UPDATE 04/19/20: Readers have uncovered a massive, coordinated asstroturf campaign to spread fake news and rally a denialist uprising about the CoronaVirus. Buzzfeed concurs, noting ties to a special interest group.

See, I told you it was deliberate, not ignorance! Listen to your prophet next time.

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As I write, 04/04/20 (or 04/04/20 for you Europeans), the world is in the grips of – wait for it – the CoronaVirus / COVID-19 pandemic. Worldwide cases: 1.1M, worldwide deaths: 64K, US cases: 300K, US deaths, 8K. Compare those numbers as you read this to see how we did.

The US is currently the most-infected country in the world. At a rate of one thousand people dying per day, we will soon match and surpass the countries where the virus has taken its deadliest toll. Currently that’s Italy, at 15K deaths. The US can catch up to that number by next week at this rate.

In the middle of all this, we still have a shockingly high denial factor.

• Nine state governors are still not issuing stay-at-home. Here in Iowa, our own governor Kim Reynolds speculated that Dr. Anthony Fauci “doesn’t have all the information.”
• Dr. Anthony Fauci, director of the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases and leader of the White House CoronaVirus Task Force, has been getting death threats. Merely for doing his job.
• Impeached, sitting president Donald Trump clashes with Dr. Fauci and the Center for Disease Control by refusing to wear protective gear. He has earlier called the virus a hoax, amongst many denials.
• A mere 56% of Americans saw the CoronaVirus as a “real threat” just a couple weeks ago.
• FOX News is making the pandemic a partisan issue, and their viewers are falling in step.
• In spite of the pandemic, students took their spring break defying orders not to congregate in large groups. One teenager whose interview went viral claimed the virus wasn’t going to stop him from partying. 44 of those people are now infected.
• Churches have continued to hold services despite being a major vector for infection.

We could go on all day of course, but that’s enough examples for now. At this point, either the reader has turned away, or else I’m preaching to the choir. Because reality is politicized. So it’s time we looked at how it got that way.

Of course, I don’t need to point out the larger context of science denialism, which was already a big problem before we ever heard the words “Corona Virus.”

Another thing that is not news at all is that we – the ones who take in new information and accept reality – are constantly asking each other “WHY?” Why do we have science denial? Why do we, even in the face of a disease that is killing one thousand Americans dead per day, do we still have Americans denying reality? You would think, if nothing else convinces people, that a corpse would. Corpses are incontrovertible witnesses, especially when they were not so different from you only a little while ago.

Say it out loud: “There are evil people.”

Probably some of you have rolled your eyes a few times by now, imagining that I’m making some Captain Obvious point. Well, it’s not so obvious. And even to the people for whom it is obvious, we really still don’t think this thing all the way through. It is an unpleasant thing to think about. We don’t look at the logical consequences following from the accepted statement, because even the most enlightened of us aren’t used to thinking this way.

This is as good a time as any to point out that I’m not denouncing all of humanity. In fact, I’m not denouncing anyone. I am simply proposing that we accept the reality that some people are just rotten for no reason at all, and there’s nothing we can do to fix them. My goal is liberation from the unrealistic optimism that hobbles our collective intellect.

We’ve actually come close to arriving at this conclusion without my help; the adjective “toxic” as in “toxic people” has entered the modern lexicon. Now it’s just one small step from a behavioral description to the label itself.

You’re not crazy for thinking this. I’m not crazy for saying so. There really are people hellbent on human extinction as an end goal, and they dress and talk and act just like you. They have no more motive than an asteroid. They are not sick, crazy, stupid, deluded, or ignorant.

We All Try To Pathologize Evil

Which means, we try to explain evil natures in humans as a disease, a short-circuit in the brain, the product of misinformation, the inevitable result of child abuse, and so on. Even our top scientific minds avoid saying “evil people,” because they’d rather say “antisocial personality disorder.” They believe that sort of label is more useful. Mind you, this is a disease which:

• has no known cause
• has no clearly indicated treatment
• has symptoms meeting every definition of “evil”

There are plenty of studies attempting to diagnose what I am calling “evil” as a brain malfunction, just snaps and sparks in the wiring. This excellent and in-depth article posits science denialism as a result of primitive and animalistic instincts in our brain meat. The article at least winds up chalking the effect up to “human nature.” It’s from 2011.

By then, the “double-down” effect was widely known; it’s when a person with a wrong opinion pushes back when confronted by facts that contradict their opinion. When proven wrong, they stick to their “wrongness” with all the more conviction.

