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Evil Shenanigans · Why We Do What We Do

0:20
Welcome to Why We Do what We do. I am your diabolical host,
0:23
Abraham Ooh, and I am your e flat host Shane. For those of
0:28
you who are musicians, you know that the e flat is just an evil
0:31
sounding chord. We are a psychology podcast. Sometimes maybe we're a music referencing
0:38
podcast, and yeah, in the month of October, we are a spooky
0:42
psychology themed podcast. And a topic that I think gets less attention than I
0:47
would have thought from people who talk about the philosophy of psychology is our topic
0:52
at hand today. So we are finishing up our Halloween month. We've been
0:56
talking about satanically themed and satan type topics the entire month. We started a
1:02
left hand path magic, we had Satanism, Satanic cults, and now we
1:07
are ending with the broader discussion of what is evil. So this is directly
1:11
from the mind of Abraham. So thank you for this one. I did
1:15
my best, and I hope that I landed stuck the landing on the notes
1:19
because this is a big topic and there's a lot of philosophical questions in this.
1:23
So for sure, as we kind of up back this, you're gonna
1:26
kind of go okay, and then I'm just gonna maybe spoil it here.
1:30
We're not gonna arrive on a good answer. I don't think that's okay.
1:34
That's what happens when you pick nebulous topics. Yeah, I pick nebulus topics.
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Yeah. So we mostly talk about things that humans do, what animals
1:40
do, and the general topics inside of psychology, and we've focused those on
1:44
spooky themed things. As I said, when we get to the month of
1:47
October. This episode, however, releases just before Halloween. So if you
1:52
are celebrating Halloween, I hope you have a safe and happy Halloween. But
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this does come out on October twenty fifth, a little in advance that which,
2:00
even though it's not Halloween, it is World Pastaday, yes, which
2:05
I support. But yeah, also going into the spooky month that it is,
2:09
it is National Chucky the Notorious Killer Doll Day. Oh wild. Is
2:14
this like a day that the first movie came out or something. It's either
2:16
that or the day that Charles Lee Ray possessed the doll in the movies.
2:22
There you go, It's one or the other, but either way, just
2:23
a bonus recommendation. Go watch the show Chucky. It's wild. Okay,
2:29
it is also Lung Health Day. I like that. It's National Fine Art
2:32
Appreciation Day, which you know, if you're not an art fanatic then you
2:38
should maybe try a little bit, try a little bit harder. And if
2:39
you're not an art fanatic, you might enjoy that. It's National Greasy Foods
2:43
Day. I honestly I like both of those things. Yeah, you say
2:46
you can be bothfied. I don't know why I had decided to segment them.
2:47
Yeah, they don't have to be mutually exclusive, especially because they are
2:51
on the same day. It's National I Care About You Day, which is
2:54
nice. Yeah, and related to that, it is punk for a day
2:58
day, so being a punk caring for other punks. Yeah. Avril Levine
3:02
stoked about this one. It's a god you just community. Anyone who listens
3:10
to us is like in upunk, Like, what did he just say?
3:14
Burn about the steak. I'm supposed to be subversive. That's that's the whole
3:16
thing here. Yeah, Oh, that was so evil of you. It
3:20
was so evil of me. Speaking of evil like sour Patch kids, it
3:23
is Sourist Day. One time I put seventy four warheads in my mouth at
3:28
the Saint No Sweethearts made my mouth raw because of that, I did it
3:31
on a dare. But we should bring back warheads. Warhead should come back.
3:35
They're around, they come up and the like packs of Halloween candy that
3:38
you can that you'll get for like trigger treaders, there's usually like a huge
3:44
segment of them that fall to the bottom of the bag, individually wrapped.
3:46
So yeah, I like that. Okay, Warheads are on all right.
3:50
It is also ACE Week, formerly a Sexuality Week. I guess that's what
3:54
that stands for. Yep, to those ACE people, I guess yep.
3:58
It's also Disarmament Week, which I think is pretty fitting right now, fantastic,
4:02
let's do that. Let's do that please, International Magic Week. Love
4:06
that. It's Pastoral Care Week, Respiratory Care Week, and World Origami Days,
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which is I feel like a lot of fun. Sure, there's a
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lot of holidays. Yeah. Now, as I said, we're actually talking
4:18
about the concept of evil. So this is sort of a philosophy mixed with
4:24
psychology, and I think that psychology is sometimes more philosophy than it should be,
4:28
sometimes less philosophy than it should be, and is hopefully a balance of
4:31
an appropriate level of philosophy and psychology. Today but we need to start by
4:35
asking the question what is evil? What is evil? So as an adjective,
4:43
evil is quote profoundly immoral and wicked. But as a noun, it
4:46
is profound immorality and wickedness, especially when regarded as a supernatural force. So
4:53
there's kind of to unpack in that there is this idea of being immoral,
4:58
but there's also a supernatural force that is in itself evil, that acts upon
5:03
the universe itself. Now, when evil is generally discussed, it is referenced
5:09
as against good. So evil exists as a counterpoints to good, if you
5:14
will. So to highlight the dichotomy of good and evil, good is defined
5:17
as that which is morally right or righteousness. M hm. And you may
5:23
be getting some religious vibes as we go through this, and yeah, that's
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fair. We're going to see that as we go. Yeah. The word
5:28
evil comes from Proto Germanic languages, originating from the word ubilahs. Over time,
5:33
the word has taken a number of forms in Middle English as eve e
5:38
l as evil, i f e l is evil, or uffel u f
5:43
e l. Old Frisian, which is spelled e v e l evil Old
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Saxon ubil ubil, Old High German ubil and Gothic ubils U B I l
5:55
S. So there are a lot of different kind of origins for this word
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and how it's shaped up over time. I could say that that makes a
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lot of sense. I think, yeah, all right, Now, again
6:03
we're sort of unpacking just at the beginning, what the concept of evil.
6:08
The definition of evil is as a concept that is quite broad because it applies
6:13
to a wide variety of things that it could potentially be in reference to.
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Now, which makes this episode a little more difficult to unpack. So to
6:21
adequately touch on this topic, we're going to focus on a central idea,
6:26
which is what do we really mean when we're talking about evil? And can
6:30
evil be redeemed? I think it's a fair question, so I think to
6:33
start doing that, we have to figure out what types of evil exists.
6:38
So there are discussions around different types of evil, and you may have your
6:42
own kind of unique opinion about it, but here's what there's some agreement on.
6:46
First, there's moral evil. Moral evil refers to wilful acts of people.
6:49
Acts like murder, sexual assault, et cetera. All fall within the
6:53
range of what can be described as moral evil. Basically, it is something
6:57
that is immoral to do or is morally wrong to do, and that's where
7:00
moral evil kind of comes into play. So it's kind of more about the
7:04
fact that it's evil because it is against a sort of ethical code of guidelines
7:13
we have generally adopted as a species. Yes, you could almost think of
7:17
that as being in a sense arbitrarily evil or abstractly evil, but it does
7:23
seem like some of these it's not arbitrary because it's like murder, right,
7:28
like that, that's not right. That's like an actual, physical, pretty
7:30
significant thing. So it's interesting to call it moral evil. Said another way,
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those who are the arbiters of moral good are then also the ones who
7:40
create the arbitrary definitions of moral evil and as such attempts to punish what they
7:46
deem as evil. Right, Yeah, So, like I remember being in
7:50
school and some of the local Baptist churches were really mad that eminem was a
7:55
thing that existed, and so they would take minemcds and go burn them.
