Evil: The Science Behind Humanity's Dark Side

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A comet the color of blood and flame cuts across the sky. Two great leaders—Lord Eddard Stark and Robert Baratheon—who hold sway over an age of enforced peace are dead, victims of royal treachery. Now, from the ancient citadel of Dragonstone to the forbidding shores of Winterfell, chaos reigns. Six factions struggle for control of a divided land and the Iron Throne of the Seven Kingdoms, preparing to stake their claims through tempest, turmoil, and war.

And I'm not arguing against that: slavery used to be normalised in the West and is still practised here by the “greedy” and “selfish” in the shadows; but can't "greedy" and "selfish" still be evil? It was more challenging for me (in a very large section on sexuality) to think of pedophilia as a sexual orientation instead of an active choice, and Shaw urges us to see it as natural (and unharmful if not acted on) so that pedophiles can feel safe to open up about their urges and seek help. All in all, I liked this book because it really made me think. I don't necessarily agree with all of Dr. Shaw's points, but I'm at least willing to seriously think it over and try to wrap my mind around it. communities / neighborhoods lower in socio-economic status, disadvantaged, under-educated or under-employed.But how typical was Eichmann? He was the arch-bureaucrat, sitting in his office, deciding how many ‘pieces’ (i.e. people) would be transferred to Auschwitz, on which train, on which day. That’s at quite a distance from the sorts of cruelty that were actually going on face-to-face in the camps. His evil might have been more banal because it was largely done at a distance. For Manne, misogyny is a belief that women should act a certain way towards men. When they don’t, violence and cruelty are often directed towards the women to punish them or to bring them in line. ” So, we should not summarize a murderer’s character with the label “murderer” because we make mistakes too?! Why would someone attempt to use actions such as lying/infidelity/theft to defend someone who commits murder? This is quite the mental jump to make. If we didn’t label a murderer as a murderer, would that help them to not murder again? Truly struggling here. Stanley Cavell is a philosopher who has written a series of essays in this book on plays written by Shakespeare. At the centre of the book is an essay on King Lear called ‘The Avoidance of Love’. What I find so compelling about it is that it offers a reading of that play which really strikes at the core of everyday experience. He says the reason that King Lear rejects Cordelia in the first scene is not because she’s failed to give him the kind of showy demonstration of love that her sisters did, but that, in fact, she showed him real affection by being honest and clear.

It's a useful example for Shaw to point out that there are countries in the world that still have a death penalty for homosexuality – most of us in the West see that while those who think of homosexuality as evil feel justified in throwing “offenders” from rooftops, they are very wrong. So, what are we wrong about here? Shaw basically says that there is no behaviour that anyone engages in that we are not all capable of, and it's more useful to talk about ways to improve society than throw around the label “evil”. For example, rapists are a product of rape culture:In ancient times the Rings of Power were crafted by the Elven-smiths, and Sauron, the Dark Lord, forged the One Ring, filling it with his own power so that he could rule all others. But the One Ring was taken from him, and though he sought it throughout Middle-earth, it remained lost to him. After many ages it fell by chance into the hands of the hobbit Bilbo Baggins.

He does make that connection. The response to horror movies, and our response to the Holocaust, or to Nanking, are not entirely dissimilar. There are similar itches that are being scratched. One might be for recreation and one might be for scholarly study or concern about the future of humanity, but there is a lot of common ground.

This book seeks to inform and empower. When we understand what leads to harm, we can begin to fight against it. This involves taking action to stop harm, fighting against our own urges to do harm, and helping people who have done harm to get better. And whatever we stand for, fight for, feel for, we must never dehumanise each other.”