“Fear is the State's psychological weapon of choice to frighten citizens into sacrificing their basic freedoms and rule-of-law protections in exchange for the security promised by their all-powerful government.”
― Philip G. Zimbardo, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil

For those who are not acquainted with Dr. Zimbardo, he’s the world-renowned psychologist who was behind the Stanford Prison Experiments, the Lucifer Effect, The Time Paradox… And lately he has been working on a very interesting study about evil and heroism.

What makes a young man in Tiananmen square stand in front of the state’s scary tanks and sacrifice himself?

Tough question.

What makes a good person go dark?

Tougher question.

It’s important to define words before entertaining any new thoughts or ideas, and in this case, evil is defined by: The use of force or/and deceit to achieve what you want.

If your ideas are good, you don’t need to force people to accept them, right?

When asked about the root of evil, Dr. Zimbardo didn’t go with the infamous mono-syllable otherwise called “Greed”. Instead he left a cryptic message.

The System.

Now, I know this is way too broad of a term to pin-point with painstaking accuracy, it’s like a total lottery to guess what he meant, but it’s an important hint nonetheless.

Which system does he refer to? The current forms of governance? How about old empires? Or does he mean authority in general?

I guess that we will have to wait and see.

The Root of All Evil

Money is the root of all evil, isn’t that what they say?

But what if there is more to the story that a non-living object with no conscience nor principles? What if the answer was a little bit more complex? What if there was more than one cause to the problem?

Even assuming that money was causing all evils in the world, what if money caused only a fixed percentage of evil, and other percentages were caused by other factors?

I mean, what happens to all those jealousy crimes, or hate crimes, or any crimes that have nothing to do with money to start with?

Should we blame them on the money too?

Here’s a crazy thought, what if money, just like flags before or ancient books, are mainly objects that are not even self-aware of their own existence?

For instance, there are so many people that love their country and flag but oppose the politicians’ wars.

There are so many decent people out there that were born into a religion they never thought about doubting… Yet they wholeheartedly oppose the preaching classes’s wars.

Any rational person will probably oppose using the taxpayer’s hard earned income to pack the prison industrial complex with innocent people.

No one wants their tax money to be used to bomb thy living shit out of other people. But why do these things keep happening?

Money didn’t make them do it, the flag didn’t make them do it, rhetoric did.

What if there were some sort of sociopaths out there who have another agenda and who tend to use those lifeless objects and inventing meaningless jargon to cause so much damage by appointing an enemy to fight.

Us Versus Them Until the End of Time

Have you ever wondered why thousands of civilizations come and go but the ruling class always seem to be the same?

They come with another name, another body, another shape but the song always remains the same.

Their Modus Operandi is identical.

A Song of Serpents

Us VS Them, getting people to fight between with each other left and right, cracking down on dissent and punishing anyone who questions their fictional stories that usually defy every single law of the universe.

They always tap into people’s fears and insecurities and manipulate them to harm other people who did nothing to them.

They always use force and/or deceit to achieve what they want, yet they always seem to secure positions of power.

Before this latest research on evil, doctor Zimbardo did several studies on similar subjects for over three decades now.

Mention aside deserves the infamous Stanford Prison Experiment where he studied the effects of authority on the human fabric and how it causes certain good people to do evil things to one another.

Personally, I’m a voluntarist, and I don't need to pull the 'authority' card. My kids – if someday I’m blessed enough to have some – will never be forced to listen to me because of genetics, instead I hope that if they do it'll be because I’ve earned it, because they trust me, because I was a good father.

I find life to be easier with non-forced interactions.

Children who wanna read are gonna read. Kids who want to learn to read are going to learn to read. [It's] much more important to teach children to question what they read. Children should be taught to question everything. To question everything they read, everything they hear.

Children should be taught to question authority. Parents never teach their children to question authority because parents are authority figures themselves, and they don't want to undermine their own bullshit inside the household. ― George Carlin

Closing Thoughts

Every time someone even dares to mention that the world is moving towards a more voluntary set of interactions, or that we are slowly moving away from coercive systems and adopting mutually beneficial ones...

Anytime anyone even tries to talk about that, there is an automatic reaction that immediately shoots up to the throat before you get the chance to finish the sentence:

We should never have a society based on voluntary values because there are bad people in the world.

On the other hand, taking the baddest of the bad, give them all the power and no accountability… That always seems like a good idea.

I think I’ll take my chances with voluntary interactions. I just don’t want to be fifty fucking years old and still choosing between the lesser of evils.

I don’t know the root of all evil, I don’t even know if there is only one cause, but one thing I know is that complaining about the root of all evil while rooting for some evil to root against another other evil…

That doesn’t seem like a game worth playing.

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