The Philosophy of Evil Compels Oppressors to Dehumanize the Vulnerable

How we are coerced into maintaining a system that is designed to exploit us

Image by Walter Rhein

Even before a newborn baby has opened its eyes or taken its first breath, some people insist the child has already been “soiled” by “sinful” acts that must be forgiven.

They look upon newborn babies with contempt and justify cultivating feelings of revulsion against that child by insisting they hate the sin and not the baby.

Have you ever considered how corrupt that philosophy is?

The baby has done absolutely nothing. It barely has the strength to lift its head. Yet, religious groups claim it is a “sinful” creature that can only be “saved” through the oppressive guidance of religion.

What’s going on here is far more insidious than anyone seems to recognize. For most of my life, I didn’t question the assumption that people who followed this philosophy genuinely had a concern, misguided as it might be, for my spiritual wellbeing.

But that’s a lie. The truth is, there’s no context that justifies training yourself to hate something you claim to care about.

What’s actually going on is that “original sin” is used as a tool by oppressors to brainwash themselves into fundamentally believing any act of aggression they commit against a vulnerable and exploitable group is a righteous action.

The philosophy of evil trains oppressors to dehumanize victims before abusing and exploiting them. The mechanism of how this is done has changed throughout time, but the fundamental elements remain constant. They browbeat victims to the point where the victims don’t even consider raising their arms in self-defense.

Evil doesn’t just prevent you from working to better your station in life, it betrays you with the false conviction that you aren’t even worthy of anything better, then coerces you into laboring to maintain the structure of the system that controls you. Evil makes us work against ourselves and our own self-interests, and there are plenty of examples to be found in American society.

Original sin

You almost have to stand back and admire the pure malice of “original sin.”

Most children likely find themselves immune to the pressure of religion because deep down, they know they haven’t done anything terrible.

Children are innocent. They’re prone to acts of spontaneous kindness. I remember when I was a child, I had to run out into the street to save the worms whenever it rained.

A pastor will never credit you for these acts. They’ll always turn the conversation to ways that you were tempted and how desperately you are in need of their spiritual guidance.

Hundreds of years ago, somebody decided it was a threat to the established power hierarchy to recognize the purity of children, so some theocratic monster came up with the idea of “original sin.”

Today, every time you approach a pastor, you can expect to receive a look of complete contempt. They’ve cultivated this look over centuries. You find yourself wanting to apologize just because you know they have judged you and found you lacking.

Before they know anything about you, they’ve given themselves permission to judge you as less than they are. They think they can see into your soul and they perceive only the potential for evil.

They consider themselves “pure” and you’re a “sinner” and therefore anything they say or do to you is justified in their minds.

That should terrify everyone.

It’s a dangerous and entitled way to think that can easily be turned into evil.

The philosophy of contempt

You see examples of this form of oppressive contempt in the lies that pass as justifications whenever religious groups manage to make their unfounded beliefs the basis of some draconian law.

In the wake of the Supreme Court’s misguided decision to strip women of the right to potentially life-saving reproductive healthcare, many Republican politicians shot off their mouths to the poor effect. One even tried to claim that nobody is “forced” to have sex, completely forgetting that rape exists.

In the simplistic Republican perception of reproductive healthcare, they incorrectly fuse the concept with promiscuous sex. They think of people who need surgical procedures as “sinners” and they hate them. The fact that married women could potentially have a life-threatening ectopic pregnancy doesn’t even cross their minds.

They also place blame on women because they insist women always have a choice. In their simplistic, hateful minds, they insist the situation is always that of a promiscuous woman choosing to have sex.

Yet, even when confronted with reality, you don’t see the person who denied the existence of rape apologize and change position. They can’t because they’re committed to the philosophy where they believe they are pure and everyone else is evil.

So, instead, they double down and effectively become rape defenders.

They get deeper and deeper into the weeds with absurd arguments because, again, they’ve conditioned themselves to hate the people they oppress. In their minds, they are right and the people they oppress are wrong and no amount of discussion or evidence is ever going to change their opinions.

If they resort to acts of physical violence and you put them in jail, they’ll claim they were “falsely imprisoned.”

If you defeat them in a fair election, they’ll claim they were “cheated.”

Their distorted way of looking at the universe prevents them from ever recognizing the harm they inflict on other human beings through their misguided and self-righteous hate philosophy.

The perspective of people who claimed they could own other human beings

Anyone who cares about the concept of freedom should occupy themselves with wrestling with the philosophical question of how oppression is allowed to happen.

Too often, even in countries such as our own which claim to revere liberty and freedom of speech, we’re told to be quiet and not question authority. We’re also told that we should take care not to offend certain individuals with our theories, no matter how inclined we are to believe that they are true.

Today people dismiss concepts like white privilege or institutionalized racism, W.E.B. DuBois encountered a society where a large percentage of the general population dismissed the very humanity of Black people.

DuBois, too, heard the same deceitful arguments we still hear today.

“You need to present both sides of the issue.”

“You shouldn’t say things that people find offensive.”

“You’re going to alienate a large percentage of your potential readership if you write this.”

Of the people who refuse to recognize the humanity of the Black population, DuBois writes, “But this latter person, I am not trying to convince.” DuBois knows that some people will not change their perspective even in the presence of evidence and facts.

Any person who considers himself or herself an obstacle to oppression has to adopt the same philosophy. You have to tell the truth even if you know it will alienate you from your audience or your community. Remember that the only audience that will object to your telling of truth are the evil oppressors you are working to overcome.

There is a strand of deceit in every generally accepted viewpoint

A war rages all around us. That war is between the people who have irrevocably decided they are your superiors and that they have been divinely bequeathed the power to tell you what to do. On the other side of the battle lines are those of us who insist we are all entitled to the same basic rights and freedoms.

We can’t be confused by the fact that it’s a fundamentally idiotic concept to attempt to defend a philosophy of racial or national or spiritual superiority. Although the fundamental beliefs are stupid, the mechanisms put in place to defend institutions of evil are themselves maliciously clever and they have the additional advantage of employing tactics of deceit.

Forces of oppression constantly try to blame the exploited for the crimes of the oppressors. This isn’t just an argument, it’s their fundamental belief. They don’t make their decisions based on evidence, they start with an assumption and then only perceive the facts that support that position.

So, as DuBois alluded to, decent people cannot be overly occupied with demonstrating a commitment to a strategy that meets the approval of evil forces. No matter what we do, the oppressors will object. That’s the nature of this fight.

Ilhan Omar recently tweeted, “When you push power, power pushes back.”

Some people try to insist that you must share blame simply for participating in a conflict, but that is a deceitful argument. Conflict is an inevitable component of the battle to eliminate oppression as Martin Luther King, Jr. was well aware:

[T]he white moderate who is more devoted to order than to justice; who prefers a negative peace which is the absence of tension to a positive peace which is the presence of justice — Martin Luther King, Jr.

Accepting a “negative peace” makes you an enabler.

You need to embrace the “positive peace” even if that means enduring constant tension with those who are committed to the philosophy of evil

The crimes of the father

The commitment to a philosophy of oppression supersedes even the relationship between parent and child. Consider a mother who tempers her love for her newborn baby by taking a moment, even as she holds her child for the first time, to consider the concept of “original sin.”

These evil thoughts are like a crack in an otherwise sound foundation that let the water get in enough to eventually crumble the structure.

Frederick Douglass discussed the crimes of human slave owners who held their own children in cruel servitude.

Any institution that engenders a justification for punishment creates the psychological difficulty that our society is currently unwilling or unable to discuss. Consider the potency of a philosophy of evil that allows a parent to justify the abuse and torment of his own innocent children.

White slave owners held onto their absurd belief of superiority as a lifeline against the reclamations of their own conscience for their blatant acts of unforgivable child abuse.

This is part of the reason why racism is so deeply ingrained in American society. The master that abused and tormented his own child clings to his philosophy of evil because to dismiss it would be to endure an unsurvivable self-recrimination against his own deeds.

Because of the cowardice of the evil, the innocent have to suffer. Evil people cannot live in recognition of the unjustifiable torment they’ve perpetrated and benefited from. Therefore they are incapable of recognizing any fact that might reveal their own depravity with the equivalent tenacity of any other impulse for self-preservation.