The Difference Between Evil People and Wrong People

Now of course, nobody is perfect, not I nor you. Nevertheless, if willful, forceful ignorance were just a foible of human nature, then why doesn’t everyone have it? Or at least, why don’t we all have it to the same degree?

Most of us suffer from the delusion that curing evil is a simple matter of informing the ignorant. It is the single greatest time sink of idealistic people. Myself, I am in the writing business now because, as a younger and more naive penguin, I believed the problem with the world stemmed from ignorance. The problem is that people do not know enough things, I thought. “I will teach all of the people all of the things,” I said stupidly, “and that will solve the world’s problems!” Most of us who work in media suffer from this delusion.

You know better, don’t you? I learned this lesson so hard.

My moniker “Penguin Pete” comes from Tux, the mascot of the Linux operating system. Way back at the turn of the century, I believed that if everyone understood what a wonder informed computing was, they would adopt the ethical hacker lifestyle, flood the world with STEM graduates, and we’d be exploring the galaxy at Warp Factor nine by now.

That didn’t work. I settled down to advocating computer literacy in general.

That didn’t work. I joined then-newly-elected president Obama in clamoring for STEM education.

That burned down, fell over, then sank into the swamp. I started advocating for plain old science and education.

Even this turned out to be too much to hope for. For the past few years, I have joined my fellow enlightened masses in fruitlessly bellowing “Read book! Book good!” over the heads of the shambling hordes.

It appears that the zombie apocalypse is over; the zombies won.

Yes, the notion that we can make the world a better place simply by spreading more information is a delusion. It is a form of denial as well. And yet, it is a denial of which we do not want to cure ourselves. The least cynical, yet most realistic, of us fall back on Optimistic Nihilism:

It is a philosophy with no solutions, doing literally nothing but helping us carry on through another day instead of, you know, throwing ourselves off a tall building. I, for one, am a misanthrope, but conduct my work to be cast as much as possible into the future, against the hope that one day, mankind will fix itself. If all you know about me is “I’m a misanthrope,” you expect a villain. Ask me why I’m a misanthrope and I’ll explain it’s because we, the whole human race, collectively know how to solve all of our problems and yet we do not do that. By the time I am tearfully singing John Lennon’s “Imagine,” you’re agreeing with me and saying that you think that maybe you’re a misanthrope too.

Collectively, people suck now. In the big picture, we hold out hope for people to work out for the better. I write – and live, for that matter – to talk to the people thousands of years from now, not the people now.

It may be a stupidly and hopelessly optimistic endeavor. But if the gamble pays off, it was worth it, and if it does not, I at least did no harm and perhaps helped a few other people feel better.

Ironically, I will now continue to try to make you feel better by convincing you that unqualified evil exists.

The difference between evil people and wrong people is that wrong people *want* to do the right thing, they just fail to have the information or lack the intellectual chops to evaluate it. But when corrected, they stay correct. Evil people know they’re wrong, but their defense is always to play stupid. They have no intention of changing, but will only pretend to listen to your evidence, proof, arguments, and rebuttals because it wastes your time and stops you from doing something more productive.

It’s Not About the Politics!

I have of course cited Republicans a lot in this essay so far, and quite a percentage of the population concurs that this is where the problem is coming from.

But politics actually means very little to this discussion. The only way politics applies to evil is that evil people with common goals tend to flock together to make their efforts more effective.

But we can see the same behaviors in other countries, far away from American bipartisanship. Quick, the media is here to the rescue by pointing a new finger at “global conservatism.”

The problem here is that pointing any finger at any political party undermines the point. People choose their political parties inspired by their own beliefs. Political parties tend to reinforce certain behavior, but that aspect comes after the original evil. Evil people are just as evil working alone as in groups. In fact, as history shows us, evil people don’t work together with each other all that effectively to start with.

Our Unwillingness To Admit Evil Cripples Our Progress

Philosophers have been pounding on tables arguing about evil since there were tables. Some deny the existence of evil, saying it’s only a matter of ignorance, mental illness, excuses excuses. Balderdash.

You see how hard this is now? I am talking about pure evil and how there are people who possess it.

Try to imagine the scientific study of evil. We can pathologize it as a disease, but the evil person doesn’t seem to suffer adverse causes from their actions and in fact many seem to enjoy a perfectly happy life. We can claim it as “militarized ignorance,” and yet all the information in the world only hardens it. We can excuse it as the byproduct of childhood abuse, Freudian motivations, society made the psychopath what they are, yadda yadda. But there are plenty of cases where a demonstrably evil person came from a perfectly happy home, spoiled rotten in fact, had every advantage the world could offer, and still responded with nothing but scorn for the world.

