The Left's Hierarchy of Evil
"There is no dignity in wickedness, whether in purple or rags; and hell is a democracy of devils, where all are equals." - Herman Melville (1819–1891)
No matter how well-versed the reader might think themselves on the darker side of human nature and the decadent depravity of the ruling elite, there surely can be few among us who managed to make it through the last three years entirely unsurprised by the scale of atrocities which have been brought to light.
Western governments’ brutalization of their own citizens should have been a wake-up call for everyone. More eye-opening still is that whenever the basis of this brutalization was proven a lie it only became more vicious, and yet even the rapidly unravelling COVID scam is but a single thread in a vast tapestry of crime and corruption ranging from the breathtakingly callous to the flamboyantly debauched. Safe to say, those who tug on these threads are continuously sickened by what they uncover. Even people paying marginal attention have found their faith in authority fatally undermined. For a great many observers, however, your humble narrator included, the most personally transformative revelation since March 2020 has not been any one instance of establishment barbarism but rather - when these instances are considered in their totality - the uncomfortable, inescapable conclusion that evil truly does exist.
A Philosophy of Evil by Lars Svendsen
In hindsight, it was probably this realization which attracted me, upon a recent visit to my local secondhand bookstore, to the work of Lars Svendsen. At the time, of course, my reasons for pulling A Philosophy of Evil from the shelf, never having heard of its author, amounted to nothing more profound than I liked both the title and its stark black cover (as well as the fact I retained the requisite six dollars after already picking up a copy of Nikolai Gogol’s Taras Bulba).
Naturally, I assumed the book to be an exposition of Svendsen’s own perspective but upon returning home and leafing through its pages, I discovered that A Philosophy of Evil instead constitutes his effort to first define his subject matter and then to provide his audience the language necessary for some long-overdue discussion of it. To do so, the writer delves into (and borrows liberally from) some of the greatest thinkers ever to grapple with the topic. This is a cast comprised of philosophers, theologians, and psychiatrists; saints, sadists, and scholars of the criminal mind - Svendsen’s purposely broad-brush approach leading him to contend that, unlike the monolithic force it is often presented as, evil in fact manifests in four distinct iterations: