The Worth of Good and Evil

Terminology is at the heart of any explanation. Profit-generating systems like religion rely on slogans to promote their products and therefore deliberately confuse the meaning of words. For example, “religion” is not “belief”. Belief is personal, sacred, and a matter of what appeals and makes sense to an individual. Leave that alone; it doesn’t belong to you; it belongs to your neighbor. Slogans stick to the brain like burrs and create their own terminology. Like memes or earworms created by bubblegum rock tunes, buzzwords become the basis for your thoughts and actions unless your intellectual immune system is healthy enough to fight back. You have to defend your mind from this garbage or you become easy prey to the plan.

Let’s straighten out something. VotePlusPlus is predicated on the idea that not everybody deserves equal formal status and authority in the world. This is of benefit to all. If you don’t enjoy the cold smiles and duplicity of life in the corner office, then why should you be condemned to make your career there? Go get the welding equipment and have at it. Fun at work is mandatory for productivity, if inconvenient for some misfit management staff. However, let’s not hand a machine gun to a chimp. That’ll be the end of all the furniture in the room. So, don’t appoint an unsuitable leader to a position of power.

There is clearly good and evil in the world. Where the line should be drawn is not possible to prove, because you have no idea about two things: what is the true nature of an individual and what would be best for the rest of us if an individual were allowed to manifest their natural behavior. All you can do is take a guess. However, the better the guess the more safe, productive and healthy the world becomes. Being in a position to be able enact guesses into law is critical to the survival of society. Electing the wrong person to do that is something we should never tolerate.

Knowing someone’s true nature is ultimately impossible. Proof? Anyone can lie. I immediately bristle when someone feels compelled to tell me “I am an honest person”, right out of the gate. What’s that supposed to do? Save me time deciding for myself through actual experience? Let my guard down and sign anything they put in front of me? I consider self-proclamation to be a mere tactic in most cases, designed to misdirect or disarm another person. I say nothing about myself as a rule unless the topic of conversation is introspective, or I feel comfortable sharing preferences within a trusted group.

So, what do we do with good and evil? Well, we can bow low and throw luxury vehicles at the “good” and perpetrate unspeakable horrors upon the “evil”. History has shown that this mistaken approach can have disastrous consequences, including the eternal condemnation of notorious tyrants who approached this problem wrongly. It’s a matter of terminology confusion, once again. Let’s untangle the words “good” and “evil” from “worthwhile”. The latter is intended to convey an intrinsic value that is deserving of respect, preservation and even reverence. Every human being should be afforded this benefit simply on the basis of having shown up and able to order a sandwich. This is why, flawed as it may be in your locality, the justice system in most places in the world does not chop off the hand of a thief or execute a citizen for having been involved in a bar fight. This civilized restraint is at the heart of the death penalty debate. I personally detest arguments that break out over “damned if you do, damned if you don’t” scenarios. Nobody is wrong because nobody can be wrong. All decisions about matters that rest on a split hair should be made on a case-by-case basis, with the understanding that no results will ever perfectly fit the situation. Yet, urgent problems still require a really good guess to solve, no matter how complicated or inscrutable. They should preferably be offered by an expert who has dealt with similar problems, up-close and first-hand.

VotePlusPlus recommends that we ascribe worth to everyone and formulate our policies on that basis. Then, if we need to make a judgement about what’s “good” we can do that thoughtfully and by consensus. You cannot obtain consensus – where dilemmas can be resolved by choosing what’s behind “Door Number 3!” – without broad representation. And, you cannot lead a representative government without having power, influence and a mandate to proclaim and declare. Having the wrong individuals assigned to positions of authority is like populating a zoo with armed monkeys. Have a look at the political situation today and tell me what you see.