Quick Sketch: On Evil

 I've probably been mentioning this about as often as someone mentions they are vegan, but I need to come out as an Igtheist, or Ignosticist if brevity ain't your thing. Totally compatible with being Atheist, Igtheist is the position that basically I don't know what the fuck anyone is talking about when it comes to really metaphysics and that needs to be flagged when I quickly bash out some words about "evil".

So in an attempt at clarity, take for example the exercise of "prayer" of course I understand that prayer is something people do, people clap their hands together face some idol or direction or maybe just bow their heads or look to the sky. I understand that prayer is a thing that exists and I could point to people praying and say "that's some people praying." Sometimes even this exercise is intelligible, like in a Shinto shrine in Japan when you see someone ring a bell and clap and throw a coin in a big wooden box and they pray for good grades or to have a baby boy instead of a girl, or that their grandma lives to be 115 by getting over the cold she caught at 107. Shinto has evolved to become a fairly clear cut placebo prayer procedure - you buy sugar pills, you take the sugar pills, you feel better and maybe even coincidentally get what you want when you want it.

I can also make sense out of how people more generally only pray for shit that is out of their control. People don't pray for lunch unless they are starving at sea. If there's a supermarket and they have cash they don't generally tend to ask the creator of the universe to help them out. But, and here is where it breaks down, when they pray to be cured of cancer or to get selected for a reality tv show, and they are praying to a monotheistic tri-omni plus god, the whole exercise is unintelligible. In fact, a tri-omni god is unintelligible or at least indistinguishable from nothing at all.

A prayer enthusiast could probably try and inform me of what they are doing, but as an igtheist they generally don't want to. So my position on all that shit, prayer, evil, good, sin is not merely that I don't know what you are talking about, but that I have no confidence you know what you are talking about.

Boom. Evil. What is it? Is it a thing? Short answer, no. Whatever it is it has to be subjective. 

A while ago though, I watched an interview with one of the many people struggling with the social friction of the times, and these people tend to fall into one depressingly predictable camp.

People I've noticed have a bit of a USB mindset, by which I mean if they try one thing and it doesn't work, then they try another thing and that doesn't work, they tend to try the first thing again. This works for USB sticks. If at first you don't succeed, then at second you don't succeed, it probably was a false negative the first time, provided you really tried to make the second thing work.

For me this describes the swing voters that must exist that are always dissatisfied with the incumbent government and feeling nostalgic for the last incumbent government they were dissatisfied with, hence you get voting patterns of conservative, reform, conservative, reform, conservative, reform. Which would be fine if the switch flipped via a recognition that it was variously time for necessary reform or time to conserve the good times. But typically it's like inflation is too high and wage growth is too slow from 1976-2024 and counting so you just vote out whoever isn't addressing it and vote in someone who won't address it.

It also appears to be the USB mindset of people who do not like the unexpected turn secular societies have taken in the 21st century into a form secular puritanism. A depressing number of people bitten for expressing common sense views that stand in juxtaposition to presumed collective ideals go to their rooms and wax nostalgic for society under the church.

I don't have it in me, to understand how men in dresses preaching horseshit, meaningless drivel in an activity that takes a full quarter of one's weekly downtime has any appeal whatsoever. Alas, fucking alas, a bunch of people do. This is not a USB stick where the answer to the new horseshit is a revival of the old horseshit. The problem with behaviour based on maps that do not describe the world very well is to dust off old maps that became unpopular because they do not describe the world very well.

This was an interview however with someone otherwise clearly intelligent who put it to her host, a well known atheist and sceptic, the question as to whether he believed the universe has moral laws.

To outline my understanding of such a question, it's like observing a Newtonian law of motion like everything in the universe remains at rest unless acted upon by another force (your coffee won't ever jump off your desk and commit suicide, but if the desk gets bumped hard enough it will spill) and thinking that the universe might punish lying.

