Ok, so this is going to come with a trigger warning. I’m about to talk about evil… or rather, what I define as evil.
In my vernacular evil is the act of voluntarily inflicting suffering on another for gain.
It might not be accurate, but it’s a decent enough starting point.
Why are you talking about this, nerd?
I live in America and have friends spanning both sides of the political aisle. Friends from one party blame every problem of evil on the friends of the other party and vice versa.
It sucks, because I want to talk about computers, and they’re focusing on politics instead of reducing RAM consumption by switching to a tiling window manager.
Does that sound petty in comparison to their very real political concerns?
You bet.
But I can actually change my RAM consumption and see the consequences of my actions play out. I recently converted from XFCE to I3wm and the results are stunning. I have yet to see my friends change the political landscape with their hot-takes. It hasn’t happened once. The world is still evil, regardless of which political party is running it and it has been since I was born… and it’ll likely be so when I die.
Where Evil comes from
To hear it from my Democrat friends, the root of evil is the greedy capitalist pigs who care about profits over humanity.
From my Republican friends, the root of evil is the wicked spirit of progressivism tearing the nuclear family apart and killing our self-reliance.
But they are wrong.
Evil is a society-wide skill issue, full stop.
The following quote comes from the offensive mind of Louis C.K. Like him, or hate him, his comedy tackles subjects in a wildly different way than the standard binary thinking that we are all guilty of. This bit comes from the comedy special, “Oh My God”, and the bit is called “Of Course, but Maybe.” I’m writing it out because he can say some pretty crazy things because of his delivery style softening the blow. I want you to read this and feel the impact of the words themselves, but here is the Youtube link in case you have a hard time.
Of course, but Maybe Quote:
Everybody has a competition in their brain of good thoughts and bad thoughts. Hopefully, the good thoughts win. For me, I always have both. I have like the thing I believe, the good thing, that’s the thing I believe and then there’s this thing. And I don’t believe it, but it is there. It’s always this thing and then this thing. It’s become a category in my brain that I call “of course, but maybe”.
I’ll give you an example:
Okay, like of course… of course… children who have nut allergies need to be protected, of course! We have to segregate their food from nuts, have their medication available at all times, and anybody who manufactures or serves food needs to be aware of deadly nut allergies. Of course!
But, maybe…
maybe if touching a nut kills you, you’re supposed to die.
Of course not… of course not… of course not… Jesus…
I have a nephew who has that, I’d be devestated if something happened to him.
But, maybe…
maybe if we all just do this for one year, we’re done with nut allergies forever.
No… of course not…
Of course, if you’re fighting for your country and you get shot or hurt it’s a terrible tragedy, of course. Of course.
But, maybe…
maybe if you pick up a gun and go to another country and you get shot, it’s not that weird. Maybe if you get shot by the dude you were just shooting at, it’s a tiny bit your fault.
Of course… Of course slavery is the WORST thing that ever happened.
*Crowd gets visibly uncomfortable.
Listen, listen… You all clapped for dead kids with the nuts; for kids dying from nuts, you applauded… sooo… you’re in this WITH me now, you understand? You don’t get to cherry pick. Those kids did nothing to you.
Of course, of course slavery is the worst thing that ever happened. Of course it is! Every time its happened! Black people in America, Jews in Egypt, every time another race of people has been enslaved it’s a terrible, horrible thing… of course!
But maybe…
maybe every incredible human achievement in history was done with slaves. Every single thing where you go, “how did they build those pyramids?”, they just threw human death and suffering at them until they were finished. How did we traverse the nation with a railroad so quickly? We just threw Chinese people into caves and blew them up and didn’t give a s*** what happened to them. There’s no end to what you can do when you don’t give a f*** about a particular people; you can do anything!
That’s where human greatness comes from; it’s that we are s***** people, that we f*** others over.
EVEN TODAY…
How do we have this amazing micro-technology? Because the factory where they’re making these, they jump off the f***ing roof because it’s a nightmare in there.
You really have a choice…
You can have candles and horses, and be a little kinder to eachother or let someone suffer immeasurably far away just so you can leave a mean comment on Youtube while you’re taking a s***. "
My take on Louis’s bit
He’s right… and wrong here. The examples he listed in the slavery portion of his act are functionally correct. Throughout our time on the planet, most of our greatest accomplishments were the result of targeted evil.
We wanted something, so we increased suffering until we got the thing we want.
Where he is wrong is WHERE our greatness as a species comes from.
And thank God that he’s wrong on this, or evil would be the only way we could progress as a people.
The true root of our greatness is not throwing suffering at a problem, it’s innovating past the problem.
The Horse problem
Please read this article about the manure problem in New York over 100 years ago. It’s crazy to think, but just a little over 100 years ago, there was so much horse feces from public transportation, shipping, industry, etc that they predicted that three story high piles of manure would make the city impossible to navigate… and that’s not factoring the smell or disease from being near so much waste.
Now let’s do what everyone seems to do nowadays and put our political standards at work back during this time.
The heart of Democratic policy is rule-setting and tax collection. A Democrat would look at the massive piles of manure and say that we need to regulate the horses of big business since they produced the vast majority of the feces. Then they would tax everyone who has a horse until it became an undo burden on every citizen who couldn’t afford the tax. The end result? Big businesses would still use the horses, but pass the cost of the bills to the stores buying their goods, the people would have less access to horses, and endless committees would be formed on how to use the money to clear out the poop, but would fail to do so because the system in place could not shovel it out at near the rates that are needed to stop the problem. They might contract with some big manure company, but without proper deadlines, it would be slow, inefficient, cost more, and get less accomplished. There’s all this money stolen from the people, but nothing to apply it to.