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So basically eminem was moral evil in the face of the church, which was
8:03
considered the moral good. And so like that's kind of a thing where you
8:07
see that happen time and time again, and we're seeing that right now with
8:09
book bands. Right A lot of the book bands are because these books are
8:13
considered quote unquote evil by somebody who considers themselves the arbiters of good, i
8:18
e. The Moms for Liberty and all that stuff, like, consider themselves
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the moral good, when actually they're they're probably the ones that are really evil.
8:26
That's absolutely true. And I actually I was reading I was taking something
8:30
a little bit different from this discussion, although I could completely agree with your
8:33
points, which was I was seeing this also as that the people who claim
8:37
themselves to be those arbiters of good are creating the situation where then people are
8:45
regarded as being evil. So an example of this, I was actually just
8:48
talking about this with someone the other day, is you take something like some
8:54
culture that they look at another culture that they don't like. Yeah, let's
9:00
take the Roma people for example. Because they don't like them for whatever reason,
9:03
they dispel them from their homes. They attack those people, and the
9:07
group of people ends up being sort of on the run constantly and trying to
9:13
find places of shelter, but not really staying in one place for any too
9:16
long because they're constantly being persecuted by whatever culture is the one that has the
9:22
more power and the more control, and so then they're sort of demonized as
9:26
being these like they're so wicked, you can't trust them. They can't they
9:31
don't even like they're not responsible enough to hold down a home for a long
9:33
period of time. I'm like, that's your fault, right, The fact
9:39
that they're having to constantly move around is not because there's anything wrong with them.
9:43
It's because there's something wrong with you. Right, But there's this tendency
9:46
to literally demonize other cultures and their religions and things of that nature because it
9:52
then but in doing so, it makes you look like you're the good guy.
9:58
Right. Well, right, I think that's an important point too.
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Like, you know, I think I brought up an example that's clearly like,
10:03
you know, something that we're experiencing now, but like your example is
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something that happens constantly. Like if you think about how in the United States
10:11
we have essentially demonized communism or like socialism in particular, like we've considered socialism
10:18
a moral wrong, but we have found that like the people that in a
10:22
lot of socialist places that are not you know, the socialism piece isn't corupted
10:26
or whatever. Like in places where it's working, we it's still demonized even
10:30
though it's actually pretty effective for making sure that people have universe versal health care
10:33
or those things. So sometimes I think it's really I think we're talking about
10:37
moral evil. Moral evil is coming from that space of I disagree with you,
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so what you're doing is wrong, what I'm doing is right, and
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that makes you evil to my good. When you know, it's kind of
10:48
that whole thing where you know, the sympathetic villain, right, the sympathetic
10:54
villain in a story is often considering themselves to be the good to the fold
10:58
of evil, which the person who is typically good is actually doing the evil
11:01
thing, and vice versa. So it tends to be perspective based in contextual
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and I think that's a really important thing to take away, and we'll talk
11:09
more about that as we kind of unpack this too. Okay, Yeah,
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I would love to sort of follow that rabbit hole more, but I think
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for the sake of us getting through all of our content, we'll put a
11:20
pin in it. We'll come back to it, because this whole time we've
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been talking about moral evil, but there's other types of evil that people have
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sort of enumerated, and then another one is called natural evil, and natural
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evil really primarily focuses on natural disasters such as floods, fires, major weather
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events, probably hurricanes, famines. Yeah, and so an interesting point that
11:43
came up in his space that was kind of fun to explore is the idea
11:46
of God. In this one hour psychology podcast, we're going to unpack the
11:50
meaning of God. So, if God is conscious and he allows for natural
11:54
evil to occur, can he be morally good? And this is a question
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that comes up in the religious circles about moral good versus moral evil and kind
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of like allowing natural evils to occur. So here's the argument from a theistic
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discussion site that we're going to cite in our notes as well. One,
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if God exists, then there exists a being who is omniscient, omnipotent,
12:13
and perfectly good. Two, if there existed a being who were omniscient,
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omnipotent, and perfectly good, then there would be no natural evil. Three,
12:24
but there is natural evil. So in conclusion, God does not and
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cannot exist as an idea of morally good or exists at all. And that's
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something that comes up as like the God problem in terms of evil and a
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lot of the theistic discussions. I think that's really fascinating. I'm the I
12:39
fall on the side of atheist, but is I think an interesting kind of
12:43
discussion to unpack. I'm a little confused at the point they're trying to make
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because you said this is a theistic discussion, right, yeah, yeah.
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Are they trying to say that God is not perfectly good? I think that's
12:56
the argument they're getting at, or that God is not omniscient or the God
13:00
is not omnipotent. Okay. I think basically the argument is when people go
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to argue that God is perfect, then that would suggest that there could be
13:07
no evil, but God is not perfect. So God can be loving and
13:13
be imperfect, and so that's kind of the argument for wild childhood, cancer
13:16
exists and stuff like that God is not a perfect being, but he does
13:20
care and love and all those things. I see, Okay, I see.
13:22
So they're basically just trying to say, like stop holding the standard,
13:26
like yeah, yeah, sure God is killing you know, millions of people,
13:30
but he's still he still cares about you or it or she, Yeah,
13:35
or it or she or whatever. So the end of that argument goes,
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if God were perfect and perfectly good and omniscient and omnipresent, then how
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could the devil have ever existed? Or how could Lucifer have ever fallen?
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Because if God were perfect, he could have prevented that, but he didn't.
13:48
Okay, by being imperfect, he has accidentally created evil, so on
13:52
and so forth. Like that's kind of a part of that argument. All
13:54
right, interesting, Interesting, I think it's funus to think about. Yeah,
13:58
no, I like to I appreciate that. All right, So that
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was natural. Well, those kind of natural evil and supernaturally together, so
14:05
we add moral evil natural evil. The next one is physical evil, and
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this refers to manifestations, physical manifestations of evil in the form of such experiences
14:15
like pain, illness, grief, war, et cetera. Yeah, So
14:20
basically, like the reason people get cancer is because that's a physical evil.
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Cancer itself is a physical evil. That's what they'll say, I got it.
14:26
Okay. Now, metaphysical evil, which is the more fun of the
14:28
evils, refers to less tangible evils. Some of the examples includes things like
14:33
birth defects, criminals going unpunished, various injustices, those types of things which
14:37
are not necessarily tangible, but they exist in the world. You know.