There is of course some evidence that the universe punishes lying, but not enough to be conclusive. There are plenty of lies that probably turn out to be inconsequential, like I once lied to get out of a work shift to go to a gig, then saw the guy from work I spoke to to cancel my shift at the gig, but he didn't see me was it sufficient for the universe to make me mildly uncomfortable during the gig? I feel these are more social consequences that are part of course of a greater universe but it is entirely plausible, if not demonstrated that one can be a pathological liar and enjoy wealth, avoid prison and produce offspring.

Furthermore, just because a behaviour is compatible with the physical material world we live in (like climbing down trees instead of leaping from the upper branches) doesn't mean that anyone or anything wants us to behave that way. An idiot that jumps out of a tree because he doesn't understand that injuries grow exponentially in severity the greater the distance fallen may not live like someone who climbs down to a survivable height before jumping out of the tree, but their rotten corpse provide energy and nutrition to the biosphere that on the whole is largely indifferent to that idiot being dead and their more sensible contemporary being alive.

So Hitchens used to say that he believed in evil and defined it as "the surplus value of totalitarianism" where "you've made your point but you keep on going." For example, by this definition, Hannah Gadsby could be considered evil in relation to Louis CK. Asking work colleagues if you can masturbate in front of them is unacceptable behaviour whether they agree to it or not. Louis CK got exposed and took a massive financial and reputational hit. Consequences. It is pretty clear, that society disapproves, but Hannah Gadsby differs from the emergent consensus (that Louis is allowed to work, people are free to associate with him, venues are allowed to book him) in expressing views congruent with anything short of Louis CK being a destitute persona non-grata is insufficient to making the point. (Probably, I give her the benefit of the doubt that she feels the social response insufficient, rather than her views coming from a pure vindictiveness, her wanting a response surplus to the making of the point is not something she herself views as surplus. But Vlad Tsepes I'm guessing never looked out the window of castle Dracula at all the people slowly dying impaled alive upon poles for suspicion of petty theft and thought "you know I really am excessive." He could have just thrown those Germanic ambassadors out to make his point, he didn't have to have their hats nailed to their heads. Totalitarian is as totalitarian does.)

Hitchens is pretty good but he's no Abe Lincoln:

It is the same principle in whatever shape it develops itself. It is the same spirit that says, "You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it."

Okay, so that's a multi-valent statement if ever I heard one, it could simultaneously be quoted as an argument against pinko Commies, and quoted in an argument against capitalism and "free" markets. This president being my favorite leader ever, keep in mind presided over the largest mass execution in US history, and that's not a euphamism for the civil war, it's a literal execution of a bunch of Indians that did something rebellious in light of annexation and probably broken treaties by the States. #CancelAbe. 

I think it describes as close as we'll get to a moral law of the universe.

So it might seem ambitious and that I have already rambled on too long just to get here for a post I called a "quick sketch" but if you are reading this it means I published it and vis-a-vis therefore I published it and quickly.

The fundamental observable nature of the universe is that it is dynamic. It moves. It is not static and therefore behaviour is possible. Consequences are possible. All that shit. It's very simple, it's all around us all the time, but that's the basics.

A dynamic universe, I assert, doesn't work if there's no risk premium. It can't fucking sustain life and thus we would be talking about the morality of rocks.

Picture a valley where a bunch of tribes have figured out how to share natures bounty and subsist on the fruits and the game of the valley by taking turns, biting their lips and limiting the expression of dissent to passive aggression, never actual aggression. 

The people survive but nobody is really happy there. Then one day, one tribe are like "fuck this I can't take our neighbouring tribes all night singing anymore. We're leaving the valley!" and leads their people out of the valley into the unknown.

Outside the valley could be endless uninhabitable wasteland. That has to be a possibility. If it were guaranteed however, there would be no risk premium for exploring the unknown and this particular incidence of abiogenesis occuring in the universe would be the equivalent of lichen growing on a rock somewhere before eventually dying and disintegrating back into inert matter with little consequence to itself. However, if there's a possibility that this tribe stumble for a couple of days through a wasteland, gradually beginning to doubt themselves, before they climb the next hill and discover a verdant, beautiful and heretofore uninhabited valley, then this universe has a risk-premium.