Here is the actual problem: We, as a species, cannot conceive of the concept of motiveless evil. Every living thing we can observe, no matter how simple and small, possesses some kind of motive, even if that motive is “don’t die.” But while being evil certainly helps your survival rate and personal gain in some circumstances, we witness people who thwart their very survival and happiness just to be evil. We see people who shit the nest to make the nest stink for everyone, even if it makes the nest worse for them, too.

That’s the hard part to take in. What if evil people don’t care about their own well-being? What if the willfully ignorant know perfectly well that they are wrong, and they are being wrong on purpose? What if the “double-down effect” discussed above is, in fact, a voluntary act? What if the science deniers know that science is right, and they hate it anyway? What if the evil people know that their denial of climate change is killing the planet, and they actually want that to go on happening?

One whole branch of knowledge, economics, is based on a fundamental principle stating that all humans will conduct their business in their own self-interest, for personal gain and the comfort of their financial security. But evil people throw a monkey wrench into economics. Too often, economists make assumptions based on people being perfectly programmed software who will automatically make consumer decisions based on the greatest value for the lowest price. We keep basing societal models on rational people who want the best for at least themselves.

We see a failure to acknowledge the existence of evil as its own right everywhere in the struggles of society. The art of law and order is based on the concept that punishing people will correct their behavior, but ask any jail warden how that’s working out. We base our political systems, from the most Anarcho-Capitalistic Libertarian to the most Left-Wing Pinko Socialist, on the same notion that people will collectively vote for their own self-interest and thus push society in a direction which will result in the greatest collective good.

And yet what happens when we give people the best possible access to Democracy? Half of them don’t vote at all:

That’s mostly chalked up to apathy and burnout. People don’t always get the desired result in voting, in fact, most of us find the contrary. But among both the voters and the non-voters, we fail to take into account the evil people factor. The people who only vote to make things worse. On purpose. Even for them.

A Case Study

You can take your pick of any person to hold up as the definition of evil. You’re thinking of Hitler already. Perhaps you’re also thinking of any number of famous despots throughout history, based mostly on body count, such as Genghis Khan’s 40 million deaths. And yet, hey, he had an empire to run, and it apparently wasn’t an utter shithole. The thing that seems to make him evil in most people’s eyes is that, while he did lead an empire, he didn’t have to be so nasty about it.

I consider a clearer portrait to be Stephen Paddock, the mass murderer of the 2017 Las Vegas shooting. Here’s a case where a mass murderer clearly defied every motive we could possibly fathom. He came from my adopted home state of Iowa, an idyllic, tranquil state mostly devoted to being as nice as possible. He had a reasonably happy life, was upper-middle-class successful, lived a high-rollers life gambling his days away in the casinos, and had a girlfriend. His only brush with the law was a traffic ticket. He suffered from no known mental illness symptoms, and left no journals of gibbering screeds against society.

To this day, his motive is unknown.

Everyone with an emotional desire to explain away evil – because naked, motiveless evil by itself is scary – has jumped onto the bandwagon with a theory to explain Stephen Paddock, but none of them correlate with any evidence. If we look hard enough, because humans like patterns, we can find some excuse in his drinking or gambling, his politics, whatever you want to pin it on. I’m sure he played a violent video game and listened to a heavy metal album once too. Maybe he ate a Twinkie.

But what if his motive was just “kill a bunch of people”? What if it ends there? What do we do now?

What if he was not crazy? What if it is possible for a happy, sane, rational, healthy, productive individual to just say “today’s the day”?

What if a person can be a successful family man and pillar of their community and still be maniacally evil? Then you have the BTK Killer. What if there’s no correlation between intelligence, lack of same, and evil? Then we get a Unabomber. What if the person doesn’t even manifest their evil in a splashy mass killing spree that makes headlines? Then you have what Dr Robert Hare calls the subclinical psychopaths among us.

It’s just as hard to face the prospect of evil people as it is to face the awareness of our own mortality. It even dampens our Optimistic Nihilism party back there. To be alone against the universe is not so bad, if only mankind could pull together and win a better day for itself in the future. To be alone against the universe and, at the same time, against a percentage of our fellow human beings whose sole motivation is in preventing us from winning, that is bleak indeed.