14:39
It's like, it's kind of when you say, that's unfair. This person
14:43
got away with this thing and they shouldn't have gotten away with it. Okay,
14:46
that's what metaphysical evil refers to. And some of the discussions okay,
14:50
got it. Some of the lines on these kind of bleed across one another,
14:54
I think a little bit in the attempts to taxonomize the different types of
14:58
evil. But that's okay, Yeah, just a way of people sort of
15:01
philosophically trying to bin those ideas into various segments, I think, to start
15:05
to unpack them. Part of the discussion within this is whether evil is an
15:11
empirical or spiritual phenomenon, and both discussions here there's always the discussion of where
15:16
evil comes from, right, and kind of just what that means. But
15:20
I think that if there was a true evil, it would be in the
15:24
form of advertisements. All right, let's continue our discussion of evil after that
15:35
evil break and talk about the origins of evil. Yeah, so there's a
15:39
really great example that we can use to highlight where evil might come from.
15:43
And in the example described from Stanford dot Edu. They specifically reference Nietzsche in
15:48
some of the work. There's a really great picture here called the Table of
15:50
Evils, which is applied to the Nietzsche case that we're going to kind of
15:54
talk about. Let's suppose a man has a history of being incredibly cruel to
15:58
his horse, been known to physically assail his horse on a regular basis,
16:02
and one day he is diagnosed with terminal cancer. So there's an empirical view
16:07
of evil, but also a metaphysical origin and the idea that the cancer was
16:11
deserved was a deserved outcome for beating his horse, And so that's some of
16:14
the discussion, is like the terminal cancer is there's an empirical way to study
16:18
where that evil came from, right, Like, you know, this is
16:19
how cells work, this is how cells mutate and turning the cancer's tumors and
16:25
all that stuff and become a problem. There is that piece, but then
16:26
there's also the metaphysical part, which says he got that because he was a
16:30
jerk to his horse, right, And so if we unpack that origin of
16:34
evil, there are essentially two places where evil comes from. Okay, in
16:40
some discussions there are three, Yes, we've sort of alluded to these natural,
16:44
moral and then spooky non agential I love spooking, not AGENTI yeh,
16:51
whether there being agents, so non agent or non agential. Yeah, And
16:53
we're already familiar with the natural and morals, so let's unpack this new fun
16:57
one, the spooky non agential origin of evil, which argues that evil and
17:02
evil outcomes are directly linked to dark supernatural forces. Ooh, that is the
17:07
best. So essentially what we're saying here is if we're talking about these three
17:11
generalized origins of evil, Natural evil comes from a place of like things happen,
17:18
like natural disasters and stuff like that. Moral evil is like the behavior
17:21
of people with the intent to harm others. And then spooky non agential means
17:25
that like some dark force is just mean to people. And that's kind of
17:30
the part here that I really like. So if we look at the the
17:33
mean horseman scenario and kind of take all that, so we can look at
17:37
at as the kinds of evil, right, metaphysical and empirical, and the
17:41
origins of evil natural, moral, and spooky non in gental. The metaphysical
17:45
part says that from a metaphysical natural origin is that the Coachman and the horse.
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It's all based in nature. So even though there is no justice,
17:55
or that there maybe is justice, the evils come from a natural place.
17:59
Where the more piece is that the cancer as a result of his damage due
18:03
to his nature and that of his species, and so ultimately it's based on
18:07
the facts about his immoral acts. Like so he was engaging in immoral acts,
18:11
so he was as a result of that given cancer from metaphysical places because
18:15
he was immoral. But the spooky not agentile just basically says that there is
18:21
an evil entity that gave him cancer, some dark force gave him cancer.
18:23
The shadow side principle in reality gave him cancer, because that's what spooky non
18:29
agential evil does. Okay, now if we try and then break that down.
18:33
So that was all the metaphysical piece, right you were talking through,
18:36
Yeah, the three different origins through a metaphysical lens. Right now there is
18:41
the empirical lens also, so we'll go through the same through the same three
18:45
the natural, moral, and spooky agential. So in the empirical version of
18:48
this, I think it breaks down essentially just saying that the ultimate explanation consists
18:53
of just the process of natural things that happen. Yeah, people get care
19:00
answer, people do bad things to their or they do things that are aggressive
19:03
toward other creatures and other beans. Now, the moral evil inside of him,
19:08
the empirical lens is that the explanation of the suffering of the horse comes
19:14
from the man's immoral acts and intentions right right. Essentially he's doing immoral things
19:21
and so that's why they're suffering. And then the spooky non agential is that
19:26
the cancer, the anger, the cruelty, and the suffering of the coachman
19:30
the horse. Again, it really just comes down to the facts about dark
19:34
force or shadow side principle. In reality, it's a fun discussion to kind
19:40
of unpack all these things, but at the end of the day, it's
19:41
still very unclear. Those borders are not quite as clear as we would like
19:45
them to be. Yeah, like most things are so many things at least,
19:49
it once again comes down to simply how you choose to define it.
19:52
That will be a huge factor in terms of how you try to unpack it.
19:57
So what evil means depends on what you mean when you say evil,
20:02
yeah, exactly. And speaking of that, there are other theories of evil,
20:06
as the origins of evil and stuff like that that I think are worth
20:08
discussing in the space. First, there's the absence theory of evil, and
20:11
this has its roots in Platonic ideas of evil where there are varying quote degrees
20:17
of being and essentially in the absence of creation and perfect good, evil must
20:22
occupy that space. And this boils down to the idea that all of us
20:23
have a little evil in us, right, so we can't be all good,
20:26
we can't be all evil. It's kind of a spectrum where we all
20:30
have a little bit of that as well as a little bit of good,
20:33
hopefully mostly good than evil. I see that sort of There's a concept called
20:37
horror vacuie that is essentially nature abhores a vacuum, and so where there's empty
20:41
space, it gets filled with something and that it feels like that is part
20:45
of the idea here, is that like, wherever there is not actual good
20:51
evil, then we'll fill in the cracks. Yeah, thanks Plato. That's
20:56
taking I think a lot of liberties with the idea of both space and and
21:00
concepts such as evil and good and how those fit inside of our natural understanding
21:04
of the world. But that's okay. We'll set that aside. Yeah,
21:07
I just listened to something that talked about like how the universe is just full
21:11
of miniature black holes, okay, and like that occupies a lot of time
21:15
and like a lot of space and that like they're not powerful enough to do
21:17
anything, but they're miniature enough to exist and fill the fill like empty space
21:21
and space, and that is I don't like that feeling there is like miniature
21:25
black holes that could pass through the Earth as well, Like that's a thing
21:26
that could happen. Huh, weird, don't like it. That's fun.
21:33
Yeah, Okay. Anyway, where I was going was a matter theory.
21:36
So this posits that anything that is unformed matter is the furthest from goodness.
