In my youth, teen, adolescence, even into my adulthood I experienced, indeed my whole nation lived through, political and social upheavals that could quite easily on four separate occasions caused the downfall of government, the dissolution of social order, the destruction of the very foundations of my nation. First came the international condemnation of USA geopolitical machinations, starting with the terrible rioting in London’s Grosvenor square in the late sixties and continuing in some form or another through till the Greenham common occupations of early eighties. Secondly during the bitter and violent miners strikes starting in 1972, that not only led to the loss of virtually the while industry, but to the harsh realities of mass unemployment, power cuts and the prospect of rationing for the population as a whole. Thirdly, The Brixton race riots of nineteen eighty-one when the last vestiges of British institutional racism were exposed and cleansed in one violent cathartic convulsion, resulting in a total reappraisal of the approach to social structure by authority, particularly law enforcement, and finally during the print strike of 1986, a direct result of the electronic revolution, the last time a powerful body of workers would ever successfully question the ability of management to modernize at will , to include the reassessing of manpower requirements, without the need for consultation and compensation. Interestingly this latter hubbub introduced a still reasonably young and very vocal Rupert Murdoch, founder, and longtime owner of the Fox news network into political and public awareness. Each of these conflicts, singular and in concert, took my country, people, thousand-year-old political system, teetering as close to the edge of collapse as is imaginable, but none, quite pointedly, were the result of or conducted through any auspice of evil.
Evil is a very particular quality, one that whilst easy to imagine is almost impossible to actually locate in the general population. The degree of heinousness needed for a bad act or person to escalate to the level of the truly evil is beyond the average humans capacity. Yes, admittedly a few truly evil individuals can, do and have existed, but never in the numbers suggested by the liberal usage of the word as a descriptor. The evil have no remorse, no conscience, no capacity for change, they are not mad or demented, not created or formed, they just are, without effort, thought or malice, as exactly complete in their demonic state as any other shade or quality of humanity.
By excusing individuals as simply being evil we are most decidedly committing a disservice to ourselves and our peers. Connivance is not an ingredient of evil, neither is usury, or cruelty, even outright wickedness falls short of the mark. Such attitudes, activities, willful acts, are the mark of the sociopath, the hedonist, the shameless, the uncaring. Being selfish, wholly absorbed in one’s own needs and wishes is but an exaggeration of homo sapiens natural base mental state, the starting point from where all intellectual and emotional growth commences.
Do not fear the actions of the evil, rather avoid the confounding’s of the sane, the commonplace, the ordinary. They produce chaos from innocuous beginnings, anarchy from small, insignificant, unavoidable beefs.
Daily Abstract Thoughts 