Evil without Ignorance

So many of those with significant accomplishments in their field – top-tier researchers, entrepreneurs, activists – seem to be genuinely good (of course, plenty aren’t). People with a powerful moral compass.

Are accomplished people likelier to be better human beings?

It’s a very easy statement to misinterpret, so it’s better to clarify.

Better not as in ‘their life is more valuable’ – that’s a separate discussion.

Nor is ‘better’ simply ‘morally better’ – at least not in the sense the word is usually used.

Better in a different sense – ‘better people to be around‘. This includes morals, but also more than that.

People who lift you up rather than pull you down – you feel better around them than otherwise.

You wouldn’t want to be around a douchebag, so one aspect of ‘better’ is at least not being a dick to others, if not actually being of some help. If not positive, at least zero, but not negative.

But ‘better to be around‘ also means you go beyond just morals.

You probably wouldn’t want to be around a negative Nancy whining all the time, or someone fussing about every tiny thing – so no extreme pessimism either.

You can add more traits, but then you lose generality and it becomes about individual preferences; this is general enough to apply to most cases.

These two conditions can be summed up:

They’re not douches, so they don’t harm you as a matter of habit.

And they’re not excessively negative, so they don’t cause needless suffering to themselves, or to you by radiating their negativity.

One Evil

‘There is only one good, knowledge, and one evil, ignorance.’

I think this means that there’s one cause behind every evil – ignorance.

It’s not that people are ‘evil’, but simply that they’re deluded, and their delusion makes them evil.

The guy cheating customers selling defective goods, or the one stealing money or killing someone – they think (apparently wrongly) that easy money or revenge or something similar will bring them happiness.

Socrates, or whoever really said that quote, might have meant it that way.

That if they really understood the consequences of their actions – the chances of being caught, the punishment they’d undergo, how little happiness they would actually gain even if they got away with it – they wouldn’t choose evil.

It’s only ignorance, the inability to see clearly the cost-benefit of your action that makes you do evil.

And conversely, someone with ‘knowledge’ wouldn’t be evil, because he could see clearly where his happiness lay.

It’s questionable if this is entirely true. If someone was assured that he wouldn’t suffer any consequences for his actions, he might choose evil out of knowledge.

It’s also pretty patronizing to put down everyone’s evil to ignorance, as though they are blind to some consequences (whether in this life or any other) that only more enlightened people like yourself can see.

Intelligence and Goodness

Going back to the question – why is a smart person likelier to be a better person?

Socrates’ pseudo-quote is part of the reason I think.

They recognize that it’s only because they stood on the shoulders of giants to build on the work of predecessors, and collaborated with peers, that they reached wherever they are – true for any business, research work or organization.

So it’s partly out of gratitude – because you benefitted you might be willing to give it back.

But self-interest is more compelling than gratitude.

You probably also see that when you give freely, you usually end up benefitting a lot more. Before you can deliver on anything you have to build yourself. And once you do deliver, you get connected to so many other people, who help you build further.

And if you’re even a little smart, you’ll know how many people know more than you about so many things, so you recognize how useful that is – especially if you see how little you can achieve in isolation.

That’s usually far better than the other game of hiding away everything to keep it away from others.

And if someone’s smart, they’ll see that everything isn’t about competition; that one person’s gain isn’t their loss, and so they’re far less likely to sabotage others work.

Whereas, stupidity is about viewing competition everywhere, and that mindset can easily give way to pulling others down – because it sees someone else’s loss as a personal gain.

Smart people would value their time, their energy, their mental space.

Perhaps the defining trait of stupidity is to not value any of these.

Going out of your way to be an asshole to others is like throwing mud on someone – you might hit them, but what of the dirt that sticks to you?

All that you achieved was you brought someone down, which is probably of no use to you unless you think you’re in a competition.

And you brought germs and dirt upon yourself, and even wasted your life to achieve that remarkable feat.

An overall outcome in the red, like a person breaking his limbs to win a brawl that brings him nothing. Incidentally, the type of person who goes around picking fights or joining riots has nothing to lose – you won’t find many well-off people doing that.

To say nothing of the consequences on your mental space.

I doubt it’s possible to engage in any deep work if you’re embroiled in strong negative emotions, and vindictiveness and enmity are sure to bring that.

