That is the technical description but underneath the intellectual tapestry is something dark, bitter, and self destructive. You call it evil I call it monkey madness. Even monkeys can be soulless, some dammed from birth due to the wrong genes in the wrong environment.

@wolfhnd

The difference between evil and monkey madness might be intergenerational sustainability? A maladaptive characteristic ought to extinct over fewer dead-ending generations than might sustain memetic perpetuation of mere madness over hundreds of years. A "Spiirit" in possession of an "age" just narrates reality more readily than maladaptive managerial class. The battle against flesh and blood, genetics, may make better propositional sense, but a spiritual war against evil powers and principalities seems more realistic in a perspectival, participational, phenomenological way of experiencing current year.

@govols

I have had a spiritual reawaking of sorts. The things is I have no language for such things. So while I don't disagree with "a spiritual war against evil powers and principalities seems more realistic in a perspectival, participational, phenomenological way of experiencing current year" I have no way to process those concept that is actionable. On the the other hand I have language to describe how environmental stresses cause aberrant behavior. When you talk about evil it seems entirely abstract. Does a sow who eats her young act in a way that is maladaptive? Is she evil? ForgettingTh that all language is abstract you can address the sows action in language that is actionable. You can talk about changing her environment to achieve an outcome that seems adaptive in some sense.

Western civilization is uniquely individualist. If we were to think of the Chinese, for example, as a subspecies then is there collectivist mentality maladaptive? Is it evil? They may insist that individualist mentality is evil or selfish. It seems to me that the past year could be described as a year where incompetence manifested itself as evil. What I mean is it isn't the collectivist mentality itself that is evil but hubris that leads to incompetent behavior. That is not to say that minus the incompetence that evil men do not have power or use that power in evil ways. That would be true however whether they were of a collectivist mentality or individualist mentality.

That leads me to the question of how much of the incompetence is related to a history of bad or evil decisions that individuals make. Do the deadly sins compound over a life time to make someone incompetent in ways that manifest themselves as evil? Pride, greed, wrath, envy, lust, gluttony and sloth are in the corporeal and material sense have consequences in ways that are not abstract. In terms of the spiritual we often look at someone who engaged in the deadly sins and say they are a lost soul, for example a drunk or drug addict. If you are a christian the process can be described as rejecting grace or Satan's sin of hubris, pride.

@wolfhnd

I get it, and the pig example is helpful. The big questions as individualism/collectivism? Not as helpful. I guess it's the whole actionable idea. When dealing with reality, when dealing with the vast scale of the human environment at the level where incompetence trickles down to that whole body of humanity, nothing is realistically actionable at the level of individual. That's why I had to dig back into the ancients and middle-age pre-moderns to figure out why material historical explanations kept not making any fu@king sense to me.

Modernity is cracking, post-modern is unmoored from physical reality, and I had to go back for some prior lenses. It's been helpful, and I've tried many time to write some about how it twisted my head, but I just can't figure it out yet. It's like I'm learning to see the chaos of current year through a simulated pre-modern world-view.