Good and Evil
I’ve lied to you. I’m sorry to say that but it’s true. I don’t want to talk about good at all. I only want to talk about evil. And I didn’t want to call this “What is Evil” because I care about your mental health.
Who has the authority to speak about evil? Catholic priests? Exorcists? Unitarians…? Probably those who have experienced evil have the authority to speak on it, though I feel that it is a difficult topic, for more than one reason.
Is evil a lack of conscience, and a lack of empathy? Is it a soullessness and curdled envy for those who have souls? It’s not something I can qualify or quantify or provide empirical evidence about.
But I’m sure we can agree about some things when it comes to evil: Those who gain pleasure from harming others are evil. Can we at least agree on that? And further, those whose primary aim in life, their passion, if you will, is to cause harm to others in order to be gratified, those people are absolutely evil. Except those people are maybe capable of being good and decent at times, isn’t that also possible? Sometimes serial killers have kids and isn’t it possible they love their kids? Who cares? Maybe their kids care. Watch “Evil Lives Here” you will see what I mean.
What about people who are evil-adjacent? Say a good man is forced by a cartel to help them, or else his family might be harmed. He doesn’t want to, but he’s enabling evil.
It's hard to talk about evil without referencing Hannah Arendt’s “banality of evil” idea. She was a German philosopher who created this phrase (banal means boring, obvious, by the way) when talking about the trials of Adolph Eichmann, the (purportedly) petty bureaucrat who ran the train systems during the Holocaust- the running of the trains to the death camps. The Germans who worked at these stations maybe also had no choice, but Arendt’s theory says that the banality of evil exists because of basically laziness, thoughtlessness, an inability to see the perspective of others, and the tendency to follow orders without thinking.
And then there’s real estate agents. And I’m not comparing them to Nazis or cartels or The Mafia, but I wanted to introduce them because that’s what I have immediate experience with. I would say that in some instances, agents are people who are not intending to cause harm to others, but but some gain pleasure from causing harm. In the Bay Area, when you win a deal, someone else loses, and that causes harm to the other agent and sometimes to the other clients. And certainly, that is not the main goal for the agents I know, so I would not classify them as “absolute evil”.
To help me assess and convey the nature of agents I have encountered, I created an evil scale. It’s from 1 to 10, with 1 being the least evil and 10 being the evilest. So, the agent who inspired me to create this system I would put at a 7 on the evil scale. And I would submit to you that you can’t be a zero as an agent, that you must be capable of some evil or you will not survive as an agent. If you win and you win for your clients you should be happy. Why wouldn’t you be happy? But you are also causing harm to others. How to deal with this conflict? It’s a conundrum.
I’m not here to answer these difficult questions for you, or to argue with you. I’m simply here to offer you this tool: the evil scale. Try it on yourself, try it on others and see what you think. Are we all capable of evil? Do we go up and down on the scale? Would you say that it’s evil to do to others what they have done to you? I’m not asking from a religious standpoint. Just presenting you will a problem and a tool to help you solve the problem for yourself. I know where I am on the scale, but I’ll let you pick your own number.
