Last year I started reading Richard J. Bernstein’s Radical Evil. A passage rang true to me, and it keeps coming back to mind:

What do we really mean when we describe an act, an event, or a person as evil? Many of us would agree with what Arendt once wrote to Karl Jaspers: “There is a difference between a man who sets out to murder his old aunt and people who without considering the economic usefulness of their actions at all . . . built factories to produce corpses.” But what is this difference? How is it to be characterized? What are we really saying when we speak of radical evil?

Philosophers and political theorists are much more comfortable speaking about injustice, the violation of human rights, what is immoral and unethical, than about evil. … It is almost as if the language of evil has been dropped from contemporary moral and ethical discourse.

Since the publication of this book in 2002, nearly everybody has adopted the general worldview of Bernstein’s philosophers and political theorists. Most people think exclusively with words. Whatever they cannot say, they cannot think.

Because they are equipped with pre-fab ideas and language to recognize, process and respond to injustice, human rights, ethics and cognitive biases, this is where the average mind channels its passionate intensity.

But for the same reason, because they have no cognitive tools for evil, evil can operate undetected.

Anyone who wants to commit evil in plain sight can do so by using magician’s tricks to misdirect attention to matters of justice, human rights or ethics. The only reason people would behave in an evil way is if the injustice of more powerful people drove them to such acts. See what you made them do?

Or they can use quantification to de-thicken human action, and morally flatten it into statistics. They count bodies, and whether these deaths are intentional murders or accidental deaths no longer matters. 1,139 eyes for 1,139 eyes. 1,139 teeth for 1,139 teeth.

Which brings me to another point. It gives me chills to notice how automatically most people assume war is an act of pure vengeance. That Israel is entitled to some number of Palestinian deaths, at which point enough is enough? The punishment must be proportionate to the crime?

Are you fucking kidding me? That is actually an evil logic.

The purpose Israel’s war in Gaza is not to balance some magical atrocity spreadsheet.*

The purpose of the war is to ensure October 7th can never happen again. Which is the diametric opposite goal of Hamas, which explicitly stated that the October 7 attack against Israel was just the first of many. Hamas would launch “a second, a third, a fourth” attack until Israel is annihilated. And observe the social justice magician’s trick, as the same Hamas official continues on to say: “We are victims – everything we do is justified.”

But according to the atrocity accountant’s calculations, after Israel has extracted its due pound of flesh, it must consent to a ceasefire with an enemy whose entire raison d’etre is its annihilation, and hope it doesn’t ever succeed.

This is how “good” people think, now. This is how “good” people not only tolerate, but support and encourage evil.

We are dying of stupidity.

• Note: Incidentally, this atrocity accounting is the logic behind “antiracism”. The best way to balance the justice spreadsheet is to subject oppressors to equal humiliation, or rather allow the oppressed to savor the joys of sadism until they have finally gotten their fair share of this delicacy. It is a disgusting way to understand the world, but it appears it is the only way many “leftists” know how to process moral questions.

This is, of course the opposite of what Martin Luther King advised. “Darkness cannot drive out darkness, only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate, only love can do that.” Today’s smug hate-mongers claim time has proved MLK naive. He is now, according to them, obsolete. But these same people were around during MLK’s time, and interfered constantly with his mission. The last half of his last book argues against the misguided “black power” approach. They are nothing new. The resentment-mingers are always there, always tempting good-willed people to succumb to their violent impulses, always calling good “naive”.

And this atrocity accounting is also the opposite of the Dhammapada: “The hatred of those who harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is never appeased. The hatred of those who do not harbor such ill feelings as, “He reviled me, assaulted me, vanquished me and robbed me,” is easily pacified. Through hatred, hatreds are never appeased; through non-hatred are hatreds always appeased — and this is a law eternal.”

How ironic is it, that the same set who condemns “cultural appropriation” appropriates Buddhist meditation techniques, while embracing resentment politics and identitarianism, which is profoundly anti-Buddhist. And they support the most virulent and bloody cultural appropriation of all time, the wholesale appropriation of the Jewish religion by Islamic supercessionists, who incidentally spread their religion through imperial expansion and colonized the region as settler-colonists. No group could possibly be more anathema to the principles Progressivists pretend to care about than the Islamists theocrats who seek Israel’s annihilation. But of course Progressivists have no principles — only ideas they “leverage” to justify seizing more and more dominance. Only an overwhelmingly powerful group could be this unaware and unbothered by their own profound hypocrisy. Their accusations against those categories of person they hate are projections of their own worst characteristics. If you can’t see it yet, someday you will, and you’ll convince yourself you always saw it, and were never a part of it. But I remember, and I will never forget any of this. I’ll listen and listen, but I will hear right through you, hypocrites.

Neocons, proggos, now MAGA. Y’all are all exactly the same. You are different only to yourselves — and that is what makes you alike. Keep pointing at each other, though. Keep on pointing.