[MD] Is morality Hard Wired?

[david buchanan]

Khaled said:
No one wakes up one day and decides to do mayhem. Yes I am sure there is an 
exception somewhere, But for the most part, things are planted, they fester 
for a while, an ideology here, a zealotry there and so on. Krimel summed it 
up best in his response to Micah. Small groups knew each other, and they 
kept the deranged/bad element in check. It's when things move on large 
scales, that chaos takes over.

dmb says:
I'm not so sure that small scale communities enjoy any immunity to violence. 
If that were true there would be no such thing as domestic violence, crimes 
of passion, incest and the like. You always hurt the one you love and all 
that. I can see how the larger scale communities that come with civilization 
would precipitate a need for formal codes and laws but I'm a bit skeptical 
about the effects of scale on morality per se. Its much broader than that, 
no? It seems to me that there is an alienating and disturbing effect of 
large scale, complex societies. There is something stressful about having to 
manage one's own life in a context that is complicated to the point that 
nobody understands much beyond their own role as baker, warroir, midwife, 
Queen or whatever. Seems to me that there is a psychological advantage to 
living in small groups simply because social reality is within the 
individual's range of comprehension.

I totally agree with the notion that nobody wakes up wanting to cause 
mayhem. Or, as I like to say, bad guys don't think they're bad guys. Even 
Hitler, the classic real world evil villain, thought he was some kind of 
saviour. They say that understanding this is crucial to writing a good 
story. In script writing, for example, I've heard that one very useful 
exercise is to write the whole thing from the bad guy's point of view. The 
bad guy, in his own mind, is the good guy. He does what he does because he 
thinks its good. And it usually is some kind of good. This exercise is 
designed to help the writer create a villain that's psychologically true. 
Unlike comic book bad guys, this makes them sympathetic rather than 
ridiculous. This gives us shades of grey rather than the clear blacks and 
whites that children need in their stories. In the real world, then, evil is 
not committed by people who are intending to do evil like Lex Luther or 
whatever. Evil is committed by peole who think they are doing something 
good, but for some reason they are terribly mistaken. They wanna do good, 
but they're wrong about what's better than what. I promise you that Osama 
thinks he's a righteous man. Even Pol Pot, Charlie Manson thought they had a 
plan. Bush thinks he's doing the right thing too. All kinds of things cause 
us to be wrong and ideology and zealotry are certainly among them. There is 
also ignorance, stupidity, greed, fear, hate and all kinds of things that 
interfere with the ability to make wise choices. Nobody is immune to this. 
Its just a matter of degree. Who was it that said the line between good and 
evil runs through the middle of every human heart? I think it was a hip hop 
star by the name of Soulja Neetzin. She rocks. Or maybe it some Russian 
dissident, I don't rightly recall.

So my first stab at amatuer theology has resulted only in one simple 
equation. Power + Error = Evil

dmb

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