Thanks for this review. I have done evil in the past due to similar reasons the author points. Not huge evils, smaller evil, but evils nonetheless. Afterwards I learned to be on guard against those small causal chains, but even so, even having began being on guard, I still did evil one more time afterwards. I hope my future rate will go down to zero and stay there. We’ll see.
By the way, an additional factor not mentioned in the review, and thus, I suppose, on the book, is the matter of evil governments manipulating the few who are good so they, too, serve evil purposes. This is something major powers do regularly. Their strategists identify some injustice going on in enemy territory, and induce those there who care to seek justice in specific ways calculated to cause the most disruption to the enemy government. Power structures thus destabilized result in social chaos, which can grow, when properly nurtured, into extreme violence, blood feuds, crackdowns, oppression, and generations-long prejudice and hatred. All by manipulating the goodness and sense of justice of the gullible.
To avoid that and do true good one needs to think from the perspective of evil. To imagine the many ways in which one’s good impulses could be redirected into evil deeds, and to act one or more layers above that.
Thanks for this review. I have done evil in the past due to similar reasons the author points. Not huge evils, smaller evil, but evils nonetheless. Afterwards I learned to be on guard against those small causal chains, but even so, even having began being on guard, I still did evil one more time afterwards. I hope my future rate will go down to zero and stay there. We’ll see.
By the way, an additional factor not mentioned in the review, and thus, I suppose, on the book, is the matter of evil governments manipulating the few who are good so they, too, serve evil purposes. This is something major powers do regularly. Their strategists identify some injustice going on in enemy territory, and induce those there who care to seek justice in specific ways calculated to cause the most disruption to the enemy government. Power structures thus destabilized result in social chaos, which can grow, when properly nurtured, into extreme violence, blood feuds, crackdowns, oppression, and generations-long prejudice and hatred. All by manipulating the goodness and sense of justice of the gullible.
To avoid that and do true good one needs to think from the perspective of evil. To imagine the many ways in which one’s good impulses could be redirected into evil deeds, and to act one or more layers above that.