EVIL: I’m Just a Soul Whose Intentions are Good

Announcing my eventual seventh book

In March of 2020 you got to witness something that only far away backwards cultures previously had the misfortune to experience.

Totalitarianism.

You likely hadn’t experienced it before.

And even now most of the world is not aware that that’s what they experienced.

What happened to the Germans or the Chinese or the Iranians couldn’t happen here. Because the Germans are strict, the Chinese collective, the Iranians middle eastern. And we’re Western, but, uh, not German. Or something. There’s always some post hoc bullshit justification for why it happened to them and can’t happen to us.

Covid blew right through all that.

It can happen to us. Of course it can happen to us. It happens because human groups are governed by the same “physics.”

You experienced totalitarianism first hand. You experienced evil first hand.

And, it’s quite likely most of your family, friends, acquaintances, and maybe even you, were helping hands in the totalitarianism that swept over the world.

But how is that possible? Those that push totalitarianism must be evil, and my family, friends and acquaintances were well-intentioned, with good hearts. So, how could what happened be totalitarianism?

And there’s another strain of reaction that is skeptical that what happened was totalitarianism because, from their point of view, it was all just a case of evil powerful organizations and governments implementing top-down authoritarianism. That’s the evil they saw, not the totalitarianism that actually occurred.

Totalitarianism -- whatever it is -- is complex, and most people don’t really get what it is. They don’t understand how to think about the physics of socio-political movements at the largest scales. They don’t grasp how to think about culpability at these levels. They haven’t got a good handle on the Great Evil societies have always had to contend with, the ones behind crimes against humanity.

None of it is simple. None of it is what we’re naturally good at thinking about.

To make sense of the political tectonics that shape our large-scale world requires a different kind of thinking than the one we all use in our everyday lives. And that’s because whereas what shapes the events in our everyday lives is describable as causal chains and bad or good intentions, what shapes socio-political dynamics is more akin to the actions of a brain, a flock, a termite colony, and an economy.

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That above is an unedited excerpt from a new book in progress, my seventh book, tentatively titled...

EVIL: I'm Just a Soul Whose Intentions Are Good

It will go well beyond what I've covered in more than 400 Science Moment videos, tens of thousands of tweets, and hundreds of pieces at LooFWIRED Magazine.