them, requiring no language, implied at least some degree of universal moral standards, even if the exact details of what constitutes, say, murder, or theft, may vary.
That post? Evil exists.
Just go read the thing.
I will add one observation. One consequence of the postmodern nihilism, of dragging everything into the muck, is that not only do we tear down the good, the virtuous, the capacity for divinity and light, but we provide cover for evil as well.
