The Nature of Evil

In the Dungeons & Dragons universe, your player character gets to pick an alignment, which is basically a core philosophy. You can pick from three definitions of good (lawful, neutral, and chaotic), three definitions of evil (lawful, neutral, and chaotic), and three definitions of neutral (lawful, chaotic, and true neutral). As a child, I always picked the lawful good character, usually Paladins. As an adult, I would characterize myself as chaotic neutral—probably a bard or something like that.

You see the different variations of evil in the movies as well. You have lawful evil (Darth Vader), neutral evil (Bane), and chaotic evil (The Joker). But those aren’t typically the types of evil we encounter in daily life. You don’t see people vaporizing planets, threatening to blow up a city with a nuclear bomb, or breaking a pool cue in half and letting two guys fight it out. The evil that you see in the movies is actually sadism. And there are examples of sadism in real life, for sure—15% of the prison population is incarcerated for a murder conviction. Some bad dudes. But most of us do not come in contact with people who are sadists—people who experience joy in other people’s pain. The types of evil you might find in daily life are like the people who engage in character assassination—a subtle whisper campaign to get someone denied pay or promotion. Those people will go to hell, too, along with the murderers.

I have arrived at my own definition of evil, which I think is the correct definition:

Hatred of the good for being good.

Let’s use Jeff Bezos as a straw man. I think he is the second-richest person in the world, or something like that. I have run into people—seriously—who refuse to order off of Amazon because they “don’t want to make Jeff Bezos any richer.” This always makes me smile, because when you order something off of Amazon, you’re making him poorer. For years, the retail business was being run at a loss, and was being subsidized by the profitable cloud business. But beyond that, why not be happy for Jeff Bezos? He came up with a time-saving invention. You can sit in your air-conditioned house and order pretty much any item in existence, and save yourself an hour drive to and from Target, standing in line at the checkout with the screaming babies. Internet retailing is one of the greatest time-saving inventions ever, and Amazon perfected it. Maybe you should…send him a thank-you note? Do you remember all the negative press that Bezos got for launching into space, how this super-rich jackass was going up in a rocket that was shaped like a giant dildo? Do you remember (you probably don’t) when people assembled a makeshift guillotine outside of his place in D.C.? How people compared him unfavorably to Dr. Evil, with his bald head and droopy eyelid? Most recently, he commissioned a giant fucking yacht to be built, and got a bunch of negative press around that. It’s not as if he hasn’t given to charity—he wrote a big, unconditional $10 billion check to fight climate change, which of course, appeased nobody.

Why do people hate Jeff Bezos?

Because he is good.

They don’t hate him in spite of his virtues, they hate him because of his virtues. What are those virtues? The usual stuff: intelligence, hard work, foresight, and leadership ability. They hate that he accomplished what they never could. They don’t hate his wealth—the wealth is simply a byproduct of the virtues that were used to create it. I don’t know a lot about Bezos. I never read any of the biographies. Maybe he is a dick, maybe he isn’t. I kind of get the impression that he was successful in motivating a bunch of already-successful people to work very hard in building his vision. When you’re worth triple-digit billions, you probably don’t suffer fools. Nonetheless, he created a company that is so good, that we could literally not live without it. And if it vanished overnight, it is too complex and intricate for someone to build another one. Our lives are better because of Jeff Bezos.

And we hate him for it.

You might call this “human nature.” Well, I don’t particularly like human nature. I don’t like this tendency to tear down people who are successful. I’m not sure I could even conceive of being as successful as Jeff Bezos, and that’s why he’s him, and I’m Jared Dillian. I am a fucking piker. But at least I have the ability to say the three magic words that all good people should be able to say:

Good for him.

Good for him! I genuinely hope he is happy. It sure seems like he is happy. Terrific. Let’s put this plainly in terms you all can understand: Jeff Bezos is better than me. And I’m okay with that. He’s had a much bigger positive impact on the world than I have. And he deserves everything he has. I’m not one of these people who is going to cop a resentment against you because you have a jingle in your pocket. And there are plenty of people like that—more than you can imagine.

Let’s talk about a more relevant example. Let’s say you live in a nice neighborhood, a neighborhood where the houses are big and the HOA is hyperactive. One of those types of places. There is a guy in the neighborhood who is very successful, and he lives in the biggest house in the neighborhood. How did he make his money? He has a dildo factory. He has a sprawling dildo manufacturing operation. Let’s say, for the sake of argument, that the dildo business is growing, and he is making $7 million a year. He has a couple of supercars (that sit in his garage) and hired staff to manage the house and the buzz in the neighborhood is that he is kind of a dick.

Wait, the buzz in the neighborhood? That’s right—the rest of the people in the neighborhood, when they go to their parties and dinners, talk shit about this rich, successful guy living in their neighborhood. Did you hear that he did XYZ? Did you hear about ABC? And so people wage the subtlest of subtle forms of character assassination against the guy with the dildo factory. Maybe he is a dick—doesn’t matter. You can’t bring yourself to say good for him.

There are levels of this. I’ve been on the receiving end, believe it or not, and I am nobody special. There are people who hate my guts. They hate my books, they hate my newsletter, and they hate my small pile of money. There is an interesting psychological process here—when you hate someone for their virtues, you are effectively defining yourself as the opposite of those virtues. When you look at me or Jeff Bezos and hate our success, you’re effectively saying “I’m a piece of shit.” You actually define yourself as a piece of shit, and you feel even worse about yourself. There are two types of people in this world: people who hate Jeff Bezos, and people who aspire to be Jeff Bezos. There are some people who go around hating Elon Musk, Jeff Bezos, fill-in-the-blank billionaire, but also the person who got appointed as department chair, the person who was named Realtor of the Month, the person who got elected to city council, and that woman who picks up her kid from daycare in a Mercedes. They also hate big corporation Procter & Gamble for their toothpaste commercials, and practically any business that does not lose money. They go around hating everyone, hating the good for being good. And there is a word for that, too: a communist. And that is how evil killed 100 million people in the 20^th century.

Hate, these days, has been dumbed down as some sort of racial animus. But that’s not really what hate is. I would call that kind of bigotry antipathy. Real hate is when you spend your life wishing that bad things would happen to Jeff Bezos or your rich neighbor. I don’t wish bad things would happen to anyone. I was taught that if you find you have a resentment against someone, you should pray for good things to happen to them—that they will get everything out of life that you would want for yourself. If they are rich, pray for them to get richer. If they are happy, pray for them to get happier. Do that for two weeks, and the resentment will disappear. Or you can be a turd, hating everything that is good in the world.

The definition of a good person is someone who can be happy at another man’s achievement. The obverse of that is evil. That’s the philosophy lesson for today—go forth and do good in the world.