You consider yourself a relatively “good” person, don’t you? What about others? You think they consider themselves similarly, even those who commit what you call “crimes”? What about the pathological, that serial killer who both frightens us by action, but continues what is for him or her a “normal” activity? If you consider yourself to be a “good” person, do you believe the “good” lies within you, innately so, or do you think you acquired “good” from your culture? Does “bad” like “good,” or evil like good, come from within or without? Both?
No matter how hard you wish for a break from bad news, you won’t get it. Bad things have always occurred and will occur. You’re on your own if you want respite. Not only are there people “out there” who do bad, but even when you seek respite and no matter where you seek it, there are also people “out there” who are determined to tell you about every conceivable “bad thing or person.”
That bad people do bad things is a fact. That they do them ubiquitously is also a fact. And for every bad person there appear to be multiple reporters, all eager to tell you the bad that has occurred, is occurring, or will occur. The 24-hour news cycle is here to stay. and it is fed by a seeming endless number of reporters eager to find something newsworthy, a term, in today’s world, meaning, if not “an act of dire consequences caused by humans or Nature,” then “the best example of public disgrace we can find at the moment—it’s all about the opprobrium, baby; it’s all about the bad we can attribute.” What is newsworthy as “bad,” of course, includes natural disasters and suffering of all kinds, from burned koalas to burned out homeowners. But since the large disasters, like the tsunami of 2004 or the Australian fires of 2020, are relatively infrequent—on the order of about one or so per year— the news people have to fill their day with something. No murders or robberies today? No problem. There has to be some kind of argument at the town council or school board meeting. There has to be some politician or celebrity to denigrate. Is reporting on the “bad” of any kind—from murder of the innocent to death by volcanic eruption—a manifestation of something surfacing from the “inside,” the reporters’ suppressed “bad” springing fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus? In the absence of mega-events does the devil inside reporters emerge in those stories that supposedly reveal the internal evil of others?
Did INXS provide the succinct explanation for bad news in “The Devil Inside”? Were Mick and the rest of the Rolling Stones among the most insightful of social and moral philosophers in “Gimme Shelter”? Didn’t the two groups encapsulate all the writings on the philosophy of evil in those two songs? Is the source of bad news, of evil itself, internal or external? Do we, as INXS sings, house evil, i.e., the Devil Inside? Or must we seek shelter from outside evil? If the latter, do we mark our safety from the “bad” by our distance from the nearest “shot” that starts verbal or physical local or regional war? Is evil out there, external to us individually, or does it lie within us as it does in the boys in Lord of the Flies. Is evil a natural state kept in check only by some artificial constructs that make up societies and religions? Can there be no shelter because we, all of us, are only “a shot away” from its inevitable occurrence?
Are respite and shelter possible in a world that is so seemingly full of evil and bad news? Is it possible that we all, in fact, shelter a “devil inside” that makes escaping the “bad,” any “bad,” only temporarily possible? In the absence of reporters, do we find ourselves self-reporting? Is there something legitimate to this “original sin” notion? Are we evil by a nature that is enhanced by nurture? If we take away that nurture, are we inherently devilish? Or, are we victims of evil imposed from outside, living just “a shot away,” as the Rolling Stones sing, from war of any kind?
You might ask, “Why does the origin of evil matter? That it plagues us as it has always plagued humans is the point. Evil from the outside or evil from the inside, I don’t see the difference. You can go back to the Book of Job to see how old and unresolved this discussion is. Job was supposedly a ‘good’ person, but the Adversary, aka Satan, the Devil or whatever you want to call him, imposed ‘evil’ from without.” And you might continue, “Anyway, how do we define evil? Isn’t one person’s evil another’s good? Kill a murderous terrorist and people live. Isn’t such killing justified. Isn’t it just a choice between the ‘lesser’ of two evils? Do we include evil or ‘the bad’ as the product of natural events like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis that kill the innocent? Surely, all 230,000 victims of the 2004 Christmastime Indian Ocean tsunami didn’t deserve their watery deaths. For their surviving friends and families, the seafloor perpetrated a great evil. Did IT act on its own, as an agent of an indifferent natural process, or as a proxy for an external Adversary?”
Is it possible that natural disasters aren’t a manifestation of evil in any sense? To attribute evil to them is to ascribe some conscious agency. Volcanoes just do what they do. The “evil” they impose on people living nearby isn’t the result of a conscious act except as a consequence of deciding to live near active volcanoes. If no people lived nearby… well, by analogy, if that tree falls in a forest, it does transfer its kinetic energy to the air, but in the absence of humans, no one hears those sound waves. Evil? If there are no villages beneath the volcano’s summit, there's no death by pyroclastic flow--the Pompeians live.
