This blog was taken down by comment spam, hence the lack of entries recently. I’ve now installed new blog software (MT 3.12) which helped me to get rid of those ****ers. Unfortunately I also got rid of all the other comments that had been made. I’ll try and enter them back in manually some time when I have time.
I’ve kind of gone off the process of ranting recently. Sometimes I feel strongly about something, but then I think – well what’s the point in posting this on the internet. Some of the stuff I feel really strongly about is stuff I couldn’t write about anyway.
Of course I wanted to write something about the US elections – I had my impressions – but they were all taken from the media so who’s to say that they have any validity. Did Bush rig the voting machines – I really I just don’t know. Other stuff is coloured by my internal biases – entrenched resentments and hatreds that have less to do with their objects than with my own blind-spots.
Maybe it would be better to post the open questions I come across and I wonder about. I was going to post a great bit of Solzhenitsyn, but then I worried about copyright. It’s only one page. Maybe I will.
So here’s a question. What are the roots of evil? Clearly it’s not the fact that evil hasn’t yet been stamped out or destroyed. I absolutely don’t subscribe to the view that if you get rid of the evil people, evil will go away. There’s a great bit of Solzhenitsyn which says that there is a line between good and evil in the heart of every person, and the line shifts constantly throughout the life of the average heart – or something to that effect. So if you accept the assumption that you can’t deal with evil by “eliminating” its symptoms, then what is the treatment? Passivism and being nice to people who commit evil probably wouldn’t help much either. Very few people do bad things because they like being bad. Usually there is some kind of ideology which allows people to do really nasty things while still believing that they are doing something good, honourable, that they will be rewarded for eventually. So what conditions lead to the absense of this factor?