A Quote by Ross MacDonald
I used to think the world was divided into good people and bad people, that you could pin responsibility for evil on certain definite people and punish the guilty. I’m still going through the motions.
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We like to think there is this core of human nature – that good people can't do bad things, and that good people will dominate over bad situations. Infact, when we look at the Stanford prison studies, that we put good people in an evil place, and we saw who won. Well, the sad message in this, is in this case is the evil place won over the good people.
People are now looking at the world in terms of axis of evil and evil-doers and by logical extension good-doers, and that's a very polarised look at good and bad people. Reality is much more complex than that and people can be good and evil on the very same day.
There are two kinds of people in this world. There are the people that will have you think that there are two kinds of people in this world, and there are the 'good; people. There is no good, there is no evil, there is just a war going on between the people that want you to think there's a war going on and the people that know there doesn't have to be one.
There are people who are at fault for one or another problem. These people are very avaricious and self-serving. They're not doing it just to do it; they're doing it for the money. That money, they keep here. When you say, "We're going to find these people, these guilty people, the ones who are not only breaking laws but are also hurting their own fellow country people," and you say, "We're going to punish them, specifically, that's a step in the right direction."
I have done research about people who think they're doing movements and people - like Madonna and professional dancers - who are actually 'performing' movements. The people who can connect and perform during their workout get results way above and beyond the people who are just going through the motions.
The people who did this act on America, and who may be planning further acts, are evil people. They don't represent an ideology, they don't represent a legitimate political group of people. They're flat evil. That's all they can think about, is evil. And as a nation of good folks, we're going to hunt them down, and we're going to find them, and we will bring them to justice.
...You can only subject people to anguish who have a conscience. You can only punish people who have hopes to frustrate or attachments to sever; who worry what you think of them. You can really only punish people who are already a little bit good.
I used to wonder why God used a prop like the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil to inflict guilt on Adam&Eve, until I realized it could have been a steak or a plate of fries or a bagel. Anything. Making people feel guilty is a staple of religion and society in general. It works. And if you can transfer guilt from a real criminal to an innocent bystander, you've really got something going. It's a magic stage trick that can make a career.
It feels like a lot of times when I'm watching people perform, they're just going through the motions and checking boxes. Costume - good, hair - good, make-up - good, death drop - good; it's like they're just going through a checklist of what makes a 'good performance' but it's not entertaining, it's very disposable.
With tons of chaotic supply on the internet, you're going to have people who become very good at being curators or stylists. It's the same sort of people that I used to go to record shops for - I knew if certain people recommended something, it would be good. There's always going to be those people. It just depends on what they're called: curators or radio jockeys or bloggers.
There's a real connection between the history of print in Europe and nationalism, and how those two things could be formed. I think they may both now be ending, for good and bad, but I think mainly for good. Either globalism was supposed to make people all realize this is one big business going on and we should know what's going on everywhere, or it makes people say, "I don't want to become part of this thing. I want to be incredibly different from you and I want to uphold my local behavior." Dress a certain way.
What intrigues me is that people kind of naturally want to label or pigeonhole the characters. They want to make it easy for themselves to go, "All right. There's the good guy, there's the bad guy, there's the girl. Okay, I get it now." But life isn't one-dimensional. The world isn't simply divided into good versus evil. I think we're all capable of both. So any time the hero does something I'm not crazy about, or the bad guy does something I can relate to, I'll find it more interesting.
I think that we all know what evil is. We have a sense of what's evil, and certainly killing innocent people is evil. We're less sure about what is good. There's sort of good, good enough, could be better - but absolute good is a little harder to define.
If it ever seems to us that the world is a place where bad things only happen to good people, it is because we still believe that bad things happening to bad people is a good thing.
If there are going to be people out there making war on other people, don't you think it's a good idea for some of those people to at least follow a code of ethics? Not 'honor' but something you can pin down and be sure of, something with the same rules for everybody.
We lie to ourselves and try to escape that bitter reality by saying that the world is divided into good guys and bad guys, and that we're the good guys. We condemn people as evil to reassure us that we're not like them. If there's to be any hope of preventing these things from happening again, we have to look at the reality. That any act of evil in our history was committed by human beings like us. That, very often, we're all implicated in it.
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