The Brilliant Side Of Bad - Why Evil Is So Compelling And Good Is So Insufferably Boring

Hannah Arendt was famous for her work on 'the banality of evil', how ordinary people do unspeakable things; and she used Adolph Eichmann as a prime example - a man of literature and good taste, cultured, and knowledgeable, but capable of the most horrendous crimes imaginable. 

David Brooks a number of years ago wrote an interesting article about human nature.  “Why”, we ask, “Do good people do bad?”.  Brooks wondered why this doesn’t happen more often since we are programmed from birth and down the millennia of human existence to be self-protective and aggressive and to expand our perimeters and secure our interests.

John Calvin believed that babies come out depraved (he was sort of right; the most violent stage of life is age). G. K. Chesterton wrote that the doctrine of original sin is the only part of Christian theology that can be proved. This worldview held that people are a problem to themselves. The inner world is a battlefield between light and dark, and life is a struggle against the destructive forces inside.

This worldview was both darker and brighter than the one prevailing today. It held, as C. S. Lewis put it, that there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism.

 

Frank Bales, the topical subject of Brooks’ article is the young soldier who massacred 16 people in Afghanistan.

Friends and teachers describe him as caring, gregarious and self-confident before he — in the vague metaphor of common usage — apparently “snapped.” As one childhood friend told The Times “That’s not our Bobby. Something horrible, horrible had to happen to him.”

This is a normal reaction, affirms Brooks:

According to [the worldview that prevails in our culture], most people are naturally good, because nature is good. The monstrosities of the world are caused by the few people (like Hitler or Idi Amin) who are fundamentally warped and evil.  This worldview gives us an easy conscience, because we don’t have to contemplate the evil in ourselves.

Josef Conrad in Heart of Darkness expressed it best in the words of Kurtz, 'The horror...the horror', the deathbed realization that not only were the cannibalistic savages he courted the very incarnation of human voracious paganism, but that all human beings shared the same trait. 

Yet there can be no denying the irresistible appeal of such pure, amoral, willful behavior.  Nietzsche observed that the only validation of the individual is the expression of pure will, the Übermensch riding over the herd, 'beyond good and evil' and the characters of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg and others have created characters of enviable, but terrifying will. 

There is something far more compelling about Richard III than Richard II, his predecessor, the one devilish and Machiavellian in his plots to secure his reign; the other given to fantastical poetic dreams, emotional weakness and a suicidal desire to die at the hand of his enemies. 

Goneril and Regan are unspeakable harridans, murderous sisters with no compassion or remorse who consign their father, King Lear, to madness and a solitary death; or Dionyza who without a scintilla of moral hesitation sends Pericles's daughter to her death; or the macabre, pure evil Iago who plots to destroy the noble Othello. 

  

Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilde Wangel, Ibsen's heroines are women of pure, unadulterated will, ambition, and personal desire.  Lovborg, Solness, and Rosmer are all sent to their death by these determined, brilliantly soulless women.  There are others.  Literature is filled with such villains and villainesses. 

While one rightly and justifiably condemns Hitler and Stalin for their murderous and genocidal actions, one cannot help but wonder at how humanity, God, or Natural Selection have created men of such power and unmitigated, unstoppable wrong; and as such are fascinated.  The horrors of the Holocaust, the millions humiliated and frozen to death in Soviet gulags, and the tens of millions destitute and dying because of Mao's enforced collectivism can only make us wonder.  Who are we, after all? 

After all is said and done, Americans pity Joe Biden, a weak, beholden, timorous idealist, a fantasist and prayerful aspirant to a better, more peaceful, more verdant world; and cheer the macho, unintimidated, uncorrected, and outrageous Donald Trump.  It is not only American Wild West individualism that is behind the cheering and adoring crowds.  It is because Americans, Europeans, Asians love, want, and adore the great, the unbowed, and the Supermen.  It is no surprise that after years of a wailing, penitent, clothes-rending and breast beating liberal idealism, the Right has emerged strong and defiant on every continent. 

Despite liberal democracy autocracy, African Big men, neo-emperors and czars are still in power.  As much as progressives would like to believe that Americans - all people - are inherently good, compassionate, considerate, and cooperative, history has shown that we are not.  Strong men - and increasingly women - are in power because of an innate human destiny - strength, dominance, supremacy and rule. 

 

More importantly and less openly expressed is the desire to be like such rulers.  We are all Nietzscheans, not obedient Christians at heart.  Jesus may help keep our willful desires in check, but our thoughts are with the mighty.  Genghis Khan, not Joe Biden is our hero. 

