edit: for context, this reply was written before you edited your own thoughts into that previous post
aside:
idk if i consider "evil" that useful of a term, but for the sake of the discussion i'll picture some imaginary-but-realistic "evil" (but not just a psychopath) person, and ask myself "why's he like that?"
answers include:
- world view (e.g. unquestioning loyalty to something he should really be questioning, causing him to suppress his feelings that would question it)
- mental inclinations (lower empathy, or higher inclination to "following" or giving in to social pressure, in the above implied example)
... hm. if pressed for time and forced to spit out an answer, at the moment i'd probably proclaim that "evil" is caused by "the contagiousness of destructive worldviews and unbalanced minds" and "the non-contagiousness of constructive worldviews and balanced minds".
....or: it's because people are really "flawed." in, like, a whole lot of ways. they're not consistent. they're not really capable of "thinking through" things, so they (including me) are not actually rational, but they persistently believe themselves to be, and the fucking-up goes on from there.
or: it's because people's brains fundamentally can't handle the concept of everyone being in a big community together (not to mention we can't cognitively handle the logistics of it), so people can only manage to really care about the people close to them, and "evil" is permissible to the people outside of that circle, when push comes to shove. And push
does come to shove. People have to choose who they'll prioritize. They have neither infinite time nor infinite resources, nor do we have the kind of combined will/agreement that would allow us to harness everyone's time/resources to fix everything. disadvantages of not being an ant colony.
i tend to figure that the situation of the world is way, way out of anyone's real grasp or comprehension (partly because of just the immense scale of the population), so i see it less in terms of evil and more in terms of just flat, impartial chaos. anyone who manages to make sense of it enough to make something really nice happen for some decent amount of people is a huge success.
that's what my brain farts out on this topic at 5 am without sleep
edit:
> serial killers and stuff
I mean, psychopaths are a separate topic. They're "aliens." They're uhh Kyubey from Madoka Magica. They're a predatory species. They're in a way different reality.
And people with such a warped view as to be "near-psychopaths" are similar, to me. although everyone's also fundamentally a bit alien to each other...
Last edited by Brackass; Nov 18, 2019 at 11:57 AM.