Anyone with any sense wouldn’t be an asshole to others – not even for their sake, but for his own.

And if you are surrounded by assholes, you’d do your best to dissociate – if not physically, at least emotionally, to keep your mental space clean.

Another reason might be confidence.

Intelligent people might have the self-confidence to recognize that they can achieve stuff through their own merit. And they’re secure enough not to view another’s success with envy, but perhaps even with happiness and admiration.

They don’t need to steal credit from people; it’s actually insulting to have to ride on their work.

It’s those who recognize that they don’t have capability to achieve anything on their own who’re forced to resort to such theft. And because they’re painfully aware of their incapability of achieving it, it’s not surprising they’d resent another person’s success.

Another Evil

Which brings me to something, for which there doesn’t seem to be a word for: To want something for nothing. Wanting a car without paying for it, wanting to be rich or get your dream job without working for it.

I’ll call that mediocrity, because I think mediocrity is an attitude, even though the word literally means ‘of low quality’.

Ignorance itself isn’t always the only cause of evil – it’s not true that ‘there is only one evil, ignorance’.

Another cause of evil is mediocrity.

To have high goals and be unwilling to work for them, and to think you can get them through shortcuts and hacks.

There is one kind of evil, ignorance – and that’s what the saying attributed to Socrates gets at. When you take a path without thinking through the consequences. A lot of evil is down to this.

But there’s another evil, and that is mediocrity – an attempt to get something without working for it – just because you can through other means.

I think people aren’t always so stupid that they’re ‘ignorant’ of the consequences of their actions – though it’s true enough in many cases.

Sometimes a person might choose evil even if he’s aware of the risks and the possible downsides – because he knows there’s no other way to get what he wants. A smarter or driven person wouldn’t fall down this trap so easily because he can get there legitimately – in fact, he wouldn’t have it any other way.

It’s not right to call this simple ‘greed’- it might just be cost-benefit, and someone might decide the reward is worth the risks.

Like the powerful guy who encroaches on a weak person’s land at the (often tiny) risk of being punished – he can’t earn enough to get so much land legally.

Or someone who takes credit for their colleague’s work at the risk of being found out – he can’t do anything as good on his own.

It’s possible to argue that such ‘mediocrity’ is an outcome of ignorance – if you believe people operate under the assumption that they won’t get suffer for their actions – and that it comes down to the same thing. It’s the most common response, and one that seems to patronize people, putting them down as incapable of clear thinking.

The difference really comes down to how you view evil.

Someone who believes in Reformation would prefer to pin it down to ignorance.

If they had known better, they wouldn’t do that.

You can always hope to ‘cure’ evil through knowledge.

Evil is like a disease, a symptom of the deficiency of the nutrient ‘knowledge’, and something that can be treated. Every sinner, then, can be treated – it’s just that you have to find the cure.

The ‘mediocrity’ view on the other hand leads you to justice as treatment according to one’s deserts.

The idea that an individual can and must take responsibility for their actions.

That they chose to behave the way they did and therefore accepted the possible consequences their action entailed the moment they engaged in it.

When you engage in evil, you do it for an upside, and if you’re lucky, you get it – like the thief who robs a bank to get money he hasn’t earned and spends his life in luxury, albeit with a fear of being found out anytime.

And if you’re not lucky, then you face the downside – the thief who spends his life in jail.

It’s about skin in the game, like a trade gone wrong – you might enjoy profits, or you might lose what you already have.

If you can enjoy the (unearned) fruits of action, should you not suffer if you’re caught? You can’t have it both ways, you can’t have the upside and escape the downside.

To end this essay with the idea that began it – I think smarter people are also less likely to be evil because one of the avenues of evil gets cut off.

They won’t pursue evil out of mediocrity – they know they can get the rewards without the risk through effort, and they often enjoy the pursuit more than the reward itself. Cheating to get something is in fact an insult – as though you’re not good enough to earn it and have to resort to this.

And when they do engage in evil, it’s not out of mediocrity, but ignorance – because for whatever reason, the path they want to pursue carries a very high toll, but one they believe is worth paying. Most rulers, conquerors, demagogues probably believed their vision was worth all the suffering necessary to realize it.

Which means that smarter, driven people are less likely to be evil, but when they are evil, they’re likely to be much more evil than others.