21:41
So as a result of being non created unformed matter, unformed matter is evil
21:45
by nature. So I guess what I'm hearing in this is that the idea
21:48
that unless it seems to have a sort of evolved or created direction or niche,
21:56
then its lack of niche and direction makes it evil. So whatever sludge
22:02
you have left over from making like dinner, that doesn't evil. Now,
22:08
well it's kind of yeah. The way that I read that is kind of
22:11
like order is good and chaos is bad, right, Like, that's kind
22:15
of the way that reads. You know, Yep, that is exactly how
22:18
I hear that. That's probably a gross oversimplification. So for any philosophy major
22:23
that's listening to this that wants to talk about it, please write in,
22:26
because I know I'm not a philosophy guy, not really to that degree,
22:30
So feel free to reach out and let us know how wrong we are on
22:33
that. There's also privation theory, and this rejects matter theory on the basis
22:38
that God created matter, so matter cannot be evil. So basically where it
22:42
says like whether it's unformed or formed, it doesn't matter. God created it,
22:45
so can't be evil. Instead, this leans into the idea of absence
22:48
theory, where basically, where there is no goodness, evil occupies, but
22:53
goodness is relative to a thing's kind, which then also means that you know,
23:00
humans can be good and evil, but axe lodels can't. I mean
23:03
they feel like they're mostly good. Yeah, they're definitely good. And then
23:07
there's the real property of la or something. Just trying to make a real
23:14
Housewives joke, This theory argues that evil is a type of reality and is
23:18
an inherent feature of finite means. Good and evil are both interlocking realities,
23:23
realities that fight for supremacy. So it's just that evil's just there. It's
23:29
part of things. You know. Sometimes evil is victorious, sometimes good as
23:33
victorious, but they're both coinciding and at battle at all times. It's an
23:38
infinite war of good versus evil. But there are actual there are other philosophies
23:44
from different cultures that we wanted to kind of pull in as well, that
23:47
I think are going to be really important to kind of show that this is
23:48
not a unique discussion to Americans. I feel like Americans should talk more about
23:52
evil and how maybe we do some evil things and maybe kind of self reflect
23:56
a little bit. But it has neither here nor there. So let's talk
23:59
about Chinese moral philosophy or Confucianism or Taoism. So there is no direct analog
24:06
in how good and evil interactor oppose each other in the space. Essentially,
24:08
the primary concern within this is that behavior toward the learned or superior man and
24:15
evil corresponds to wrong behavior. So essentially it kind of gets into the idea
24:19
of moral good and moral evil, but it focuses on the superior or learned
24:25
man as opposed to those who are quote unquote lesser. That would be like
24:29
people who are unlearned, people who are more animalistic, is what they might
24:33
say. Maybe those who are closer to let's say, like they don't really
24:37
get into anything other than the learned man being like somebody who has a lot
24:41
of education. So that's kind of the way that they unpack that a little
24:44
bit interesting. Yeah. In European philosophy, Baruch Spinoza had two thoughts on
24:48
this one, So I'm sort of reading from his perspective. By good,
24:52
I understand that which we certainly know is useful to us, and two,
24:56
by evil, on the contrary, I under stands that which we certainly know
25:00
hinders us from possessing anything that is good end quote. So basically, good
25:07
is what is not evil, and evil is what is not good. Yeah,
25:12
yeah, so weird somebody else, Yeah, somebody landed on that same
25:15
thing with a lot of flourish, like they gilded the lily on that one.
25:18
For sure. Yeah, up is up because it is not down,
25:22
and down is down because it is not up. Yesh, God, you
25:26
know it makes me laugh because I feel like that happens a lot with like
25:30
a lot of Europea and like philosophy and stuff, where like they just kind
25:33
of cite things that other cultures have said much better and more thoughtful, and
25:37
it's just kind of surface level where it's like, yeah, this, if
25:38
this comes out of England, then they're just basically saying like, yeah,
25:41
we love spices and then they just salt things instead of like you know,
25:45
stealing spices from other people, which they also do. They're just stealing ideas,
25:48
is what I'm saying, and their original ideas are just kind of surface
25:52
level, is what I'm saying. So take that England English. I'm just
25:56
taking shots to everybody. I thought you check out all of you, but
26:00
maybe it was. I mean I have a particular particular feeling towards England,
26:04
but also yes, I'm taking out all of Europe there too. Okay.
26:07
Now, the Bahal faith argues that evil is simply the absence of good,
26:11
marking back to absence theory, so you kind of see that happen within that
26:15
particular faith. In Christianity, it is not as simple as the devil,
26:18
although the devil is often hailed as the archetype, the bearer, the harbinger
26:22
of evil, et cetera. Evil is essentially any opposition to God, even
26:27
though, as we've learned, God is apparently fallible, not omnipotente or omniscient,
26:33
or at least as complicated and not that good at it at their job.
26:37
Hopefully you're listening to this episode and not having a crisis of faith.
26:40
But if you are, we're here to support you because we are a psychology
26:44
podcast and we're good accountsling. Maybe yeah, we're not trying to be evil.
26:47
We're not trying to be evil that whole thing. So in ancient Egypt
26:49
religion, like religious practices or kind of spirituality, evil was described as is
26:53
fet or disorder and violence. And this was in direct opposition to matt It's
26:59
spelled which was order if set was embodied by Apep, a serpent god who
27:03
regularly attempts to kill Ra, the sun god. And I would like to
27:08
say something here. I think polytheism is way cooler than monotheism. When you
27:15
get into Egyptian mythology and Greek mythology and Norse mythology, it is so much
27:19
more fun in terms of storytelling, Like, Okay, so you've got job
27:25
who lives in a whales belly. That sounds really neat. Okay, but
27:30
do you have Odin who has an eight legged horse? No, you don't
27:34
have that in the Bible. So you know, Christians do better, is
27:37
what I'm saying. Get more creative or other monotheistic religions or other monotheistic religions.
27:42
Yeah, how great would it be to live in a world where you
27:47
believe that a serpent god was trying to kill the sun all the time?
27:51
Like that feels like it's it makes things a little bit more urgent. It
27:55
must have made eclipses feel very scary. Oh my god, yesterday the probably
27:57
would have lost it. Yeah, ring a fire. They're like, oh
28:00
hey, pep, No, you know, all right, we do need
28:07
to actually talk about psychology at some point, But first pause, ads.
28:18
Okay, we're getting now to the point at which we have something to a
28:22
little bit more to say about this, and we're still sort of unpacking what
28:23
others have said in the history of this and all of that, and I
28:26
think that that's probably what most people would rather hear than our opinions. But
28:30
we'll get into I think a little bit more of the psychology aspect of this,
28:33
where psychology podcast. Humans are obsessed with evil behavior to a degree at
28:37
least talking about it, so he thought it'd be worth unpacking a few famous
28:41
psychological things about evil what others have said about them. So let's talk about
28:47
Carl jung Jung, the dream Master, as I like to call home.
