Why We Love Evil Ideas
Ignore fact and reason, live entirely in the world of your own fantastic and myth-producing passions; do this whole-heartedly and with conviction, and you will become one of the prophets of your age.
--Bertrand Russell
Russell wrote those words in 1932 in the course of explaining “How to Become a Man of Genius”. (He mentions Carlyle, Nietzsche, and D.H. Lawrence as cases in point.) But I think he left out an important part of the secret: if you want to become a prophet, it is also important to advocate outrageously evil behavior.
I want to understand why that is. But first, let me explain more what I mean.
1. Some Horrible Ideas
Obviously horrible ideas are surprisingly popular. For example, many primitive religions have endorsed human sacrifice. On its face – if you leave aside the religious beliefs – this looks like just about the most obviously evil idea you can think of. “Hey, let’s periodically murder an innocent person!”
Other examples: “Hey, let’s cut off every woman’s clitoris!” “Hey, let’s go murder the people who don’t agree with us!” Again, obviously evil on its face. And what about the popular idea that God is going to send most human beings to be tortured horribly forever after their deaths? Though this doesn’t directly call for us to be evil, it ascribes just about the most evil behavior imaginable to God.
Not only religious belief systems but also political ideologies often endorse blatant evil. Especially the idea that some large group of people needs to be persecuted or killed. The obvious example is Nazi ideology, advocating for persecuting the Jews. Also, in the communist countries in the 20th century, it was held that people who didn’t agree with the government deserved to be sent to prison, or the gulags, or killed outright. In Marxist ideology, there is a good deal of hatred directed at “the bourgeois”, as well as people who disagree with Marxism. How many people really endorsed this ideology is unclear since people were afraid to dissent. But it is striking that this ideology took over a large portion of the world, and a fair number of intellectuals even in the U.S. have endorsed it. Many have continued to be attracted to Marxism even after learning of the tens of millions killed by Marxist regimes. (For more on Marxism, see: https://fakenous.net/?p=327.)
Granted, not all popular belief systems are blatantly evil. Some may even be good. But it’s still surprising how much evil there is in popular belief systems; you would think there should be hardly any.
2. False Beliefs
Perhaps the first thing you’ll be tempted to say is, “People only endorse seemingly evil behavior because they have mistaken descriptive beliefs, such that if those beliefs were true, their behavior would be justified.”
For instance, suppose it were true that the sun would literally stop shining unless you murdered an innocent person every year on the altar of the sun god. In that case, it’s plausible that you really should murder that innocent person.
Or suppose that God commanded you to attack people who don’t believe a particular set of propositions describing him. In that case, maybe you should do so.
We could then wonder why people have so many false beliefs. That would take a long time to address. But we have lots and lots of false beliefs about lots of things, especially theoretical beliefs about unobserved things, and especially philosophical beliefs. In philosophical matters, one sometimes thinks, it is only extremely unjustified belief systems that ever take over a social group. So maybe our epistemic irrationality and unreliability is all we need to explain the success of horrible ideas.
In response, I don’t want to try to detail all the reasons why people are bad at figuring out unobserved truths. (That would perhaps be good for a series of other posts.) But even without answering that, I want to say that there seems to be something special to be explained about false beliefs that support evil behavior. Those beliefs seem to have some strange attraction.
I mean, if you’re going to adopt some unjustified beliefs, I can see why you’d pick things that are comforting, like belief in an eternal paradise following this life, or even the belief that your tribe is the best tribe in the world. But why would you choose to make up stuff that supports obviously-horrible-on-its-face behavior?
I think it’s fair to assume that there was never any evidence that the sun god wanted us to murder innocent people. The Aztecs just completely made that up. Now, if you’re going to make up stuff about what the gods want, you could just as well make up that the gods want us to treat each other nicely, and that they will become angry if we hurt each other. Wouldn’t that make more sense?
Or consider God’s supposed feelings about sex. Some think that God becomes enraged by homosexuality, or pre-marital sex, or female promiscuity, etc. Again, I assume that God did not ever actually say any of that. But if you’re going to make up stuff about what God said, again, you could just as well make up that God is very kind and understanding and wants us to enjoy sex in any way that doesn’t harm or violate the rights of others. Wouldn’t that, again, make more sense?