It is no surprise that Islam is so fast growing and seemingly unstoppable.  It is a militant, absolutely undeterred religion.  Muhammed was the original Muslim strong man, and ISIS, al-Shabab, the Taliban, and Hamas are his offspring. 

Donald Trump has been called by the Left an insurrectionist dictator, a strong man, an autocrat interested only in complete authoritarian power; but that is exactly why he appeals to America in this early era of the 21st Century, a country tired of lamentations, penance, and dutiful compassion.  We were never so, never in the days of colonization, Manifest Destiny and Westward expansion, the Wild West, or the unbounded era of Darwinian evolutionary supremacy in the age of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Morgan. 

Dostoevsky created a Devil in The Brothers Karamazov, and he tells Ivan that without him life would be a thumping bore, church on Sundays, fidelity, good works, and responsibility; but that we are not created to be such choirboys.  On the contrary we are programmed for irrefutable self interest, violent aggression and personal territorialism - all of which produce drama, tragi-comedy, and hilarious vaudeville to enjoyed not mourned. 

 

Liberal democracy notwithstanding, the desire for strength, unmitigated, unalloyed power is more a part of our nature than any compassionate, considerate, and inclusive Christianity.  We have been sold a bill of goods by Jesus, Ivan Karamazov claims, offering majesty, miracles, and authority embodied in the Church and giving it rise to institutional hegemony; but Ivan was wrong.  We love and want authority, the more unassailable the better. 

So do we want a Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot on American soil? Hardly, but at the same time there is no doubt that Americans prefer a strong, undaunted, undeterred macho like Donald Trump to his weak, feminized predecessor. 

Trump is not evil as he has been portrayed by the Left; and it is an injustice and demeaning insult to Holocaust survivors to suggest he is a Hitler.  His undiminished sense of legitimate power and righteous authority, and his absolute commitment to reestablish the foundational principles of the United States are not Hitlerian, but very American and very, very human. 

Febrile Brain Disorder - New Scientific Research On Political Hate And Cognitive Dysfunction

Professor Anton Rabinowitz, Chief Scientist at NIH's Department of Neurobiology, Adjunct Professor at both Johns Hopkins and Georgetown medical schools, and a well-known researcher into political phenomenology recently came out with a new paper entitled Febrile Brain Disorder - The Socio-Neurological Basis For Political Virulence. 

The paper published by The New England Journal of Medicine, the premier medical journal in the United States and known for the rigor of its peer review process contended that there was a systemic, functional link between inchoate, irrational, political belief and disturbances in the cerebral cortex which over time were adapted by the brain as predictable behavior. 

In a series of double-blind experiments, he showed that the neurological circuitry of the brain did indeed flare up when what he called 'true believers' (TB) got into a state of inflamed, irregular 'passion'.  He assembled his subjects and attaching them to sophisticated state-of-the art neuro-patterned electro-magnetic receptors, invited them to a lecture by a a political advocate far to the left or right of their stated views.

The experiment was like the old Stanford experiment where subjects were asked to play the roles of guards or prisoners, and reactions noted (even in a laboratory setting, the subjects became either brutal or submissive); or the Yale experiments where students were told that painful shocks would be administered but they could drop out if they couldn't stand the pain (hoax, of course, no pain was to be delivered, only the mental discipline of students from different socio-cultural backgrounds be measured). Similarly the Rabinowitz subjects were given a plausible but untrue explanation as to the purpose of the experiment when the objective was to see how they reacted when they got when politically exercised. 

 

The subjects were all true believers - partisans on both sides of the current political debate - and 'invited' to hear opposing views.  The 'speakers' were trained to presents political philosophy in the most exaggerated, intolerant way, but within academic rules. 

The initial results of the experiments were surprising. There was a marked difference in brain activity between progressives and conservatives.  The progressive subjects became angry, then hostile, than near hysterical, shouting down the speaker, standing and waving their fists, bellowing insults and threats; while the conservative subjects simply laughed and snickered and what they later described as the absolute 'bullshit' they heard. 

The progressive subjects were asked (and paid) to return to Baltimore and be retested, this time without political provocation, and there Rabinowitz made his surprising and unique discovery - the brainwave patterns of the subjects who had gotten so inflamed and hysterical remained upset and in neurological terms 'incoherent' weeks after the original event.  To be sure he tested again after six months and found the same results. 

