Evil is a troublesome word. It is both emotionally charged, as well as intractably linked to concepts of religion and other supernatural belief systems. However, it is also a word descriptive of the very worst elements of human motivation and conduct through history. Loading gypsies, dissenters, and Jews onto trains to be shipped to death camps was, in the early 20th century, a singular example of evil’s human face. The mass enslavement and extermination of human beings between 1939 and 1945 is so prominent in memory it is regarded as “The” Holocaust, despite being only one of many mass exterminations.
What motivates humans to do this is seldom publicly examined, due I suspect to the discomfort we feel at the answers. How easily intelligent, and “normal” people fall into the cognitive traps of ideology and atavistic group-think. Those modes of thought leading to the construction of ghettos, to lynchings and to racial cleansing. It’s easier to blame episodes of culture-wide malevolence, violence or murderous insanity on an external, or supernatural agent. It’s easier to blame “the other”. Another demographic; another religion. Even a fictional devil of this or that bronze age fable. The truth, however, is harder and more subtle.
Whatever its causes, whether mass psychosis, or popular rise of ideological thought, evil exists. And I do not mean the supernatural. I mean the mundane, banal human element; that which has become fashionable to ignore, or explain, as mental disorders, chemical imbalances, or in modern instances past abuse resulting in a monstrous cycle of behavior.
I enjoy the hatred of those who practice evil. That is not to say those who are ill informed, or honest adherents to differing point of view. To suggest mere disagreement or misunderstanding is evil would be cowardly and dishonest.
In April of 2013, I attended a scheduled presentation by the co-authors of a series of books on cultural misandry in Toronto. That event was protested by the University of Toronto’s campus ideologues. In a discussion with several of these protesters, the fact that men commit suicide at 400% greater rate than women was pointed out as being a real human rights concern affecting men and boys. This protester did not debate the number. Rather, she spontaneously sang a mocking rendition of “cry me a river”.
This was not mere difference of opinion, it was a demonstration of a will to do further emotional harm to those already in pain. It was a chosen and intentional mocking of human suffering.
In 2011, the US Department of Education issued new guidelines to universities, with which they had to comply to continue receiving federal funding. In cases of female accusation of male sexual misconduct, standards of evidence would be reduced from “clear and convincing evidence” for culpability, or “reasonable doubt” for establishment of innocence, to a “preponderance of the evidence.” That change, sufficient to be called extreme, was just part of the new paradigm. Along with the new standards of proof, came new rules of procedure. Gone was the presumption of innocence, the right for the accused to face their accuser, to ask questions of them, to have an attorney represent them at school “honor courts” that would determine their future academic life.
Not content to just remove the presumption of innocence and the right to a fair trial – both foundations of justice throughout the western world, the ideology behind the DoE’s guideline removes these sacred rights selectively based on sex.
There is no honest way to describe this without identifying it as evil.
Domestic violence is an area of human interaction which receives great public attention. In fact there is an entire industry of shelters, advocates, lobbyists, fund-raisers and public educators all focused on it. Billions of dollars are spent yearly on conferences, publications, university and community outreach, public messaging and salaries of the grievance industry’s employees. Unfortunately, although domestic violence is real, the theoretical model used almost universally in the grievance industry is a false model.
The Duluth Model of domestic violence realistically describes only one-sided, male-aggressor and female-victim instances of DV, the smallest and least common pattern of domestic violence. However, almost all public messaging portrays this as a representation of all domestic violence. Language popularized by the grievance industry refers to domestic violence as “violence against women”, furthering the myth of a sexually directional, mass-epidemic of male-perpetrated abuse of totally innocent and helpless women.
The obvious objection to this is the plain fact that domestic violence is initiated and maintained equally by men and women, and their sex has nothing to do with it. Some women abuse their male partners, just as some men abuse their wives, girlfriends and so on. “..women are as violent as men in domestic relationships.”[1]
“The most comprehensive review of the scholarly domestic violence research literature ever conducted concludes, among other things, that women perpetrate physical and emotional abuse, as well as engage in control behaviors, at comparable rates to men.”[2]
The Duluth Model denies this, of course, because the one-sided fiction portrayed of evil men and innocent helpless female victims makes an easier, more compelling story for raising money. Male victims are a harder sell, and don’t resonate with our natural impulse to protect women. But the one-sided fiction sold by Duluth Model advocates is false, and that means efforts to diminish domestic violence built around that model are guaranteed to fail. The failure is purposeful, because continuing human damage, especially to those for which we have sympathy (women) is what makes money for the DV grievance industry.
The collateral damage to men of being told they are naturally violent, that male identity is the problem is just incidental, collateral damage. The same for the children who are victims of violent mothers. Since according to Duluth, those children do not exist, there is no need to take them into account when providing services. Continuing this false public narrative, so assured to cultivate human harm, because it pays well, is evil.
No more examples. I could list dozens more, but the point should be clear.
Formerly, I struggled to distinguish motives. Some, I believed, who were earnest, if misinformed could be reached by better evidence, or by clearer communication. Some might simply be mentally ill, and best left to mental health professionals. Some very few, I thought, might be consciously, cynically fostering human harm for purpose of malice or profit. I tried to reach and to communicate with those whose actions were doing harm. I was rebuffed and dismissed at every turn, and that is the milder cases. Often I was demonized and attacked for even raising the questions.
And the end result was the same; continued and escalating human damage.
As mentioned near the top of this article, I enjoy the hatred of those who practice evil. This is not a polite euphemism. I derive satisfaction from the hatred of the practitioners of human harm. Those who justify the sexual mutilation of infants. Those who wrap real world violence in excuses, or sanctify the brutalization of men as a disposable sex with witless comedy. The violence and human harm practiced by such people is clearly visible. And seeing that damage done, their hatred directed at me provides satisfaction.
It also provides us examples to point to as we make our appeals to the uninformed, who still hold the erroneous belief that the domestic violence industry is inhabited by well meaning people who are working to ameliorate the problem of intimate partner violence across the society as a whole.
By showing the world, one evil example at a time, what is really going on, we are gaining the momentum to correct the problem.
Evil cannot remain in residence without the approval of the masses.
[1] http://www.csulb.edu/~mfiebert/assault.htm
[2] http://www.prweb.com/releases/2013/5/prweb10741752.htm?PID=4003003
