MYM – Evil

You often don't.

I think it is a kind of historical, cultural, has strong religious, moral, philosophical kind of overtones.

And I think it tied up with a very strong sense of free will.

You know, people can choose to be good or bad.

Yeah.

In the psychological world, I think you're quite right.

I think we have a spectrum of pro-social, asocial, antisocial.

And that might be applied to the act

or

to the person.

To the person, have they done that once and then sought forgiveness? Or do they do that repeatedly, in which case you go, hang on a second, this wasn't just circumstantial or bad judgment.

They seem to have a propensity to behave that way.

Now, in my world, it also comes up Not uncommonly and still in mad versus bad.

Yes.

Did the person have an unsafe mind and they did something really bad or are they fundamentally morally responsible bad? It's not something that's explained by an altered state of mind.

or an altered brain state or by an illness.

It's some fundamental characteristic.

And then you get into that whole where I think, you know, the demonic possession type idea that they've been taken over by a force that is fundamentally against our good natures.

So I think what happened in the past was externalized into things like devils and demons and possession.

And now we go, he's just a really bad guy.

And we don't tend to use the word evil in that sense.

I was thinking about this in modern terms.