Or is ignorance the cause of random misfortune, like not knowing a volcano can erupt or not knowing that an old tree is ready to fall. Would you say that in the case of natural disasters—for individuals or groups—ignorance, and not evil, is in play. Death by volcano is death by ignorance. Is such “evil” planned? And if one says, “It was his (or their) time” or “It was meant to be,” does that ascribe responsibility to the agency we call fate? But bad luck, just being in the wrong spot during a volcano’s long history of activity or beneath that old big tree, eliminates the universal Adversary that reversed Job’s fortunes. Job, like those victims of “perfect storms,” was just in the wrong place at the wrong time in a universe of so many possibilities that eventually someone’s timeline was going to meet in space with forces of downfall and destruction. Remember that fender bender? Had you and that stranger not left your respective homes at the moments you backed out of the driveway, taken the routes you took, stopped at those traffic lights, or yielded to a merging driver, then neither of you could possibly have collided at that distant intersection. Preordained? With a couple of hundred million vehicles on the roads, isn’t that collision just a chance event with a “bad outcome” one that would inevitably occur to two out of hundreds of millions of people traveling in cars? Is the universe merely filled with particles in motion that randomly collide and that for humans indifferently impose the evil of fender benders or horrible accidents?
“Gimme shelter from randomness,” is an unrealistic request if all is a matter of randomness whose only control lies in the four fundamental forces of the universe and Newtonian principles. “Gimme shelter from conscious evil,” might also be an unrealistic request, especially if the “devil” lies within. Anyway, merely making the request suggests that there’s an Agent capable of granting the request. Are the Rolling Stones seeking shelter from such an Agent? Is Mick a religious man? From whom does he seek shelter?
And even if we define evil only as “the act of a conscious being,” isn’t randomness still in play? How, like the car accident, does the serial killer come across the path of one of the victims? Would you say, “With seven plus billion people in the world, some random chance meeting of killer and victim is inevitable”? But if evil resides inside, then how does it emerge? If suppressing the evil inside requires a conscious effort to be “good” as a culture defines good, then does the “devil inside” escape to the outside because all cultural restraints are incomplete barriers. Some of us just don’t have a moral wall strong enough to keep the devil inside.
Gimme shelter from the devil inside others, from random evil, and, if I have one, the devil inside me.
No matter how hard you wish for a break from bad news, you won’t get it. Bad things have always occurred and will occur. You’re on your own if you want respite. Not only are there people “out there” who do bad, but even when you seek respite and no matter where you seek it, there are also people “out there” who are determined to tell you about every conceivable “bad thing or person.”
That bad people do bad things is a fact. That they do them ubiquitously is also a fact. And for every bad person there appear to be multiple reporters, all eager to tell you the bad that has occurred, is occurring, or will occur. The 24-hour news cycle is here to stay. and it is fed by a seeming endless number of reporters eager to find something newsworthy, a term, in today’s world, meaning, if not “an act of dire consequences caused by humans or Nature,” then “the best example of public disgrace we can find at the moment—it’s all about the opprobrium, baby; it’s all about the bad we can attribute.” What is newsworthy as “bad,” of course, includes natural disasters and suffering of all kinds, from burned koalas to burned out homeowners. But since the large disasters, like the tsunami of 2004 or the Australian fires of 2020, are relatively infrequent—on the order of about one or so per year— the news people have to fill their day with something. No murders or robberies today? No problem. There has to be some kind of argument at the town council or school board meeting. There has to be some politician or celebrity to denigrate. Is reporting on the “bad” of any kind—from murder of the innocent to death by volcanic eruption—a manifestation of something surfacing from the “inside,” the reporters’ suppressed “bad” springing fully formed like Athena from the head of Zeus? In the absence of mega-events does the devil inside reporters emerge in those stories that supposedly reveal the internal evil of others?
Did INXS provide the succinct explanation for bad news in “The Devil Inside”? Were Mick and the rest of the Rolling Stones among the most insightful of social and moral philosophers in “Gimme Shelter”? Didn’t the two groups encapsulate all the writings on the philosophy of evil in those two songs? Is the source of bad news, of evil itself, internal or external? Do we, as INXS sings, house evil, i.e., the Devil Inside? Or must we seek shelter from outside evil? If the latter, do we mark our safety from the “bad” by our distance from the nearest “shot” that starts verbal or physical local or regional war? Is evil out there, external to us individually, or does it lie within us as it does in the boys in Lord of the Flies. Is evil a natural state kept in check only by some artificial constructs that make up societies and religions? Can there be no shelter because we, all of us, are only “a shot away” from its inevitable occurrence?