28:49
He was obsessed with the shadow side of humanity. He believed evil to be
28:53
a part of the mental processes of severely of the severely disturbed. Throughout his
28:57
career, he began to view as a moral choice, and basically evil was
29:02
something that individuals were able to reflect on and change within themselves. So I
29:06
think there's there's something cool to be said about self reflection within that. It's
29:08
kind of a fun discussion there, sure, yeah, I think charitably what
29:12
we can take from that is, as you said, the utility that can
29:18
come potentially from some amount of self reflection. Then we'll talk more about the
29:22
thing processes that are important to unpack there. But that's okay. Let's talk
29:26
about the Stanford Prison experiment for like the fifth time on the show as an
29:29
audience experiment, and the nature of evil worked a little too well. So
29:33
the idea here was that people could engage in evil behavior as part of a
29:37
collective identity and social influence. If you're unfamiliar with the episode, go back
29:42
and just pick an upside random you might hear it. Although we have talked
29:45
about it more explicitly, particularly and I know in the Ethics episode that we
29:49
did, we talked about this. But maybe we'll do an even like full
29:53
breakdown episode on it, but for now, the experiment was supposed to be
29:56
a two week experiment. Participants were in a pseudo prison where some were given
30:03
arbitrarily the role of guard, some were given arbitrarily the role of as prisoners,
30:08
and simply the guards were instructed to not let prisoners escape. And although
30:12
this was meant to last two weeks and it ended after six days when after
30:15
the researchers found that the guards were engaging in highly dangerous and abusive behavior toward
30:21
the prisoners. Yeah, it was not a good time. Not a good
30:23
time. And we've also talked about the Milgrim experiment as well. This is
30:26
another very famous one. But this was a study that I think it exemplifies
30:30
how evil can be shaped or influenced. This was aimed to explain how people
30:34
were so easily able to join in on the quote unquote evil behavior. I
30:37
say quote unquote evil because evil is subjective, but the really terrible behavior that
30:42
people engaged in during the Holocaust. So basically they were trying to figure out
30:45
how people could join into something that they believed was evil behavior, right,
30:49
like, they think this is wrong, how could they join the Nazis?
30:52
Just to be clear, and Nazis are bad. So the experiment required participants
30:56
to shock another person quote unquote shocked. They weren't really shocking anybody. They
31:00
got so far as participants being led to administer lethal levels of shock to others
31:06
with enough influence, Like basically somebody in a white coat was able to convince
31:08
them to deliver that higher level of shock to the point where they could possibly
31:12
kill somebody. They weren't actually shocking anybody, but the idea was there.
31:17
We did a full episode of Believe talking bringing down this experiment, or it
31:19
was at least we use this experiment a lot because it was the like fault.
31:22
I was just following orders episode that we did. So there's more about
31:26
that there. But let's talk about who is evil who? And so I
31:32
think this is a question that we're always trying to look for right, like,
31:34
because I think we all want an easy answer. Who is the evil
31:38
person in the scenario? According to Scientific American dot Com quote, to be
31:41
truly evil, someone must have sought to do harm by planning to commit some
31:47
morally wrong action with no prompting from others. Whether this person successfully execute his
31:52
or her plan is beside the point end quote. The way I read that
31:56
is that evil requires intention, intention, and no undue influence. Okay,
32:01
that'll be important. I think as we get through this, I think we're
32:04
getting into the meat of it now. So to be evil is to do
32:07
an evil thing intentionally. I think we can follow that logic if we want
32:12
to, again ignore fundamental attribution error or contextual views of psychology and science.
32:20
So essentially, if you are evil, there is no redemption because you are
32:24
You know, evil is as evil does. But even more structured religious doctrines
32:29
have trapped doors for this. Right. Isn't that what all those Catholic priests
32:32
are doing in confessionals? Ah got them. See, we're taking We're taking
32:37
on Catholicism, We're taking on all the things right now, I think,
32:39
to be fair, the idea of being evil and doing evil things are separate
32:44
and we are, and we have taught about that agnauseum, right, Like
32:46
we've talked about that through the fundamental attribution error. We've talked about through just
32:51
like understanding what behavior is. So this leads to other questions about defining who
32:54
is evil though, So if someone is evil, does it ever matter how
32:58
much good they do? An evil person and doing good deeds is still evil?
33:00
Does it matter how much evil they do? How do we quantify how
33:05
much evil someone does? Is it like one of those fundraiser thermometers that explodes
33:09
after your hitler? Like, I don't know what the what the level or
33:13
threshold is to just kind of never come back from it. But you know,
33:16
when you're starting to unpack this, that's the thing that kind of that
33:21
humans struggle with. Somebody did something really terrible and they're always going to be
33:25
known as that person that did the terrible thing. And so at what point
33:29
in time do we get to redeem that person? Yeah? If ever?
33:32
If ever? And you know, I think about even people who do something
33:35
that is sort of in the heat of the moment, heightened emotions and they
33:38
do something that is ends up being excessively aggressive or someone else gets hurt,
33:45
they would in most circumstances never do that, and as the trauma from that,
33:50
they would never do it again. But they sort of get the brand.
33:52
Now you've done this thing, you are evil. Where those brand for
33:57
the rest of your life because you shall not be redeemed. I think it
34:00
is how a lot of people see it, right. The question of who
34:02
is evil is uniquely buyas an unfair question for a few reasons, and one
34:07
of those is we really can't measure intent. We don't necessarily know what people's
34:09
intent was, only the circumstances. And what you can measure intent is if
34:14
a person who has the intent is willing to verbalize their intent, and even
34:17
then what they're verbalizing is something that again is being influenced by something else.
34:22
Right, you know, whether they've been coerced or whether they maybe they do
34:25
believe that that was their intents, or maybe their changes, Like our memories
34:29
are fallible. We've talked about that, So someone who would be evil would
34:32
likely be less trustworthy by association. So how can you trust their their sort
34:37
of verbal statement about their intention? Right, So it's I think even with
34:43
intention, we don't know necessarily what intention was. It's hard to determine that,
34:46
and I think it sort of leans toward the idea of what is motive,
34:50
meaning what were they trying to get out of this as a way of
34:52
thinking about it. But it does start to, I think, introduce some
34:55
gray area to it. Right now. The second thing is, if somebody
35:00
is evil, it's because they are deemed evil by some moral authority. Scientists
35:04
who believe the earth orbit of the sun were considered evil by anti science communities
35:07
and religious organizations. I mean, which are you know, kind of the
35:09
same thing. But I think that it's important to know that the moral authority,
35:14
the arbiter of moral good, can label somebody as morally evil and as
35:19
such that person is evil, even though they are probably on the right side
35:22
of history. Yeah right, I mean that's we've seen that time and time
35:25
and time again. We continue to see that exact problem is the people that
35:30
think that they're the good are the ones that deem the other, the outside
35:34
group, the outgroup is evil. Yeah. And then, of course,
35:37
you know, history is held in the hands of the textbook writers, so
35:40
right, you know, we have the narrative and interpretation we get and I
35:45
know that at least one aspect of conquering nations when they were particularly angry at
35:51
their subjects that they knew was an effective strategy would be to try and to
35:57
raise that culture from all history. And although I think most of the time
36:00
they were unsuccessful, we'll never know about the times that they were, you
36:04
know, exactly, because because there's no record of it. There have been
36:08
people who have been completely lost to history because others decided that they wanted to
36:14
punish them. And while they may have thought of themselves as the good,
36:17
punishing that culture for being evil and just hearing that description, we might hear
36:22
it and say, wow, those people were evil. And that's kind of
36:23
the point, right, is that there is this like those who choose to
36:28
be the arbiters of this are probably they're looked at by evil as being evil
36:32
by someone else. Right, So sorry, we were sort of talking about
36:37
the few reasons why it's difficult to even identify who's being evil here. And
36:40
again, the measurement here is a problem because we're dealing with just arbitrary hypothetical
36:45
concepts here, and there's no way to quantify or measure those either it's contextual,
36:51
metaphysical, natural, or the absence of good or something there's no universal
36:57
definition, so there's really no way of identity. Like if we can agree
37:00
on what it is, how could we determine how often and to what extended
37:02
occurs? Right? And the problem is that the community at large wants an
37:07
answer. They want to know why people quote unquote do evil things, but
37:10
they're asking I think a different question. You know, there's maybe a way
37:15
to explain why a serial killer might do something and why we might consider that
37:19
thing that they have done evil, But we're not asking like why are they
37:22
evil? We're asking why did they murder fifteen people? And so I think
37:27
that that's a different question framed in a way that people want to say,
37:30
well, this person's evil. Jeffre Dahmer's evil. Why is evil? Well,
37:32
okay, maybe you can say he's evil, but like we want to
37:36
understand why he did the things he did, and saying the why he did
37:38
it was because he's evil means that we now have no actual information that we
37:44
can get like if we stop there, we never learned about things that we
37:46
can do that could prevent someone else from doing that in the future exactly now.
