Why our attempts to control evil are failing

“People who claim that they're evil are usually no worse than the rest of us... It's people who claim that they're good, or any way better than the rest of us, that you have to be wary of.”

Gregory Maguire

The horrors happening in the conflict zones between groups are nothing new. What is new is how we are getting informed about them today. In the age of TV and Internet we can witness the suffering of people in a very realistic and detailed way, something which was carefully hidden from us in earlier times. In colonial times nobody cared in Europe about the numerous victims of colonialism in Africa. Africa was far away and few people knew what was really happening there. Now because of electronic media the world has shrunk in an incredible way. Today, we know exactly what’s going on in places very far away. This vastly improved perception of human suffering has led to many efforts to mitigate it.

But are these efforts really effective? Unfortunately there are strong signs that they are not.

It has for instance become rare for „civilized“ countries to invade weaker countries. Instead of colonializing them, they are nowadays „only“ outcompeting them economically which leads to widespread poverty in the weaker countries. And because the life expectancy of a country is strongly correlated with the GDP, this poverty leads to a substantial loss of life years and suffering which is probably comparable to the effect of a military invasion. This kind of violence is known under the name „structural violence“ already for a long time. No blood is shed, nobody gets dirty hands from direct violence, but people die early and suffer nonetheless.

I believe that the rise of terrorism is a result of this effect. Weaker groups (identified by religion for example, but in reality driven by poverty) try to fight larger gangs (i.e. strong countries) by forming small and highly agile armed gangs.

Some mitigation efforts are directed against obsolete evils. An obsolete evil strategy is a strategy which does not offer an advantage anymore. An example is rape, which has become ineffective in modern times due to the widespread use of birth control and the availability of abortion. While not too long ago a raped girl was forced to marry her rapist (what a success for the rapist!), rape is heavily prosecuted in most countries today. But such efforts, albeit necessary, also give us the false impression that we make progress in eliminating evil in general. To get rid of obsolete evils is relatively easy: nobody is really missing them as they don‘t offer any real advantage anymore. So it is quite easy to achieve an agreement to outlaw them. But at the same time many new evils might appear which do offer attractive advantages (for instance the field of cybercrime is currently exploding) and are often overlooked for long time.

Activists believe that they can improve the world by fighting „evil“ groups of people. We understand now that this goal is flawed for fundamental reasons. The real problem starts when these people fail to verbally convince the members of the other groups that they are right. What kind of options are left? I can think only of 1. depriving the members of the other group of means to distribute their views and force them to accept the activists solution for the problem or (if this also fails) 2. eliminating them. Some right wing activists even tend to go immediately for the 2nd option. This is why activism tends to get more and more militant over time. What was intended in good faith to solve problems becomes a big problem itself.

Another method which some try to make the world a better place is to put power into the hands of women. Unfortunately there are fundamental limits for what they can do differently in a competitive world while remaining effective. It is true that women do tend to show more cooperative behavior, but they cannot change the rules of the game (the group they are leading still expects them to improve the groups access to resources). The resulting effect is mostly only a shift from direct violence to structural violence as described above. And after a long enough exposure to the harsh conditions of „the border“, women tend to behave not much differently than men anymore. It’s not men who make the world a violent place but the competition which is a consequence of both the male and the female principle. Replacing men with women will not improve this world in a fundamental way (which does not mean that women should be denied power!).

Some people believe that by forming larger groups (e.g. the European Union from the individual states of Europe), wars between the former smaller groups can be avoided. This will not work because of the layered structure of groups: the smaller groups still remain intact in the minds of people, and the large group is just an additional layer. The smaller groups can still have conflicts (now renamed to civil war), and the newly formed larger layer can still have conflicts with other groups (admittedly with now improved chances of a victorious outcome if the other group is also large). This is the true reason why the European Union was founded: to be able to compete with the U.S., Russia and China (economically and militarily).

It’s a popular believe that democracy is vastly superior to a dictatorship and that it will allow to solve our problems in the future. While it is indeed difficult to suppress the majority in a functioning democracy, it is quite common that minorities are suppressed by the majority (e.g. the black population in the U.S.). It reminds me the old joke „What is democracy? Two wolves and a sheep who vote on what they are going to have for dinner“.

The germans want to make sure the holocaust will never repeat. How much progress have they made with that so far? Apparently not much. They still bring 95 years old concentration camp guards to court and into prison. This extreme unwillingness to forgive makes only sense if you assume that a small elite of extraordinarily evil nazis is responsible for the crimes committed in the concentration camps. And that society can be purged by punishing them hard and letting them die in prison. But the inconvenient truth is that the jews were murdered by (almost) the whole population of Germany collectively. Everybody who was contributing to bring Hitler into power is responsible for every crime committed by the nazis. Hitler revealed pretty clearly and early what he had in mind. And as we understand now, you don’t need a special personality to act very evil. Everybody could have worked as a guard in the concentration camps. You may not like it, but the truth is: even me and you! Don’t get me wrong: I don’t want to blame the Germans. The rise of fascism is a necessary consequence of a competitive system. The Germans (including the concentration camp guards) are as innocent as everybody else. The competitive system is to be blamed and made obsolete. But as long as the Germans (like any other group!) don’t understand this, they remain just another dangerous gang (like any other group!). If we stick to the competitive system, history will inevitably repeat. Most probably this time not in Germany but somewhere else. In some way history already repeats: the refugee camps in Greece resemble to some extent concentration camps and are a form of violence against another group (mostly Africans) which is considered inferior and a threat.