That is, this tribe gets a huge payoff for potentially risking everything and losing. It pays not to maintain the status quo. Not all the time, not necessarily most of the time, but when it does the windfall has to be proportional to the risk otherwise nothing works.

We can't have the society we have under conditions where if somebody is asked to quit their paying job to join a startup that is going to invent robot taco stands, the deal has to be "quit your job that pays $150k a year in return for a 30% stake in this venture that could be either worthless, or worth billions."

Taking risks has to, has to have a potential payoff that is greater than not taking a risk. It's why we can be certain that the music industry is worse and culture impoverished once you program the mp3. It might be hard to notice that Taylor Swift is no Madonna, given all the revenue she generates, but that is because there is less incentive to be Madonnas now, so the new Madonna's don't exist. 

Better example, the NFL is big money, the superbowl has famously expensive ad spots. It's the biggest sport in the US. For every one person watching the NBA in the United States, there are ten people that watch the NFL. 

The highest paid NFL players get between $50-$55 million per year. The highest paid NBA players get about the same. The NFL is a brutal sport, it's really hard to do well enough long enough to get a guaranteed contract and then you shoot yourself in retirement because of acquired brain injuries.

The best players in the NBA at the moment are variously Canadian, Greek, Serbian, Slovenian, Cameroonian etc. there are almost no foreign national players in NFL it is nowhere near becoming a world game, there are a few Australian punters or kickers, that's it. 

This can in part, and probably mostly be explained by the risk premium not being there for NFL despite it's domestic popularity. It is a quirk of US culture that foreigners look at and pass. Unless you are an Australian AFL full forward that can boot an ovoid ball for 60+ meters and decide instead of playing a real role in a dynamic and democratic sport, you can play a walk-on role for much more money in a league and code you never cared about.

The NBA reaps the fruits of diversity, whereas the NFL probably doesn't and that's because the risk premium is there for the NBA such that 90s kids the world over onwards can find it worth their time to gamble on a career in basketball. They don't do that for grid iron, the risk premium isn't there for anyone to build the code specific fields, purchase the expensive equipment and fill all the elaborate and convoluted defensive and offensive positions. It's not that NFL is a bad sport, it's not ten times the size of the NBA for no reason, its just the potential payoff isn't there for explorers t strike out for NFL El Dorado.

The risk-return relationship, is as close as I can deduce, a mathematical law of the universe - uncertainty has to potentially pay off. Like you cannot and should not sell a raffle ticket for $2 if the first prize is $1. Even if the expected value of a lottery ticket is lower than the cost of entry (as lottery picks exist today, hence their reputation amongst economists as a "tax on stupidity") the potential payoff has to be massive, $4.95 has to be attached to the dream of millions, even if there's a 1 in a billion chance of actually winning.

It also is a mathematical law of the universe that I feel has social implications, a mathematical law of morality. Risk takers have to get the risk premium.

Meaning evil is simply taking the risk premium, without taking the risk. We have a name for people who commit such evil, but no it's not the government who comes and taxes your income. Okay, let me be clear, the government takes a risk building roads and schools and hospitals and deploying its monopoly on violence to enforce property rights that allow the governed to do something with the land and infrastructure risking that those people will make something with the civilization provided to them and sustained for them and as such the government is entitled to its risk premium collected from every individual bet it made most of which pan out meh like me.

No the name is "rentier" these are the characters that fit the bill of "You toil and work and earn bread, and I'll eat it." though toil and work in this case, involves taking the risks. Chomsky puts it as "socialised risks and privatised profits" such as when taxpayers bail out a private company that then continues to operate exclusively in the interests of its shareholders. Rentiers are evil because they put the dynamism of life at risk by killing it, such that we return to a Universe of rocks, with no interesting thing to say about morality or even a mouth to say it with.

Don't eat the risk premium unless you earned it by taking risks.