37:52
And the last thing I think that's important to kind of ask when we
37:54
were asking who is evil. Being evil and doing evil things are both subjective
37:59
things based on current moral standards, and it's important to though that they are
38:01
two separate concepts. Being evil is basically saying this person is a particular thing,
38:07
they have a particular personality trait, they are a certain way, and
38:12
because they are a certain way, there's no way to get away from that.
38:15
But on the other side of that, doing evil things still requires a
38:20
contextual definition based on the moral context of the time. So both of those
38:24
things are going to change over time as a result of current standards, current
38:30
practices, and whoever's in charge. And I think that's kind of like,
38:32
well, I keep landing on this, is that it really depends on who's
38:36
responsible for whoever's in power at the time. Yeah, who's pointing the finger,
38:39
Yeah, because that'll tell you a lot about what's going on. Right.
38:44
But anyway, we do have some studies on this, which is always
38:45
always good that we want to pull those in from Martin and Ohlsen in twenty
38:49
fifteen struggles to capture whether pro social behavior such as helping, sharing, et
38:53
cetera, and young learners is either intrinsically or extrinsically motivated presumably intrinsically motivated is
39:00
good and extrinsically motivated is complicated. Maybe good, but possibly bad. The
39:07
question is are children evil and need to be taught good behavior? Or are
39:12
there motivations that make them less less good? And spoiler alert, they don't
39:16
arrive at an answer in this particular study. And that kind of is understandable
39:22
given what we've already talked about. They said, quote, children's pro social
39:25
behaviors may be driven by multiple motivations, not easily captured by the idea of
39:30
intrinsic or extrinsic motivation, and may be selective quite early in life. End
39:36
quote. And I think that's exactly right. That's very astute, is that
39:40
we want to point to everything and say because of this thing, but I'm
39:45
like, it's actually because of like ten different things. Like they did this
39:49
thing. They did this thing as as an outcome of many confluence of factors
39:52
that came together just at the right time to have them behave in this way.
39:57
And some of those are were like there some amount of impulsiveness possibly,
40:01
but like we also like understand who taught them, what values they brought to
40:06
that situation, What were the values that they were taught what were the circumstances,
40:09
like they had to be in the situation so they could make a choice
40:13
to behave the way that they did in the first place. So those like
40:15
all kinds of things to consider, and without having a really concrete example,
40:21
I feel like I speak too abstractly, But I'm hoping people are following when
40:23
I'm laying down. You know, Yeah, I think I follow that now.
40:27
Webster, Veasturia, and Sassier in twenty twenty one found that a belief
40:31
in pure evil can actually be limited to critical thinking skills. So basically what
40:36
they're saying is, if you lack critical thinking skills, you might more likely
40:39
believe in pure evil. So in the study, they provided an article about
40:44
a mass shooting but changed key characteristics about the shooter, and some articles the
40:47
shooter had a brain tumor that caused the shooting, while other articles the shooter
40:52
was described as evil regardless of the conditions. Though those who had a higher
40:57
belief in pure evil or like a super natural evil type of situation, they
41:01
held the shooter more liable regardless of mitigating evidence, regardless if they were some
41:07
kind of brain condition that prevented them from making certain decisions. They held them
41:10
to the same, if not a more stringent moral standard if they believed impure
41:15
evil. Now, I think a final thing on this before we sort of
41:19
I think get to what I would consider to be our conclusive take home point
41:23
thesis type thing is thinking about, like, under what conditions do we describe
41:29
something as being evil? And I think that the easiest way to or the
41:35
cleanest initial starting place, is understanding that when we call something evil, it's
41:39
because we have some sense of injury or offense. Like we're in a situation
41:45
where we are upset, or we see someone else who is upset. Something
41:49
has happened where someone was harmed in one way or another. They were cheated
41:53
out of money, they were physically harmed, they got some disease, they
41:57
were subject of a natural disaster, they were subject to terrorist attack, like,
42:00
whatever it is, the situation is harm was done or happened in some
42:05
way. Right. So I think that's an important thing to consider, is
42:07
that, like, we don't just use evil to talk about everyday things.
42:10
We only use it to talk about in situations where harm was done. Okay,
42:15
So if that's a relevant piece of this, then understanding why when harm
42:19
is done is their utility and calling something good or evil? And I think
42:23
it does come again once once again back to the idea of do we need
42:28
evil for there to be such a thing as good? I think that you
42:30
can honestly have in my own mind about this a baseline of neutral where things
42:36
skew better and things skew worse. Right, and good I think has a
42:40
lot of baggage to it that is not inherently linked to the opposite of good,
42:45
right right, It just means that, like it again, it moved
42:50
toward more helpful. So again, if we think about the conditions under which
42:52
we call something good, is often when someone benefited from something in some way,
42:58
and the fact that they benefited did not mean that they had to have
43:00
overcome harm. And that's why I think that those are not like you.
43:06
I don't think there's a really clean dichotomy there. And one other point of
43:09
that is that because these are just words, like I can say up is
43:13
down and you follow, you follow the words that I say, you understand
43:16
them if you speak the same language I do. Because words don't have any
43:20
inherent properties, and so you can kind of choose to invoke good or evil
43:24
at whatever will you have? And really then it comes the conversation becomes what
43:30
do we get from that? Like how does the word evil help us in
43:35
any way? Which I think really brings us to our final question is do
43:37
we need the concept of evil? Right? And so before we unpack that,
43:42
we have to ask the question do we need ads? Okay, we're
43:52
back, do we need those ads? Ude? I mean maybe the answer
44:00
to that is also found in do we need evil? Since there's so much
44:02
the ven diagram is so overlap, so it's a perfect circle as an evil
44:07
or a perfect circle on the ven diagram? All right? As we were
44:14
putting together the notes for the specific topic, and actually all credit goes to
44:16
Shane on this when Shane, you are the the architect here and you've done
44:20
a fantastic job, I appreciate you, right, But we had the thought
44:22
that many other folks probably had. You know, I like to think of
44:25
myself as original, and Shane, you like to think of yourself as original,
44:30
right, And all of our listeners they have to think of themselves that
44:32
way. This brought the question of whether humans need something or someone to be
44:37
evil as a unifying idea. I think this was popularized by some politicians of
44:43
like, one way of uniting the people you have underneath you in support of
44:47
you is to have an evil that they can be mad about. Yeah,
44:52
common enemy, Yes, we want a common enemy, and like there are
44:53
other ways to unify people. I think, well not even I think like
44:58
there are other ways unify people, but they chose to believe that the best
45:00
way to unify people was to have them believe that we have a common enemy.