Are respite and shelter possible in a world that is so seemingly full of evil and bad news? Is it possible that we all, in fact, shelter a “devil inside” that makes escaping the “bad,” any “bad,” only temporarily possible? In the absence of reporters, do we find ourselves self-reporting? Is there something legitimate to this “original sin” notion? Are we evil by a nature that is enhanced by nurture? If we take away that nurture, are we inherently devilish? Or, are we victims of evil imposed from outside, living just “a shot away,” as the Rolling Stones sing, from war of any kind?
You might ask, “Why does the origin of evil matter? That it plagues us as it has always plagued humans is the point. Evil from the outside or evil from the inside, I don’t see the difference. You can go back to the Book of Job to see how old and unresolved this discussion is. Job was supposedly a ‘good’ person, but the Adversary, aka Satan, the Devil or whatever you want to call him, imposed ‘evil’ from without.” And you might continue, “Anyway, how do we define evil? Isn’t one person’s evil another’s good? Kill a murderous terrorist and people live. Isn’t such killing justified. Isn’t it just a choice between the ‘lesser’ of two evils? Do we include evil or ‘the bad’ as the product of natural events like volcanic eruptions, earthquakes, and tsunamis that kill the innocent? Surely, all 230,000 victims of the 2004 Christmastime Indian Ocean tsunami didn’t deserve their watery deaths. For their surviving friends and families, the seafloor perpetrated a great evil. Did IT act on its own, as an agent of an indifferent natural process, or as a proxy for an external Adversary?”
Is it possible that natural disasters aren’t a manifestation of evil in any sense? To attribute evil to them is to ascribe some conscious agency. Volcanoes just do what they do. The “evil” they impose on people living nearby isn’t the result of a conscious act except as a consequence of deciding to live near active volcanoes. If no people lived nearby… well, by analogy, if that tree falls in a forest, it does transfer its kinetic energy to the air, but in the absence of humans, no one hears those sound waves. Evil? If there are no villages beneath the volcano’s summit, there's no death by pyroclastic flow--the Pompeians live.
Or is ignorance the cause of random misfortune, like not knowing a volcano can erupt or not knowing that an old tree is ready to fall. Would you say that in the case of natural disasters—for individuals or groups—ignorance, and not evil, is in play. Death by volcano is death by ignorance. Is such “evil” planned? And if one says, “It was his (or their) time” or “It was meant to be,” does that ascribe responsibility to the agency we call fate? But bad luck, just being in the wrong spot during a volcano’s long history of activity or beneath that old big tree, eliminates the universal Adversary that reversed Job’s fortunes. Job, like those victims of “perfect storms,” was just in the wrong place at the wrong time in a universe of so many possibilities that eventually someone’s timeline was going to meet in space with forces of downfall and destruction. Remember that fender bender? Had you and that stranger not left your respective homes at the moments you backed out of the driveway, taken the routes you took, stopped at those traffic lights, or yielded to a merging driver, then neither of you could possibly have collided at that distant intersection. Preordained? With a couple of hundred million vehicles on the roads, isn’t that collision just a chance event with a “bad outcome” one that would inevitably occur to two out of hundreds of millions of people traveling in cars? Is the universe merely filled with particles in motion that randomly collide and that for humans indifferently impose the evil of fender benders or horrible accidents?
“Gimme shelter from randomness,” is an unrealistic request if all is a matter of randomness whose only control lies in the four fundamental forces of the universe and Newtonian principles. “Gimme shelter from conscious evil,” might also be an unrealistic request, especially if the “devil” lies within. Anyway, merely making the request suggests that there’s an Agent capable of granting the request. Are the Rolling Stones seeking shelter from such an Agent? Is Mick a religious man? From whom does he seek shelter?
And even if we define evil only as “the act of a conscious being,” isn’t randomness still in play? How, like the car accident, does the serial killer come across the path of one of the victims? Would you say, “With seven plus billion people in the world, some random chance meeting of killer and victim is inevitable”? But if evil resides inside, then how does it emerge? If suppressing the evil inside requires a conscious effort to be “good” as a culture defines good, then does the “devil inside” escape to the outside because all cultural restraints are incomplete barriers. Some of us just don’t have a moral wall strong enough to keep the devil inside.
Gimme shelter from the devil inside others, from random evil, and, if I have one, the devil inside me.
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