Even Dr. Bob Hare has to define psychopaths as “lacking a conscience.” Whoops, there we go getting medical again. What if evil people have a conscience, and laugh at it? What if they know the difference between right and wrong, and also care very greatly – to do wrong?

Potential Theories If They’re Useful

Can you not stand to confront the idea of naked, motiveless evil? For those who must have an explanation, pick whichever placebo is sweetest and swallow it:
Power theory

One clear motive for every kind of definition we have about evil is this: It gives the evil person a sense of power. This is impossible to deny. A mass shooter might just be in it to play God for awhile. A person who feels unimportant might decide to make themselves important by becoming cousin to tsunamis, wildfires, and plagues. Doing something bad, even the pettiest thing, gives us all a tiny speck of satisfaction, no matter how fleeting or how overwashed by guilt. To destroy is easy and decisive.

Doomsday theory

Religion is an easy target in the debate about evil. No end of Internet atheists will scapegoat religion as the cause of denialism, based upon the notion that the dictates of religion are at odds with the findings of science. I was raised Evangelical Baptist Christian, I know all the usual arguments. Start with Galileo and the Roman Inquisition and work forward from there.

I don’t reject that religion is the foundation of much science denialism. The brainwashed cult member is not what I’m talking about here. I’m rather examining how that person got brainwashed in the first place. Who sat down to write this book about an angry, invisible, omnipotent being in the sky who commands us all not to think? That is the evil person.

In case anybody thinks I’m exaggerating, this just in:

CNN: “Aren’t you concerned you could go infect other people who don’t go to this church?”

OHIO WOMAN: “No. I’m covered in Jesus’ blood.” pic.twitter.com/KBsnJyZWxJ

— The Tennessee Holler (@TheTNHoller) April 5, 2020

•  “I’m covered in Jesus’ blood!”
• “Fine, then you won’t be needing yours.”

The reports of religious denialism just keep rolling in. Tony Spell, leader of Life Tabernacle Church in Baton Rouge, has been arrested for defying government orders not to hold services. But in a TMZ video interview, you can watch the man literally preach a death cult mentality.

But while we’re fanning through the Bible looking for anti-science verses, perhaps we can take note of the book of Revelation. The final book of the Bible prophecies an end times, an apocalypse, in which most of the world is destroyed and the Rapture comes to save the Christians. The prophecy specifies that things worldwide will be at their rottenest right before this happens.

Let me tell you, most Christians will deny it, but they look forward to the end times. I am told by some Muslims that this is common to other Abrahamic religions as well. The current CoronaVirus pandemic does, indeed, bring out the apocalypse fans. They see it as something uplifting, an “unveiling.” More than one cult has specifically embarked on a self-appointed mission to jumpstart the end times, from Manson to Jim Jones.

Well, what if there’s some religious believers who perfectly well accept science as applied to virus theory and climate change, and want it to happen because they think that’s when Jesus comes back? Routinely, Christians refer to the End Times as “the ushering in of a glorious new age.” A few pastors are currently preaching a message akin to saying “the virus is God’s judgment on everybody but us.” Then Mother Jones points out there are Christians who love Trump BECAUSE they think he’s the AntiChrist.

Preposterous as it is to think of this on a large scale, this line of thinking is shockingly common to a large percentage of the world. No, really, you can’t throw a rock at a religious blog right now without hitting a CoronaVirus End Times post. Quote: “God will allow the diseases and other afflictions to affect mankind to precisely the degree needed to help them repent – no more, no less,” said the happy Christians clapping their hands as another thousand Americans died today.

Progress fatigue theory

Even the most pathologized theory of evil in psychiatry points to deeply hidden circuitry within the human brain, vestigial wiring left over from when we were monkeys (please bear with me, it’s been a long essay). In short, being evil increases your chances for survival and passing on your genes as you ruthlessly murder and rape your way through the world. Say what you will about Genghis Khan, one in two hundred of us are his direct descendants.

It could be that more than a few people freely acknowledge that they’d be more comfortable in a lawless anarchy, and are actively working to get that back.

In the big picture, we have made undeniable progress in the past couple centuries. The last time a plague this size hit, we didn’t even all agree that washing our hands was important. The point here is that modern society places stresses on us along with its conveniences. This argument is at the very heart of Conservatism, after all. One hundred years ago, nobody had to worry about getting a traffic ticket for not carrying insurance, or their emails getting hacked, or information fatigue. On the bigot front, the bigots certainly look back fondly to a time when the various races, genders, and sexual orientations were not allotted quite so much equal time.