45:05
And that's where we see during wartime, you have seen a lot of
45:08
people who are typically opposed to one another politically come together all of a sudden
45:14
right, and it's because of there being a common enemy. And I think
45:16
that's kind of sad personally and also unnecessary. And the question becomes, can
45:22
we exist in a world where evil doesn't exist? Can we thrive in this
45:25
space? The essential question is whether we need evil for good to exist?
45:30
Right? And so some psychologists have actually talked about this. William James former
45:34
episode subject, actually believe that people were either healthy minded or six souls,
45:40
and those who were healthy minded were more likely to ignore or cope with evil
45:44
existing, whereas those who were six sold were more susceptible to evil's whims.
45:49
So there is kind of like a discussion even within the psychology space, of
45:52
like, well, people who are healthy are not going to be or do
45:57
evil things, but people who maybe struggle stuff, we're going to do evil
46:00
things, which you know, is a problematic perspective in itself. And as
46:04
we mentioned, Carl Jung believed less in a sort of universal cosmic evil but
46:07
instead in a personal evil which manifests as a result of negative childhood experiences.
46:15
And I mean it's not way off base there. We definitely see that in
46:20
the vast majority of cases where someone is arrested for some violent crime, that
46:23
person also had a history of trauma in their past, often when they were
46:28
children. So not to say that that is again account for one hundred percent
46:32
of cases, but it accounts for a lot more than you might think,
46:36
right absolutely. And then Gordon Alport believed that in the religious space, specifically,
46:40
believe in whether people were generally good or evil constituted a shallow interpretation of
46:45
the human experience, which I agree with that as well. But the thing
46:50
that I think is important to unpack in all of that is, none of
46:52
these people asked whether we needed it or whether evil is even necessary for the
46:57
existence of good, and I think that is something that we continue to struggle
47:01
in debates with. It's like, do we actually need evil for there to
47:06
be this kind of objective good in the world. Another way I would I
47:10
would phrase this is I think when we're also thinking about when we call something
47:14
evil, we essentially are saying that, like because you go back to the
47:19
intention piece, right, Like, they did this, this evil thing that
47:22
they did, and most of the time we're saying that they did it because
47:28
they wanted to cause harm, right, their motivation, their intention was to
47:32
harm other people. Potentially, There's like there might be an aspect of this
47:37
where it was like reckless harm. They were being careless and that makes their
47:42
their actions evil because of how bad the harm ended up being potentially or something
47:45
of that nature. Right. But the thing is is, again this often
47:51
comes down to who's point of the finger in all circumstances. All people,
47:55
when you look at their behavior, even if they know that they made a
47:59
mistake, they will sort of look at this in terms of, like,
48:01
I also know why I did this a fundamental attribution error thing, Right,
48:05
everybody did something for reason that to them seemed like a good idea at the
48:09
time, Right, even if it's selfish, like they're like I can get
48:13
away with this or like I need this, there's some kind of justification in
48:16
there. And so the idea of evil assumes that people's motivations are simply to
48:22
do harm, and I think motivations, first of all, are never that
48:27
simple. And second of all, it's when you consider the contextual features that
48:32
influence people's behavior, verbal their language, their values, their culture, their
48:37
circumstances, the thing that immediately preceded where they're currently at, their access to
48:42
things such as weapons, et cetera, if we're talking about like physical harm,
48:45
which isn't always the case, or their access to a computer if they're
48:49
you know, leaving evil comments on YouTube videos, not that I've experienced with
48:59
that. It all comes back to, like, there are all these circumstantial
49:02
things that are going on the circumstantial view of understanding behavior. I think makes
49:07
evil an unnecessary concept because it does not further the conversation. It does not
49:13
further analysis and understanding of their behavior. And like, I think a lot
49:15
of people want to say, like people do bad things, and I'm like,
49:20
yeah, fine, that they do things that I think they cause injury,
49:23
they cause harm. Sometimes they do it for selfish reasons, sometimes they
49:27
feel justified. But whatever, the thing that's going on is like those things
49:30
happen and someone suffered as a result, and calling that evil doesn't further the
49:35
conversation. That doesn't make anyone feel better, that doesn't make anything work better,
49:38
that doesn't give us any solutions for how to prevent that harm in the
49:40
future. So I think that it's just a derelict term that doesn't help us.
49:45
And again because language is so arbitrary, Like, I think we can
49:50
quite easily have good without evil, particularly, as I said, if we
49:53
frame it in terms of the conditions under which we think of good or benefit
49:57
and conditions under which we think of evil or harm. One does not entail
50:01
the other. You don't need to have harm to have like missed an opportunity
50:06
for good. You don't need to have good to have a missed opportunity for
50:07
harm. So I think that they can be separate. That's probably my thesis
50:10
at the end of this, right, Like a better way to frame the
50:15
question about evil is really more in this idea, and you kind of mentioned
50:20
it before, like is what I'm doing helpful or is what I'm doing harmful.
50:23
I think in that space, if you have the ability, the cognitive
50:25
ability to or like even like the insighter, the wherewithal of it self awareness
50:30
to take a second to go like, oh, I can be self aware
50:35
enough to recognize this, like that what I'm doing is harmful, or I
50:37
can self reflect and go, what I did was harmful and I need to
50:39
correct that. I think that's a better way to frame it, because that
50:43
doesn't necessarily mean that, like you said, being helpful doesn't mean that you
50:46
didn't cause harm, Like they're not mutually exclusive per se, but you always
50:51
kind of want to move in the direction of being helpful. And so I
50:53
think, regardless of good and evil, whatever that is, I think framing
50:57
the question in terms of helpfulness is way more useful for advancing society and way
51:00
more effective in reducing the power that evil, the idea the word evil holds
51:07
on certain behavior or personality types. Yeah, and so I think, you
51:12
know, if people want to create a definition of evil that makes it so
51:15
logically it does exist, fine, I guess, you know. And if
51:19
people hear this and want to be righteously justified in being angry at someone else,
51:23
like I hear you like it feels like it is frustrating when people do
51:28
things that seem like they are harmful for the sake of being harmful. But
51:32
no, that's that's never like the exclusive reason anybody does anything is for their
51:36
sort of one motive, right, And it seems like almost nobody ever does
51:38
anything just to be harmful. I think that they get other things out of
51:43
those situations often, right. Sometimes they start the pot because they don't like
51:47
what's happening on some other side of things, or they feel left out of
51:50
the conversation, or they feel like they've been slighted or abused in some way,
51:54
or because they're looking for a target of their aggression that was created under
51:59
some other It's very, very complicated. I think that there are no such
52:02
thing as actually evil people, and that people do a lot of horrible,
52:07
terrible things that cause a lot of harm in place of when that harm could
52:12
have been mitigated or avoided altogether if they had taken some other path. So
52:16
whether you choose to call that evil or not again, to me, it
52:19
comes down to whether that label furs the conversation. And I think you know
52:22
take on point here the argument of evil, the origins of evil. Good
52:25
versus evil are philosophical debates and they're fun to have and like more. But
52:30
that's kind of what it comes down to, is like we just sort of
52:32
talk about talking, you know, and they rely on established moral expectation and
52:37
comparison to whatever that expectation is. And so it comes down to, as
52:40
you mentioned before, who's pointing the finger, who's the person who is authority,
52:45
Who's the one who's calling something evil or not? Like, that's where
52:47
you're going to find more information about what they're thinking of as being evil.
