Picture courtesy of Wikipedia.
A number of years ago I wrote about Evil:
“It was enough to know that The Joker™ was trying to bury Gotham City under six feet of strawberry jam because he was Evil…. We grew up, and found that the Joker was also criminally insane….
When your world-view is that somebody or some group is simply evil, there is no room for negotiations.”
Unfortunately we’ve reached the point where we are talking about even larger groups of people being “Evil.” It’s not just terrorists. Or criminals. Or immigrants. It’s an entire political party. This is a deterioration from merely thinking members of the other party are stupid. Even more dangerously, people in power are implying that if you don’t espouse certain political viewpoints, there’s something wrong with you. And when someone in power thinks there’s something wrong with you, there is the potential for “doing something about it.”
Let me be clear. A person using language that implies that the other party is evil, demons, or similar, can’t be reasoned with. And that is dangerous for all of us.
The Founding Fathers thought certain things were so important they put them in the First Amendment before anything else: We The People have freedom of speech, religion, of the press, to peaceably assemble, and even to access the courts. If you want to believe that the Flying Spaghetti Monster freed us from the menace of piracy on the high seas, so be it. But when religion clashes with our other freedoms, things get messy. You don’t have the right to tell others what to worship, revile, or read. And you certainly don’t have the right to endanger others because of your beliefs.
Do not use good and evil in political rhetoric. It leads to people being imprisoned or executed.