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Everyone tries to do the right thing, at least by their own conception of what the right thing is, but many acts are destructive to other people’s well being and those other people would consider those actions to be not just bad but evil. I am thinking of bad as an action that brings about destructive consequences to some person, perhaps the doer; evil action is one that brings about a destructive event, but which has the additional quality of being motivated by the intent to do harm. There are other ways of looking at the difference between these two concepts:  for example, bad is doing or even thinking things which are outside of local conventional wisdom, and evil is intentionally going against the accepted mores of the local group, perhaps even cooperating with some alien group, but the intent is to injure the local group. Yet another and deeper division of the two ideas is that bad is any violating of the local mores, and evil is a more philosophical attempt to make a distinct change in the moral structure of the group. That is to be a Lucifer, the bringer of a new light. It is a light that is intended to abandon and throw out accepted beliefs and replace them with other ones. This person is thought of as evil because many of the existing group will be forced to change in some way, and they will lose power and status with the new order of ideas.

The old order of things is to submit to the existing power structure, and the new order is always trying to create a new way of seeing and doing things. Of course the problem comes about when this new group comes into power, in that they make every effort to lock their new order and their new control into a permanent state. Thus there is no fundamental change for most of the common people, and there is simply a movement from one set of rulers to another set, superficially different yet the same in their basic motivations – to rule.

Here in America we have a way of changing the power structure through a voting process, which supposedly pits opposing powers, and their ideas, against each other, and thus creates a balance of opposing interests that prevents any one currently controlling group from gaining perpetual and unlimited control. The idea built into our Constitution is that whenever a single entity gains absolute control it will be first at the sacrifice and eventually at the destruction of everyone else. Unfortunately, the current power elite appears to be totally in control of money, and whoever can put the most money into the voting process controls the elections and everything that those politicians can impose on the public. The current trend is toward the concentration of money into fewer hands, and thus the future for everyone but the wealthy is poorer.

So what is the right thing to do? It would appear that if everyone got involved with the political process, and actively supported the things they believed in, then the power of these people would overwhelm the money submitted by those with money, and the people would be served by the process rather than money being served. The over-concentration of power into an elite group will not bring about what seems the long term ideal,

“To maximize the total number of humans to ever live, give these people the maximum access to personal choice, and let them pursue their own self-interest as they see fit.”

This post swerved from where I thought it was going to go. I had wanted to explore the idea of actions of a conscious individual empathizing with other people and then doing those things which would help these people to approach their needs more fully. This comes about when individuals are empathetic to other people needs and strive to help those people fulfill their needs. Perhaps in the future that idea can be more fully developed. It seems ideas have a life of their own, and we must give them the liberty to go where they will, and pursue their own self-interest as they see fit.