The Guile of Wickedness

It is imperative that I say, of course, the usual pleasantries that are egocentrically satisfying: "Of course things are getting better. Consider the systematic mitigation of disease, warfare, and general atrocities of mankind." I genuinely do believe this, but on a provisional basis in the same way creationists believe "the jury is still out" on Evolution. This is to say that while change has no inherent valence, given our stronger interpersonal interconnections stemming from a global economy and cultural exchange, the future does look bright when juxtaposed with the repugnant prevalence of ethnocentrism merely 50 years ago.

While a burgeoning population does run risk of destroying itself through blatant disregard for its environment, as strongly and accurately argued by leading Anthropologist Jared Diamond along with many climatologists who provide evidence of global warming, it is important to make the point that our morality as a whole improves as technology and nutrition improves. Acute disease reduces as a result of a general improvement in nutrition, which augments our intellectual standing as a society as well. I've too much to add to the issue, but suffice it to say the link above outlines exactly how 'more modernized' societies are more consequentialist in their decision making. This is to say that the results dictate action, rather than deontological dictation, which is essentially a punitive, retributivist form of reciprocity.

Be that as it may, the guile of wickedness is simply put, the reduction of what is acute into what is chronic. It is tantamount to the famous Boiling Frog Syndrome, but shall I tweak the analogy for purposes of acumen. As Joshua Greene (link above) points out, emotions play a predominant role in decision-making, and there appears to be a subjective threshold as to when emotional stimuli saliently incur an overriding effect on decision-making, which is largely predicted upon direct personal involvement or agency. This threshold differs from person to person, but it is essentially relative to the prefrontal cortex's capacity to successfully curtail the emotional activity in the limbic lobe, and whether or not sufficient environmental stimuli are present to activate emotional circuitry in the first place. To zoom the picture out, this is to say, simply, cognition may have the capacity to curtail emotions, but emotions inevitably guide our decisions (given sufficient stimulation), and in an unreliable manner.

Now to the Boiling Frog Syndrome. Simply put, if you put a frog into a pot of boiling water, it will jump out. However, if you pot the frog into the put, then slowly increase the heat to the point where it is boiling, the frog will inevitably boil to death. To me, this is not dissimilar to the use of atomic bombs vs. carpet bombing in World War II. The United States carpetbombing campaign in Japan (and Europe) sufficiently leveled many cities, but unfortunately did not carry the emotional 'critical mass', if you will, that was necessary to override the zealotry of the Japanese at the time. However, once the atomic bomb was implemented (or twice, to be exact, given that the Japanese were mostly unaware of the first bomb), emotional critical mass was sufficiently met to cause a cessation in fighting. This works both ways of course, in that emotional critical mass can create war just as much as end war. The point is that it induces people to act in search of a resolution, or put another way, forces them out of complacency.

This pattern has similarly repeated itself in a cyclical manner throughout history, where atrocities meet a certain critical mass of emotional salience (normally that which is local or familiar enough to us to cause up roar), causing people to spring into action in an inevitable attempt to seek a resolution. The Boston Massacre. Archduke Ferdinand's Assassination. The World Trade Center bombing. The blitzkrieg of ally Poland. The personal attack at Pearl Harbor. None of the above are truly similar to the atomic bombing of Hiroshoma & Nagasaki, but in effect they are, insofar as they represented a dramatic spike in the emotional salience of the environment at that time. Peace + 9/11 = punctuation of emotions not dissimilar to atomic bombings during war time. Essentially, people need an emotional critical mass to act, and as such, a Machiavellian adaptation to such a critical mass would be by not throwing people into a boiling pot, but rather just ratcheting up the heat a degree or two per hour, creating a slower yet equally disastrous resultof death.

By relegating the wickedness of certain selfish actions that once sufficiently caused traumatic emotional stress (and summarily an unintended reaction against the wickedness) into that which keeps people below critical emotional mass, by essentially disseminating suffering temporally into a chronic illness, individuals who control far more lives than they ought to have successfully navigated the stormy weathers of human emotion. I find it imperative that we look at this through a cognitive lens, rather than emotional, as the effects of chronic illness in America are truly more salient than any terror attack in the history of mankind, but do not in any measurable form cross the threshold that evolutionarily has spurred man into action. As a society, we have had the wool pulled over our emotions by increased economic, political, and social stratification that causes immeasurable suffering that the majority are born into. We must be aware, and cognitively understand that death is death, and the ripping of ones innards is serious, but not as serious, mathematically, as the diabetic neuropathic destruction of the lives of two people.

Math matters.