Thinking

[omimouse]

So, due to recent posts and commentary, I got to thinking. (This means, at least IMO, that Good Stuff came out of said posts and commentary.)

More specifically, I found myself trying to figure out what, exactly, is 'evil'? (For the record, there are times when I would love to be able to convince my brain to pick easier topics to ponder. 4:00 AM is one of them.) Even more specifially, what do I see as evil?

The panel of the webcomic in question is no longer available without a subscription, so I'm going to have rely on memory here. ursulav has a webcomic, Digger. At one point, she had a link up to a panel where the title character was talking about the nature of evil with a charcter by the name of Ed. Digger said something to the effect of, "Evil is doing bad or hurtful things for no reason." Ed's response was long, and it came down to this: "No, evil always has a reason. It beats the wife because dinner wasn't ready, or the house wasn't clean, or because she talked back. It has reasons for everything it does. It all comes back to the simple reason that the world isn't the way that the person wants it to be. So it lashes out at the world; it hurts the world for being not right."

The original text is much better, of course. I wish I'd saved the panel when it was up. But, at its core, this is what evil is to me. The only real qualifier I would add to the above pattern of behaviour would be that evil rarely tries to change its enviroment or those in its enviroment in a constructive manner. This is why I don't see most forms of activisim as evil.

This is, of course, my viewpoint on this. I'm curious what the rest of you think about it, and about your takes on what evil is.

Comments

[ladyqkat.livejournal.com]

Day-um girl! You don't ask easy questions, do you?

I am still cogitating on how to answer this and if I ever put it into coherent form, I will give you my definition.