He could only hypothesize that repeated febrile episodes like the one staged at Hopkins, could only further disturb brain circuitry; and that the more these TBs became exercised and febrile, the greater likelihood that the episodes would be repeated, with even more agitation.  It was, in Rabinowitz's words, 'A pernicious loop'. Events affected brain electronics, the next episodes became more exercised and incoherent because of brain interference; and before long the political partisan would become a whirling dervish, a permanent St. Vitus' dancer.

'Why were conservatives not so affected?', academic and political critics asked; and while Dr. Rubinstein could not point to any neurological differences in brain structure or function - there is no evidence concerning physiological or structural differences in liberal and conservative brains - political 'agitation' (or any persistent exaggeratedly expressed emotion), usually only confined to differences in the way they think, itself conditioned by history, economics, geography, family, and a thousand other environmentally conditioning factors, may be a product of something far more fundamental. 

Liberals and conservatives have access to the same information, yet they hold wildly incompatible views on issues ranging from global warming to sexual diversity. 

These things do not make sense — unless you view them through the lens of political psychology. There’s now a large body of evidence showing that those who opt for the political left and those who opt for the political right tend to process information in divergent ways and to differ on any number of psychological traits; and Rabinowitz added the irrefutable physiological dimension to the debate.  It was not so much a question of psychological variables, but neuro-chemical destiny.

'I always knew they were fruitcakes', said P. John Haynsworth. Haynsworth had been criticized by many of his Yale classmates for his conservative views and, surprisingly for an environment supposedly reasoned, logical, and temperate, he was attacked in what were feverish and almost unprintable hateful screeds submitted for publication in the Yale Alumni Magazine. 

The Rabinowitz article of course did not remain within privileged academic circles, but was reprinted and widely circulated through the popular medium.  'WE KNEW IT ALL ALONG' was the banner headline of conservative New York Post while The Nation, New York Review of Books, The New Yorker, and The Atlantic yelled foul, demanded a retraction by JAMA, the dismissal of Rabinowitz, and the burying of any or all references to the study. 

Hopkins and The JAMA stuck by their guns and praised Rabinowitz for his groundbreaking discoveries enabled by meticulously ethical and professional investigation. 

Yale alumni aside, once the report circulated outside of the narrow confines of elite readership, the howls of delight from Trump supporters were loud and exuberant.  Their man had been the subject of rabid attacks for over ten years, and the longer he remained a popular public figure, the harsher and more irrational they became - The Rabinowitz Theory proven again and again - political hysteria feeds on itself, and is a viral agent that permanently distorts normal cognition. 

If there were any doubters, a thousand incensed, enraged students at Hopkins and Georgetown stormed the administrative offices and demanded Rabinowitz's immediate firing.  The demonstrations were even more wild and damaging than the recent anti-Israel protests on the Columbia campus. They were not only 'agitated' but violent. 

'They can't help it', said one mild-mannered, well-meaning professor at Harvard medical school. Supporting his colleague Rabinowitz, he said 'Biology trumps psychology', and for that was properly dunned and demands for his dismissal were as loud as that in Baltimore and Washington. 

Dr. Rabinowitz has weathered the storm, and has gone on to investigate the phenomenon further, has confirmed his initial findings again and again, and has written additional papers all in the public record.  He continues on in his tenured enclave but intends to retire in a few years after a long and distinguished career. 

EVs, SUVs, Lawn Signs, And The Presumption Of Right - The Gulag Of Groupthink

University Park was a tony, leafy, well-to-do neighborhood in Northwest Washington - an all white, deeply progressive part of town, one in which residents took their political beliefs seriously and were not shy to show them off.  All the cars parked up and down the sycamore, ash, and maple-lined streets were either EVs or hybrid SUVs - a uniformity surprising given the disposable income of the community and the range of vehicle offerings on the market.  However, in early decades the neighborhood was equally consistent, first with Volvo station wagons, then Priuses. 

The reason for such consistent uniformity was due diligence.  The residents of University Park had done their homework before buying and bought only the safest, most energy-efficient, most reliable cars on the market.  The Volvos were road tanks that would survive even the most horrendous of crashes, and despite the fact that everyone, thanks to the same cautious, reasonable approach to buying cars, drove them under the speed limit, made complete stops at intersections, and obeyed all road signs, buying the safest cars made infinite, logical sense. 

The new hybrids were no different - while smaller and more vulnerable in horrific accidents, they were better for the environment, less polluting, more considerate of others, and the right thing to do. 