My point here is that it’s not enough to simply point to humans’ epistemic irrationality or unreliability. One still needs to explain why we often deploy our irrational belief-forming methods in the service of evil, rather than good.
3. Humans Are Evil
You probably knew this was coming. I can’t think of any good explanation other than that a large portion of humanity is evil.
The people who invented the doctrine of eternal damnation, as well as the people whom the inventors first told it to, found the doctrine plausible because they wanted it to be true, or because they themselves would send people who disagreed with them to eternal torture if they had the power to do so; therefore, they naturally assumed that God would do likewise.
The people who think God hates homosexuality are the people who themselves hate homosexuality. They’re projecting their own vices onto God in order to evade responsibility and feel self-righteous in indulging their hate. I’m sure these people would get mad if they read this. But that’s nevertheless how it looks to me.
The people who decided that the gods demand sacrifice wanted to commit some murders. But they didn’t want to appear evil, so they made up some descriptive beliefs that would justify what they wanted to do. Other humans were so stupid and/or evil that they didn’t call them on it.
Can you think of a better explanation?
4. Understanding Evil
You may think this is unsatisfying because I haven’t explained why many people are evil. There are probably a variety of factors. But I think the biggest explanation is that (i) evolution selects for selfishness, and (ii) human interests often conflict. In particular, people desire and have an interest (in the evolutionary sense) in social status or dominance. But social dominance is a zero-sum game. Any dominance that I acquire must be at the expense of others. So there is something in human nature that longs for harming others, especially for taking power and status away from them.
At the same time, humans are far from pure evil. If we were pure evil, we wouldn’t seek any philosophy to justify our actions; we’d torture and murder at will and then just say, “I felt like it.” Instead, we have an instinct for cooperation and a desire to see ourselves as good, which stands in tension with our innate aggression. So we invent theories to reconcile aggression with goodness – theories that tell us why, in indulging our aggressive impulses, we're actually doing a great moral good. This resolves cognitive dissonance without our having to restrain any of our desires.
Needless to say, none of this is made explicit in the mind of the evil person, since if it were, they’d have to admit to themselves that they were evil, and the jig would be up. I’m not saying that people think to themselves, “Hm, I want to commit a murder. What story can I tell myself so that I’ll feel good about it?”
The way it works is more like this:
(i) A significant portion of human beings are predisposed toward aggressive feelings. This doesn’t mean they feel aggressive all the time, nor do all people have the same dispositions. Rather, a certain portion of people (disproportionately male, btw; see https://fakenous.net/?p=2223, https://fakenous.net/?p=2207) have a relatively low threshold for feeling hostility toward other people. I.e., it doesn’t take much to get them angry or feeling as though violence is called for. These people don’t know why they feel this, and they usually don’t even know that there’s anything wrong; to them, their high level of aggression just seems normal.
(ii) Because of this background aggression, when they hear a belief system that tells them that violence and other harm directed at some person or group is called for, these people feel attraction. When they think the thoughts or say the words corresponding to that belief system, they feel pleasure. The actual reason for the pleasure is that those thoughts reconcile their aggressive impulses with their desire to feel righteous. They don’t realize this, because most people are not self-reflective. Nor do most people ask themselves for evidence for beliefs in general.
So, they want to hold the belief system, and they never ask themselves why they want this or what the evidence for the belief system is. So they just adopt the beliefs.
A similar dynamic works with other emotions and attitudes. For instance, you might feel resentment or hatred toward some other group, for whatever reason – maybe some members of that group once hurt you, or maybe you see that group succeeding when you and your group are not, or maybe you dislike them aesthetically, etc. Whatever the reason, when you hear a belief system that says that group is actually evil, you feel pleasure, because those thoughts reconcile your hatred with your desire to feel righteous. That makes you want to hold those beliefs, which in turn makes you (if you don’t care about evidence and you don’t reflect on your motives) adopt those beliefs.
What you wind up with is a belief system that is in essence a rationalization for hate, aggression, or whatever other vices are dominant in your psyche, but you don’t ever quite realize that that is what you’re doing.
(To be discussed later: how this applies to contemporary ideologies.)