It seems to me that if one is to use this word, it should be defined. All too often in human history it has been used to designate anyone who did things differently that you did. The way I use it, it means taking pleasure in the pain of others.
Yet, it exists on a continuum. Indifference to the pain of others is also a type of evil. Empathy is a fundamental element of goodness. Anything short of being able to experience deep happiness in the success and well-being of others is a sort of evil, it is a sort of shadow, a falling-short.
The desire to rule the world is a sort of evil because it implies an indifference to the fact that one’s own ideas about how life should be lived may differ considerably from those one wants to rule.
The emotion of wanting-well for others cannot be compelled. True empathy cannot be forced. It is a type of perception, an awareness that can blossom in the right circumstances. It is intrinsically an individual and individuating process, since it always looks from a specific point in the universe.
A metaphor that came to me this morning is a meadow covered in flowers. Each of them is slightly different than the others. Each came from a seed that had to sprout on its own–albeit not without the help of sun, water, and a nurturing soil. Each of them is in a place, yet each contributes to the whole, while able to live on its own, to stake its own claim on a spot of Earth.
Now, the use of power is inevitable in human life. Some sort of power must be exerted over us. The question is whether we exert it over ourselves in the form of a chosen moral order, or someone extrinsic to us compels it on us.
A religion, or any social order based on traditional values, is a power, isn’t it? It is the sort of restraint rejected by the hippies and radicals of the modern era. (I hate to say 60’s, since that was just a widespread public manifestation of something that had been going on for some time even when Keynes Bloomsbury Group had their heyday many decades before).
In my view, it is not necessary to hew to tradition, simply because it is tradition. But you have to choose a master. That master may be Yoga. It may be getting up early every day, doing an hour of exercises and another hour of meditation; it may be adopting a vegetarian lifestyle, and learning Sanskrit.
That master may be a religion. That master, to the point here, may be a political philosophy that organizes thought and behavior.
You cannot be loving all the time. We are all Yin and Yang, particle and wave. You have to have a starting point, a home, a more or less stable source of identity–which can be specific habits, like praying five times a day, and fasting during the day for a lunar month.
It can be habits of mind. That is what I have tried to articulate with my conception of Goodness, which I discuss on my other website, linked on the side.
Never feel sorry for yourself.
Never quit, if the task is worthwhile.
Always try to understand what is happening around you, and orient your behavior and thought around empathy, love and happiness.
My thought process is that you cannot walk standing on one foot, and that life is walking.
A few thoughts for a Sun-day morning.