When electric vehicles came on the market - a more serious, deliberate answer to climate change - the residents of University Park lined up.  Despite the well-known geopolitical costs to depending on war-torn countries' rare earth materials necessary for EV batteries, the pollutants attendant upon producing electricity for charging, and the environmental risks of hazardous waste disposal - all no-no issues for environmentalists - the wait for EVs was long. 

 

The hybrid SUV craze was an amalgamation of all the above.  Not quite tanks, but armored and riding high, equipped with every possible safety gadget available, and less-polluting than gas-powered cars, they flew out of car dealerships.  

All this would be well and good, but a neighborhood with only these types of vehicles? Not a sedan in sight?

Groupthink has been well-researched.  There is a tendency for socially appropriate consistent uniformity within homogeneous groups.  It is not surprising that University Park with its high proportion of lawyers, doctors, investors, financial analysts, and high-tech engineers would think similarly when it came to purchase decisions; and so it was that few women wore high heels, designer clothes, diamonds, and gold earrings.

A string of pearls on occasion, comfortable shoes, simple patterned dresses and suits, few hats and certainly no perfume more than sufficed and made a statement that was consistent with everything else.  A business suit or a plain, simply-patterned dress was like a Prius - the buyer has been intelligent, judicious, and world-aware in both.  Add to that the equally persistent social trait of belonging, and you have a lockstep community of like-minded neighbors. 

This is where the understandability stops, for University Park is a profoundly intolerant neighborhood.  Any diversion from these well-established norms is looked at with opprobrium if not suspicion.  People talk openly about their hatred for Donald Trump, the American Right, and conservatism.  Neighborhood chit chat, casual encounters at Whole Foods, and locker room banter at the gym is all consistently and presumptively conservative. No one there could ever possibly imagine a Trump supporter.  Talk is loudly, proudly, and publicly of Trump and Israel hatred, Hitler, insurrectionists, cracker mentality, and Bible-thumping ignorance.  All nod in approval. 

 

Groupthink in University Park was at its worst during COVID where there was absolutely no room for debate, discussion, or objections to the received wisdom.  The neighborhood was shut down, residents wore hazard suits and gas masks, and vigilantes walked the streets to enforce compliance with the established, undeniable, right approach to the pandemic. 

Everything, absolutely everything was in conformity and perfectly consistent.  The ethos, the zeitgeist, the prevailing norms of the community was unassailable in a virtual fortress. 

Hate Has No Home Here, Black Lives Matter, Asylum Seekers Welcome lawn signs, balcony banners and festoons were on every lawn.  The cars, the clothes, the proper COVID behavior, the Trump outrage were not enough.  Something visual and unavoidable had to be added to the vitae. 

Perhaps more to the point no American flags flew anywhere.  Not one house up and down the avenues and streets of University Park displayed a flag, for it had become a symbol of right wing extremism, a MAGA, corrupt, distorted patriotism that smacked of storm troopers and torchlight parades. 

All communities display some sort of uniform behavior.  Adolescents cannot be told apart, so similar are they in dress, hairstyle, tastes and behavior; and few adults ever grow out of this need for belonging and need for legitimacy and identity.  The residents of University Park say to everyone, 'I Am A Progressive', more than any talent, interest or taste.  It defines me perfectly, it provides a consistent, harmonious picture of who I am. 

The Left's famous diversity claims plurality, but groupthink has assured that every one of its potpourri marches to the same drummer.  Race, gender, and ethnicity along with climate wisdom, socialist economics, and accommodating internationalism make up the canon, the liturgy, and the articles of faith.  This 'inclusivity' is an infectious viral indoctrination, and the people of University Park have fallen for it hook, line, and sinker. 

In fact there is no diversity there, no inclusivity, no equity - it is a gulag, an intellectual concentration camp, a reservation of complacency and conformity. 

So while one might have some give when it comes to judging this tony corner of the Nation's Capital - all communities seem to subscribe to the same cloistered needs - it is hard to forget that the people living there are among the best educated, more advanced degrees than any in the city and are parallel to Cambridge and Berkeley.  Post-graduate education is supposed to be an indicator of advanced thinking, a trained ability to analyze, reflect, consider, and then conclude. 

How and why, then, is there so little of such logic, so little independent thought, so much intellectual conformity and so dutiful a slavishness to prevailing, narrow norms?  Either the smartest people on the block are actually the dumbest, or the virus of progressivism is fatal.  Probably both.