52:52
But if you look on the other person who they're pointing at, they would
52:53
look back at the person who's pointing the fingers and say the same thing,
52:57
right, So it just comes down to opposition and neither side being good or
53:00
bad or wrong or right. It's just complicated, right. I think this
53:05
discussion is happening more in religious circles than anywhere else. I don't think it's
53:07
happening quite as much in the science or psychology world. Yeah, that's that's
53:12
true. Because it is a moral and philosophical debate. It's happening and more
53:15
in those circles, and it's usually characterized by a binary argument, right,
53:19
it's either good or evil. It's not good and evil or equal parts good
53:22
and evil, or you know, like ninety percent good but like ten percent
53:25
evil. Nobody's doing that, Like it's usually like this is evil, this
53:29
is good, period, And they kind of lay it out like that because
53:31
people like binaries. But in the world of psychology, it's way more complicated
53:36
because we're talking about pro social behavior and what's helpful. We're talking about psychological
53:38
processes, self reflection. We're talking about, as William James mentioned, you
53:44
know, the idea of six souled people or whatever you might want to call
53:46
it. It's a really complicated discussion that requires a lot of nuance, a
53:52
lot of practiced kind of investigation around this, and it's not necessarily answering the
53:55
question of what is good and what is evil, like more questions around why
54:00
people do what they do. Beautiful, beautiful, I mean it may as
54:06
well just let the advertisers have space for a minute to rest on the laurels
54:10
of that beautiful closing right there, So we'll be right back. As we're
54:21
wrapping up here, I just want to let you all know if you would
54:22
like to tell us something that we said that you'd like to comment on positive
54:25
or negative, or evil or good about any of it. You may reach
54:29
out to us directly by emailing us at info at wwdwwdpodcast dot com. We're
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54:44
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54:52
ever described it, but just like a membership program, you can go to
54:55
patreon dot com, look us up and you can join if you wish that
55:00
you signed up for a monthly sort of payment and recompense for that, you
55:05
get some certain benefits like early access to episodes at free episodes, behind the
55:08
content, etc. I mean, we really do depend on that as a
55:12
way for us to continue making the show. If we have pay for the
55:15
website with pay for distribution, all of that and so a tremendous amount of
55:19
things goes to the generosity of our amazing patrons, which includes Mike m Megan,
55:23
Leyla, Mike T, Justin, Kim, Joshua, Brad, Stephanie,
55:28
Olivia, Brian and Ashley. Thank you all eternally. You are amazing,
55:31
yeah and the best. We love you to death. In addition,
55:35
this podcast can happen without my lovely team of people which includes Justin who does
55:38
are audio engineering and production, Shane for all of your work and writing,
55:42
co hosting and really guiding this discussion today, and of course our social media
55:45
coordinator is Emma Wilson. And then of course thanks to all of my listeners.
55:50
You guys are amazing and I appreciate all of you. I think with
55:52
that it is time for our final segment here, which is to give our
55:57
recommendations of the week. Yay love recommendations, we recommendations. I'm gonna recommend
56:10
a tattoo shop that I recently went to. You know, it was recently
56:14
for October. It was Friday thirteenth. Sometimes tattoo shops will do really fun
56:19
events for Friday thirteenth. In this shop did this and it's called Electric Shark
56:22
Tattoo Studio Fun. This shop is based out of Port Orange, Florida,
56:27
closer to Edgewater, New Sumerna that area, so it's kind of moving in
56:30
that direction. It's actually like right around the corner from where Eileen Warnos was
56:32
captured, so it's like right down the road from there. Oh wild.
56:37
Yeah, it's run by a really great artist's name is Robert and they did
56:39
this really fun flash sale for Friday thirteenth and I was able to go in.
56:45
The shop is clean, they're a lot of fun. It's like an
56:46
artist's shop. It's not like a money shop, which is what I really
56:50
like. Yeah, it was a really great, great feeling and the dude
56:52
was really nice. So I recommend it if you're in the area to go
56:55
get tattooed by them. Fantastic. That's great. That was Electric Shark Tattoos
57:00
Studio. This is in Florida for those of you looking around for it.
57:04
Possible to have other locations, but I'm guessing it's just down in Florida.
57:07
Yeah, right now, it's down in Florida. But the guy that runs
57:09
it also is invented a tattoo machine, so like that's where he also makes
57:14
like a pretty good chunk of changes like buying tattoo machine. So if you're
57:16
in the market for that, that also exists. Oh fantastic. Okay,
57:22
I am recommending a movie. I think I recommend a lot of movies and
57:24
TV shows, but I'm gonna do that again. So we're ending October here.
57:29
This is available on Hulu. It is a horror movie called No One
57:32
Will Save You. You could sort of generally classify this sort of in you
57:37
know what, I won't even I won't spoil anything at all. It is
57:42
a very unique movie. I think you will have seen something like. It'll
57:45
have elements of things you've seen before, and it'll also have some things you
57:47
maybe haven't seen before. But I generally liked it. I thought how incredibly
57:52
unique it was threw me off a little bit, but I actually I really
57:54
found it quite enjoyable and really impressive that they pulled it off the way that
57:58
they did. So. Yeah, interested in a spooky horror movie for October
58:04
Scary movie queue of things to watch? You might consider checking out No One
58:08
Will Save You on Hulu. Yes, I'm adding it to my list.
58:12
I can't wait to check it out. Cool. All right, Well,
58:15
I think that is all that I have to say. Anything that I forgot
58:16
or that you would like to add before we wrap up Today, Shane,
58:20
do good, don't do evil, Good, don't do evil. Yeah,
58:22
evildoers beware. Yes, have a safe and happy Halloween. I think we'll
58:30
catch you next time. This is Abraham and this is Shane. We're out.
58:34
So yup. You've been listening to Why We Do What We Do.
58:37
You can learn more about this and other episodes by going to WWD WWD podcast
58:44
dot com. Thanks for listening, and we hope you have an awesome day