Think about that the next time a pastor comes stomping up to you with that casual look of contempt on his face.

If he treated you with the respect you deserve, he might not be able to live with himself.

Their own rules don’t apply to them

Agents of the philosophy of evil exist in a shadow world built on a series of flimsy justifications. If you take the time to examine any part of the structure, it will collapse under its own weight. People who live like this become uncomfortable if you question anything. Their mechanisms of self-preservation are so highly developed that they express agitation if you suggest the possibility of an investigation.

“Witch hunt! Witch hunt! Don’t look behind the curtain! How dare you? Why are you treating me so horribly?”

Perhaps the most damning element of their belief system is the fact that they make no pretense about the fact that they have absolutely no intention of following the rules they’ve determined are best for you.

The complex delusion of self-justification

Mental gymnastics designed to justify deplorable acts of life-shattering betrayal and abuse are commonplace among those that subscribe to the philosophy of evil. Consider the way members of the clergy attempt to vindicate themselves for raping children.

They aren’t looking for guidance, they’re grasping at a flimsy argument so they can justify (to themselves) their impulses to engage in cruel and destructive behaviors.

Consider how in Brian Laundre’s “confession” he tried to present his murder of Gabby Petito as an “act of mercy.”

Even after committing himself to the path of suicide, Brian Laundrie still couldn’t compel himself to write a legitimate confession. This, perhaps more than any other example, should demonstrate the power of the philosophy of evil.

Even faced with imminent death, oppressors cannot relinquish their hold on the clumsy structure of lies they use to sustain themselves.

That’s what we’re dealing with. Oppressors take their delusions to the grave. In fact, those delusions go beyond the grave because the loved ones, family members, and even casual acquaintances of these standard-bearers of evil become tainted by the traces that remain.

Acts of unhinged violence are inevitable as a result of this belief system

We can’t concern ourselves with offending those that subscribe to the philosophy of evil. From the moment you are born, they look at you as flawed and inferior. You’ve done nothing to cultivate this belief. There’s nothing you can do to stop them from thinking it. Even if you work hard and succeed they are more likely to be provoked rather than pacified because some deeply hidden inner part of them recognizes that your example of success undermines their flimsy mechanism of self-justification.

They won’t congratulate you. They’ll accuse you of cheating.

Those that subscribe to the philosophy of evil are incapable of changing their position in light of evidence because that would incriminate them. Instead, they will act to destroy that evidence, even resorting to murder if necessary.

The philosophy of evil can effectively whisper justifications of murder because those that live by it don’t feel they are killing a human being, instead, they are killing a “sinner” or a “creature” or somebody who is “lawless” or they are making a “righteous action” or an “action of mercy” or they’ve been “cheated.”

All of these statements are lies, but that is little consolation to the dead.

The philosophy of evil is everywhere and we have to fight it

Wealthy people often claim that poor people are “lazy” in order to imply that the wealthy class is in some way innately “superior.” They don’t say the second part out loud, but they think it.

In more extreme cases, anti-reproductive healthcare activists will murder doctors. This represents an action that good people will never resort to under any circumstances. Yet even that evidence is not seen as enough to convince our society that the “anti-life-saving reproductive healthcare” movement is a flawed way of thinking.

Decent people often let casual appeals to the philosophy of evil pass uncontested. They think it’s not worth the fight to insist on teaching true history in school or to demand that individuals in positions of authority stop making unprovoked attacks on the vulnerable.

We have to change that philosophy. The philosophy of evil is like an invasive weed. If allowed to go unchecked, even a single seemingly passive strand can quickly overtake a whole society. The evidence is all around us. Our children are exposed to lies stacked upon other lies.

Those that benefit from oppression work to coerce the rest of us into maintaining the structure of abuse. We’re forced to build our own cages. We’re only released when it comes time to dig our own graves.

Our children deserve better.

Thanks for reading everyone! As always, leave your questions or comments below!

My CoSchedule referral link

Here’s my referral link to my preferred headline analyzer tool. If you sign up through this, it’s another way to support this newsletter (thank you).