https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=iW9Nr8XZ5Ms
2018, I think it was, I went to hear, my husband and I went to hear you speak in, I think, the Orpheum in LA, and you said something that has stuck with me ever since. And I still wrestle with it today. You talked about how we have, good people have an obligation to study evil and to think up deeply about evil. And I realized that how much of my conception of evil has been determined by Hollywood. The things that I imagine evil to be is sort of Hitler screaming at a podium or that one clip of him, even though he was a very charismatic figure and affable in other circumstances from what I understand. Or Hannibal Lecter, we think of these people as evil. But we’re really ill-equipped. We don’t even have a taxonomy for evil and the different prototypes of evil. And you really, you sort of pointed me in that direction separately. And I have never forgotten it and I still think about it all the time, how easily good people are misled because we have this wrong idea of what evil is. And we never, so we never see it coming. And I think, you know, it comes most effectively in the guise of benevolence. Wow. Right, right, right. Absolutely, absolutely. Well, we know that clinically even that, like, the really narcissistic psychopaths are martyr victims, both at the same time, right? And so then they manipulate you with compassion. Absolutely. Sometimes claiming they need it and sometimes claiming they’re delivering it. The most evil people take the highest good and invert it. And then they cast dispersions on the existence of the highest good. That’s what Christ accused the Pharisees of. That’s partly why he was crucified. Because he told the religious leaders of the time, the Pharisees claimed Mosaic authority. And he said, you’re religious only for what it benefits you in the public marketplace. It’s complete hypocrisy. Everything you claim to be moral is only for your own self-gratification and aggrandizement. And they weren’t very happy with that, put it that way. And this does make things, well, so, you know, people like Dawkins, for example, they attribute to the religious enterprise a kind of psychopathy without understanding that the psychopaths manipulate the religious exercise to bring down what’s highest and to benefit from its moral authority for their own devices. The Mullahs of Iran are a great example of that. We’re religious. It’s like, no, you’re not. You’re taking the religious enterprise and perverting it for your own use of power. The Westerners do the same thing now, but they do it with compassion. It’s like, I’m compassionate. It’s like, no, you’re not. You’re a psychopath. You’re a psychopath. You’re using compassion as a weapon. Right. And I think the most chilling example I’ve seen of that recently is when you see young American, young people, young adults tearing down posters of other people’s kidnapped children. It’s so chilling to watch them smile as they do it. And you just wonder why. You bet, man. Right. Why are you so happy to tear down the poster of someone else’s kidnapped child? Yeah, well, that’s probably not a question you want the answer to. I can tell you something you could read. Read The Great Mother by Eric Neumann. Okay. That’ll give you…that’s a 50% completed taxonomy of evil. Oh, wow. It’s only concentrating on the feminine side because he died before he finished the whole series, but it’s great. And there’s a book by Jeffrey Burton Russell. It’s a history of the devil. Like it’s an academic history. It’s a very serious book. It’s in four volumes. The best one is called Mephistopheles. I think that’s the best one, but all four are worth reading. Jeffrey Burton Russell. Yeah. So that’s two books. So that’s a good introductory taxonomy for evil. And it’s very, very helpful because, you know, as you said, the Hollywood style of evil is it’s not you, eh? It’s so distant from you that you can think about it as something that you have no relationship to. You don’t understand evil until you understand how you could be enticed by it. Right. You don’t understand it. You have to see that it would attract you, how it would attract you. Because if it’s completely divorced from you, it’s a caricature. And we have, you know, vast libraries on things like, you know, not just joy, but even just the tiny, you know, sexual pleasure is itself its own library. Right? There’s a whole, but carving up the different categories of evil, we’re so ignorant about its different forms and where it comes. And I think you’re right. Yeah. It does us all such a disservice. Dante’s Inferno is the same thing, right? The nine levels of hell. It is a taxonomy of evil. And Dante put, he identified Satan with betrayal. So Dante was trying to understand, you know, imagine that if you do something wrong, by your own lights, let’s say, and now you’re accusing yourself, if you go all the way to the bottom of that, the rationale, you’ll find the worst thing. You have to go down all nine levels of hell to find what’s at the bottom. And for Dante, it was betrayal. And I think that’s right, because one of the things that fosters social order is trust. And what a betrayer does is use trust against you. And there might be no more, and if you’re looking at something that will traumatize you, betrayal is, especially if you betray yourself, but betrayal period, it’s, you know, laying that out as the deepest of potential sins is wise. Anyways, Dante’s Inferno is a taxonomy of evil. It’s useful to know that when you read it, because that’s exactly what he was trying to do. You know, what are surface transgressions? And what strikes you to the core? What’s at the center of hell itself? And Milton’s too, Paradise Lost, his description of Satan. You see it there, that’s very well developed, and also in Goethe’s Faust, his analysis of Mephistopheles. So those are the places I know that have the deepest taxonomy of evil.