Wickedness

So in Iceye's post "Who do you think you are?" the question of evil was discussed in the comments. I just read the latest comment, stated by ShadoWolf that "No one considers themselves to be evil when they do something most would call evil."

I disagree. I can't speak for other people, but I see a lot of wickedness in myself.

Now, I cannot claim to believe in a "universal evil", of course, because that implies some sort of omniscent judge, and while I have what I consider solid evidence of the existence of the Blind Idiot God, I don't believe it judges.

I do, however, believe in a subjective sort of evil - as a sort of "necessary fantasy" in order to properly function. Why have I never killed anyone? The long and short of it is "Because I have been convinced that murder is evil". If I didn't regard murder as an evil thing, I would have no real reason not to do it (disregarding the "I might be caught" angle, but honestly, how likely are you to be caught if you murder a random stranger for the lulz? Not very.)

Evil may be a fantasy, something that does not objectively exist - "as real as Santa" - but unlike Santa, it is a necessary fantasy. It's a made-up belief that we, at least on a personal level, need in order to function as a modern society. It's like how the medieval church needed God to function; the church was objectively useful, it created order and provided employment for countless people - but its authority was (probably, at least) entirely fictive, there was no "real" reason to listen to the Pope. Yet, if nobody had listened to the Pope, we wouldn't have literacy in the Western world.

It's the same with "evil". If we didn't believe in it, society would collapse, because people would undertake any selfish act that they thought they could get away with.

Occasionally, people do selfish things - but often, they regret them afterwards, because they think that the act is wrong; they consider themselves, in some small fashion, "evil" for having done it.

That's how I understand the word, at least.

Hallucinogenic

Sometimes I think that, maybe, I was born with a natural presence of LSD in my body. I have strange hallucinations, chiefly when I'm halfway between sleeping and wakeful, but sometimes I see things even when I'm fully awake, strange things at the edge of my consciousness that I somehow - for just a split second, but sometimes for much longer - actually believe in.

After I had this thought, that maybe my body chemistry maybe naturally includes a little bit of hallucinogenics, I came to think of something: Our body chemistry is calibrated to see the world in a certain way. We would all see it in more or less the same way because we all have more or less the same body chemistry.

But what if there are facets of reality that we can only see while we're on drugs? What I mean to say is, what if some alternate chemical balance - one induced by, say, LSD - allows us to see things that are really there, but that our normal body chemistry can't translate into the proper neural impulses? What if shamans going on vision-quests aren't just hallucinating, but actually re-calibrating their biological make-up to perceive another spectrum of reality?

There actually isn't anything scientifically impossible or even scientifically unlikely about that thought; perception is a very complicated feat of neurobiology, and evolution would seek to make it practical - but not necessarily correct or comprehensive. If there are things we don't need to see to survive, evolution would make it so that we did not see these things.

The body is a prison. Some days, I just really want to see what the world is like outside its walls.

Anti-Immigration

So the governor of Alabama has signed the harshest anti-immigration law of any American state. On June 9, a bill was signed that makes it a crime to be in Alabama without proof of legal presence. The new crime is called "willful failure to complete or carry an alien registration document".

All immigrants must at all time carry proof of legal presence. Sure, carrying identification is a necessity in modern society, but only if you want to do something. Ordinary people aren't taken into custody just for walking down the street without their ID card. But in Alabama, that may well be the case for anyone who looks foreign. That's a little creepy.

And then I read this: "If a person knew that they were transporting or harboring an undocumented immigrant, they would be committing a crime and subject to punishment of up to a year of jail time."

Am I paranoid if this looks like the beginning of a slippery slope to me?

(Source: Ethics Daily