It’s not even just the conservatives this time. Even science fiction fans gravitate towards the kind of post-apocalyptic fiction trope called “the cozy catastrophe.”

The Benefits Of Acknowledging Evil

Why spend all this time hammering down the existence of evil? Because we waste too much time trying to avoid it.

We keep asking “why” and getting no answer. We design our society to function perfectly as long as everybody is a goody-two-shoes, and then an evil person comes along and burns it down. Us:

We make assumptions that everybody subscribes to a belief system, political party, or at least an ethos based on some ideal about making this a better world, for themselves if nothing else, but neglect the fact that there are cults, groups, organizations, people in power, who just want everything to blow up.

In America right now, for four years, I’ve been hearing “Why Trump?” Why in God’s name did it have to be Trump? The point of Trump is not to be a good president; nobody is voting for him because of his sparkling attributes. The point of Trump is: He’s the revenge-vote. Trump is the bigots’ punishment against us for eight years of Obama. The bigots want this country torn down before another colored man gets into office. I mean come on, we almost had a woman in there!

Instead of trying to cure, convert, or correct evil, we can work around it. We can proactively design systems to take into account that a percentage of the population doesn’t play well with others. We can quit wasting resources on understanding evil and come back to it later, while we have more important things to tend to. We can design a more resilient society which anticipates evil actions and routes around them.

I consider Hanlon’s Razor to be one of the most backwards delusions ever coined. “Playing innocent” is the ever-ready defense of the evil. Furthermore, in this day and age of instant electronic communication, ignorance is diminishing as a credible excuse. Don’t let the evil bullshit you. Don’t let the Internet trolls sea-lion you. They know better. They’ve had every opportunity to educate themselves as you have.

When we accept that evil people are with us and ever always will be, we liberate ourselves from trying to shame them, correct them, diagnose them, or take other great pains to avoid having them. If we’re ever allowed to have a Thanksgiving again, we don’t bother arguing with toxic uncle Harry anymore. We work around them instead. We overcome evil the same old way as always, by calling the rest of us to action, to be more selfless and altruistic than ever before.

I know a lot of you will reject this essay because you simply do not want to believe in the existence of evil people. My heart goes out to you, really! If you want to believe in the inherent goodness of humanity, and think about acknowledging otherwise in terms of breaking your spirit or “giving up,” I do understand. And I know that you’re one of the good people.

But you’re hurting yourself by denying evil as surely as the evil hurt themselves denying CoronaVirus. Whether you believe in evil or not, evil knows all about you.

A Possible Hopeful Conclusion

Every day in every way, I see despair from all of you about what rotten times we live in.

Let’s put this in context: How much more miserable would you have been a thousand years ago? Ten thousand? A hundred thousand? How would you like to be the Middle Paleolithic version of Albert Einstein, frantically trying to convey to the other Neanderthals that if we use a stick to poke the grubs out of rotten logs, we could forage more efficiently? How many humans lived and died during those hundreds of thousands of years, fruitlessly fighting to establish the basis for civilization before it finally caught on?

Regardless of evil people, human civilization has progressed. From our small viewpoint, history always seems to be at a standstill in peril of lapsing into retrograde, but in the big picture we are steadily marching to utopia.

• Only 100 years ago, US women got the right to vote.
• Only 81 years ago, America got a minimum wage.
• Only 66 years ago, the US threw segregation out of public schools.
• It has only been 60 years since the election of the first woman to office. Anywhere in the world.
• Only 56 years ago, segregation in any context was banned in the US.
• A year later came the Voting Rights Act.
• It’s been just 50 years since the first US Gay Pride Parade.
• As well as the US landing on the moon.
• And the invention of the first modern operating system.
• Of course, it’s only been 12 years since the election of the first African-American US president.
• It’s only been 5 years since same-gender marriage was legalized.
• Hey, we’re just now legalizing cannabis. How’s that working for you?

This record shows that, ultimately, evil loses every time. We have not had a return of Nazism, no matter how many idiots march in Charlottesville, NC. We have never again used atom bombs in acts of war since Hiroshima and Nagasaki. We have plagues now, but the death toll is dwarfed compared to the millions who have been wiped out in the past.

If we acknowledge that the evil people exist, and account for them, we might even progress a little faster.

Isn’t that better? Now cheer up. Thank you for coming to my lecture on staring unflinchingly into the heart of hell. Here’s some kittens: