Poltical memes. Its a good time for this.

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EDIT: That didn't post properly; I'll repost it in full here. I won't even give credit to the author, either.

Title: "Evil Is Stupid"
Caption: "Want to beat the Devil? Laugh in his face."

Let me preface this article a bit: When I use the terms 'evil' and 'the devil', I'm not talking theology, just using quick and easy shorthand; let me define the terms in the way that I'm using them.

Evil: That which is destructive while additionally being non-constructive; not everything that is destructive is non-constructive, so not everything that destroys is evil.
The devil: A human entity that engages in evil; that entity might consist of a sole individual person, or it might consist of a group of individuals. In the context of this article, 'the devil' is a human force which exercises his, her, or their capacity for autonomous agency to engage in destructive action at the expense of other human beings, while providing no substantive benefit to offset the destruction.

The thing is... evil is *fucking retarded.* (I know, I used a nicer word in the title. You have to click to get the 'medium-rare' language.)

Let me tell you a story: A long time ago, there lived a tribe who existed in a miserable self-conflict of indolence and greed. Too lazy for real work, but endlessly avaricious. They wanted it all -- but they weren't willing to put in the work to build any of it themselves. Their elders had led them to believe, from time immemorial, that they didn't have to, anyway. The gods, you see, had blessed this tribe especially and in particular. They were the only people who really counted *as* people.

Consequently, their predominant skill set radiated outward from the dominant tendency of people who are both lazy and greedy: manipulating people. Tricking people. *Swindling* people. It was a cultural tradition, in fact; their elders had done it to them, selling them all that religious bunkum which was plainly and self-evidently not only untrue but patently nonsensical.

So the greedy tribe went over the mountain. Not all of them at once, of course. Just a few, at first, a few young men to trade and a few young women to marry into the tribe over the mountain. Now, to their credit, the greedy tribe wasn't an impatient tribe. They worked slowly, over the course of generations, using their slowly growing influence to introduce their hosts to a specially tailored modification of their religion.

Unlike their own version, which was crammed full of slavery, rape, democide and debauchery of such extremity as to give a pirate fits of gagging, this modified version promoted as "virtues" the notions of passivity, tolerance, and even martyrdom to the tribe over the mountain. This strategy is not unlike how a leech introduces anesthetic and anticoagulant enzymes into a host to keep the blood flowing and prevent the host from dislodging the parasite. If only any other parasite in nature was so clever as to make its unwilling host feel a sense of heroism in its role of dumb, ambulatory blood bag.

Not in short order, but in natural due course, the greedy tribe had so utterly subverted, then subjugated, the tribe over the mountain that it seemed the latter could never escape the yoke of the former. The extent of the subversion was so extreme, in fact, that the tribe over the mountain had forgotten its own gods and its own virtues almost entirely; in fact, the very word for 'god' in their language now referred *only* to the god of the greedy tribe which had conquered them without them ever even realizing it.

Except... some of them *did* notice. And as the greedy tribe (which now controlled them as a cordyceps infection controls a misfortunate ant) used up their sweat and blood and treasure for its own ends more and more heavily by the season, more and more of them began to rebel... but too late. By the time a full-throated rebellion could be undertaken, the greedy tribe had spread its young men and young women to all the other tribes in the region, and what was in deed if not in word a slave revolt was eventually put down, the yoke tightened to its most unbearable degree yet, never to slacken.

Until... the tribe over the mountain had nothing left, and died.

And the greedy tribe had already conquered every other tribe in the region, and destroyed them, too.

To switch metaphors midstream... the parasite had killed its host. And now, bereft of any host on which to feed, the parasite, too, would die.

*Which is an hilariously fucking stupid strategy to run a culture on.*

Evil is, ultimately, a self-correcting problem. It's the damage it does to good people on its path to self-termination that demands that we isolate it, contain it, and remove it.

But the old aphorism holds true: An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure. And when an injury is generations being delivered, it's never too late to act. So what do you do in the face of such an intricate form of attack?

You Keep It Simple, Stupid.

When they try to convince you that victimhood is virtue? Call them kooks.

When they try to sell you passivity as paragon? Laugh them out of the room as crackpots.

When people object: "It isn't that simple!" what they really mean is, "That's going to work, and I mean to muddy the water so that you sit confused and, most importantly, idle!"

When the devil weaves his best web, put on your grinning warface, gird up your loins with a mighty horselaugh, and laugh it down.

*Postscript: Yes, obviously the story is an allegory.
*Post-Postscript: The allegory is a reference to royal families.
*Post-Post-Postscript: If you thought it was an allegory about somebody else... congratulations. The enzymes are wearing off.

 

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