"Evil Is Stupid"

Evil Is Stupid:

"The Evil Tyrants of the real world never see themselves as evil. Only cartoon villains cackle with glee while rubbing their hands together and dream of ruling the world in the name of all that is wicked and bad. While we may admire our philosophers for the way they grapple with the Problem of Evil, a lot of the great tragedies of our culture stem from people who were trying -- quite nobly in their minds -- to free humanity from the Problem of Evil. Could our philosophers be on the wrong track here? Could they, in fact, be a big part of the problem?

A lot of people in the West can't come to grips with Buddhism because it doesn't address the Problem of Evil. We've got so much invested culturally in the notion of real Evil, that we aren't willing even to entertain the idea that evil may only be a mental concept with no corresponding reality. There's a tendency to try and shoe-horn the concept of evil into Buddhism. The most common way is to look at the idea of karma as an example of Buddhism's view of the Problem of Evil.

The word karma, which really just means 'action,' is often mis-used to refer to the Buddhist idea that the same laws of cause and effect we see evident everywhere in nature apply equally to the realm of mind, and that there is what we could call moral cause and effect. So if you believe in the concept of evil, you might look upon this as an idea that if someone does evil, evil will come back to him or her. And there's an unfortunate tendency to want to insert some kind of deity figure into the picture to mete out the proper punishment to the evil doer...

So even in the idea of karma, Buddhism doesn't address the Problem of Evil. That's because there really isn't any Problem of Evil. There is no Evil in this world. That's a hard one for us Westerners to swallow. But, in fact, there is only the idea of Evil. It's a concept borne out of an idealistic view of the world. It's a way of explaining what we encounter. But it's a piss poor explanation when you look at it carefully.

Evil is not real (and neither is Satan -- sorry Louvin Brothers!). But there is something else, and Buddhism does address this something else. I like to call it stupidity. All that we call "evil" is just plain stupidity. There's a very popular and very stupid idea out there in the world (and in your mind and my mind) that it might be possible to gain something for yourself by causing pain to others, and that you can cause pain to someone else without feeling that pain yourself or without suffering any consequences of your actions. This is a view held by almost every human being in the world -- the "evil" ones as well as the "good" ones. We "good" people hate seeing evil get rewarded while we ourselves behave so purely -- I always feel this way when I see who's won the Grammy Awards®. But the view that a person can cause harm without feeling any ill effects is wrong.

It's wrong because evil always involves another, either someone to whom you do evil or someone who does evil to you. In reality, though, there is no other upon which you can ever perform an act of evil, nor is there any other who can do evil things to you. The idea that you can do harm to others without ever experiencing the effects of what you've done is just plain stupid. It's like getting pissed off at something your left hand did and then punishing your hand by smashing it with a hammer. You miss the point that you alone are responsible for the movement of your hand and that you alone will suffer when your own punishment.

Of course, it's really, really hard for most people to accept the idea of universal oneness. We take our separation from each other as fact. But it's not a fact at all. It's a very deep misunderstanding, a misunderstanding so deep that even our physical senses seem unable to perceive the real situation. Oh but they can. It's just that most of us miss out on these perceptions. You might say they're far too subtle. But it's better to say we're mostly just too stupid to notice the obvious, the way a drunk might not notice he's just vomited all over himself."