On His Deathbed, Anakin Skywalker Becomes Darth Vader

Chapter 9.7: Most people aren't trying to be evil

Note: This is an installment of The Freedom Scale: An Accurate Measure of Left and Right. See here for installments of The Distributed Nation: A Plan for Human Independence.

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Chapter 9.7

A Standard of Goodness

One look at the annals of history, or the news headlines on any given morning, reveals the tragic fact that people do bad things. Equally revealing, however, is a look at how most cultures judge bad behavior. Simply put, we begin with a presumption is that people should live up to standards of goodness, and badness is generally viewed as a failure.

Goodness is our starting point. We have a Golden Rule (treat others as you would like to be treated) and a Silver Rule (don’t do stuff to other people that you don’t want done to you). It is telling that we don’t have a Sulfur Rule (do unto others the worst things you can).

Very few people make a New Year’s resolution to be more evil. The very notion sounds a bit ludicrous. There may be a few Satan-worshippers out there who do, but most of them are probably posers anyway.

By contrast, lots of people make vows to be more good. Outside of extreme cases or horror movies, evil appears to be more of a deviation from some standard of goodness than a phenomenon unto itself.¹ More of often than not, evil acts can be chalked up to a failure to control some impulse motivated by one “deadly sin” or another.