The heart of Republican matters is self-reliance and competition. Republicans would probably take a two-pronged approach to solving the manure crisis. Churches would probably meet together and figure out how to clear the waste from their properties extremely efficiently. They’d then take those lessons and talk about the poop problem from the pulpit until service project opportunities would be created and executed on to clear waste from the streets on the weekend. Maybe it would net you a merit badge if you were in the Boy/Girl scouts. The result of this effort would be clean churches, but not much else. People have lives and like 7 kids. They aren’t going to spend their free time shoveling manure. They would also encourage small businesses to spring up and compete for who could monetize and ship out the manure as fast as possible. These small businesses would inevitably be purchased by bigger manure companies, and then all of their shovelers would be fired because their shareholders care more about profits than the service they provide. Eventually, all the manure companies would be running skeleton crews and the shovelers would quit because they were tired of being overworked and underpaid. Under a Republican system, you’d actually get more done, but the pious wouldn’t be effective enough to shoulder society’s weight and the greedy would cannibalize the only thing capable of solving the problem.
The Solution was Technical
So, taking our same political system and throwing it back into the late 1800’s, we see that it was just as ineffective then as it is now. So is that it then? Did we just embrace the evil, exploit some societal underclass, and throw human suffering at the manure? We certainly did for a while. The article mentioned committees and contractors… Everything I just described. So did New York become a mountain of feces?
No. The problem went away in 5 years. We switched from horses to cars.
Think of all the hours spent shovelling manure. Think of all the hours spent talking about the problem. Think about the money that the city all but set on fire just to clear out a natural byproduct of their primary tool.
The problem went away when they switched to another tool. No enforcement, no legislation, no taxes. Cars are easier, cheaper, and don’t stink. So everyone naturally switched with no incentive needed beyond the better experience.
The thing is… this isn’t a one-off.
After the 13th amendment was passed, there was still a massive problem. The demand for cotton was high and the cost of picking it was terrible… hence… the evils of slavery. But when slavery was taken off the table? Around 15 years later, Robert Munger automates the Cotton Gin so thoroughly that the industry restructures itself. This quote from Wikipedia is important:
Munger's motivation for his inventions
included improving employee working
conditions in the gin. However, the
selling point for most gin owners
was the accompanying cost savings
while producing cotton both more
speedily and of higher quality.
How to beat the “evil game”
If you go to Wikipedia and read about the cotton gin, you might be tempted to tap me on the shoulder and remind me, “Uh Ross… The original cotton gin actually kicked off slave-run cotton productions because people needed to run the machines”.
Yeah, that’s totally true. When Eli Whitney introduced his “at the time” revolutionary cotton gin that still required massive amounts of human labor to use, he accidentally kicked off the cotton revolution that led downstream to the Civil War.
Let’s take another example, McDonalds. Millenials have been pushing for Mega-corporations to use less plastic and they realized that there are massive cost savings to using less material and such. Win, win. The problem is that their solution is worse than the previous thing. Paper straws might be better from a “trying to stop platic pollution” perspective, but paper straws aren’t even really straws. They’re spit balls that took one too many promotion and rose to the level of their incompetence.
So the truth is, you can’t just have a solution to a problem. You need a solution that is better IN EVERY WAY, or the ways in which the original product was better will be your downfall.
Now, having the pieces that I’ve given you so far:
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For thousands of years, our species defaulted to throwing human suffering at problems (slavery is our default)
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There are some problems you can’t regulate around (horse manure)
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Good problems to solutions will effortlessly trample existing problems (cars overtaking horses)
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Coming up with partial solutions may make a problem worse (cotton gin)
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Coming up with partial solutions that are worse will stop adoption (paper straws)
I believe that you’ll see my next point coming:
Evil is a skill issue
Pick any political issue we are facing today.
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Ai taking jobs from people who aren’t capable of something greater
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People dying in the cobalt mines
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The internet becoming a dystopian hellscape
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Police Brutality
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The Crime Problem
All of these issues will be “tackled” by our political leaders, which will fail to get literally anything done. If these problems are solved, it won’t be a Republican or Democrat that solves it. It’ll be because someone was working on a cool project that had limitless potential and was sooo much better than the current status quo that switching to it will be better, cheaper, and safer than the thing it was replacing.
Instead of complaining:
Realize that the reason things are as screwed up as they are is because what we have now is the best our society can come up with. If you want to change things, come up with solutions that are:
- Cheaper
- Scalable
- Easier
- More enjoyable
- Ethical
Do you think there is a chance that even the most malicious CEO wouldn’t go with your idea if it hit all 5 of those qualifiers? The solid press alone would make a mint.
If you want to save the world, solve problems. Make robots that can coal mine. Create employment guilds that ensure worker quality and solid contracts. Defang criminal drug syndicates by getting street drugs sold by CVS and Walgreens. (I’m half joking about that… tops. You think that the cartels can match CVS? You’re out of your mind.) You manage to pull that off, (in that order) and you’ll have solved a major crisis and made the world a better place. Play the game better than the idiots who played us off a cliff.
In Short, stop complaining about politics and build more cool stuff!