Fuck You, We Matter

There seems to be a silly idea that evil is the absence of love. Perhaps this is only silly to me because I cannot fathom being alive and naturally without the ability to love, and I tend to think that the evil that I am facing does have love for many things – itself, most of all. I can also see and understand the argument that if a lifeform truly loved itself, it wouldn’t choose to be evil, as it is almost certainly shortening it’s own lifespan and therefore the amount of time it can dote upon itself. These things are things that I can understand on a human level, and might even understand on an imagining of other life, but I am not 100% sure that I understand it according to the evil lifeform that I am actually facing.

What would evil want? Dominion over everything? Absolute and total control? This sounds so boring to me, but seems to be the case if I were to take my surroundings in the latest few years as evidence of its intention at all. It sounds even more boring because it’s already at that point – okay, you’re big and powerful and you do whatever you want whenever you want, what you want to do just happens to be disrespecting life as I know it. Now what? Torture and pain? Sure, I can imagine that. I can also imagine how boring that would be, from my perspective.

This is where the word evil becomes divorced from the reality of what this thing is, in my thoughts. Well, it’s still doing evil things and evil is the best descriptor I have for it, but it is a lifeform of some kind and is mostly more than just evil – or is certainly capable of being more than just evil, though I really cannot say what it is or what it chooses to be in entirety. I vehemently believe that the total control over another lifeform is evil, and that has been a sort of basis for how I interpret this reality. The isolation that I believe is present is a close second, though often is overshadowed by what is “allowed” or what leniency I’ve been given for my own individual thought.

My own experiences in True Life are pretty much with things that aren’t evil, and therefore I know much more about what evil is not than what it actually is. These days I fall back on intention, but intention really is just a sign of evil and not evil itself.

As for what evil is not – evil is not death. Humans have a great respect for death,a somber type of love that we periodically revisit and reimagine and retell in order to show our respect for what it is and what it means to us. As much as I am upset at my situation, and even more upset by the situation that all deceased humans are facing, I have not been mad or upset that death exists nor that I have experienced it. I am not angry that I died, I am angry at a sapient lifeform that has decided to take other’s death as an opportunity to be the worst thing in existence. Death is not only not evil, it is something that humans find beauty in.

In fact, it is something that I find beauty in. Why is that important? I mean, it isn’t super important currently, but is important in a small but meaningful way in the weight of the entirety of existence. Fighting the “forces of evil” doesn’t always mean doing something loud and radical – sometimes it means doing something small and radical. In this case, being able to look at something that is objectively negative and think of it in a positive way is part of how I can fight a greater evil. The kind of evil that disrespects life and death. The kind of evil that disrespects existence itself.

In fact, this is why I’m not fighting for just myself – even by choice. If I’m going to be fighting evil, I’m doing it at the same time that every deceased human (at the very least) is also fighting evil. Like it or not, the most evil humans that have ever existed are a part of this struggle – they are fighting as well, and I would fight for their freewill and release the same as I would fight for the best humans that have ever existed. This ties in to three things that I find very important: 1) There is nothing that any human could ever do that would make them deserving of any amount of torture or torment by another lifeform, let alone an eternity of it. 2) being careless or annoying does not make someone a “bad person” 3) the average person is far better than they think they are, even if they have committed crimes or sins.

These are things that my soul, or whatever the equivalent is, is stubborn about – no rational attempt at persuading me otherwise on these points could work. At least through my eyes, humanity is already redeemed. And though the whispers around me say “you cannot be love”, what I can choose to do when given a choice is to keep trying anyway.

Elliot Smith, we are fighting the same fight – I know you fight for me, as I know I fight for you. Thank you for your shared love and perspective. “I’m never gonna know you now, but I’m gonna love you anyhow” was already incredibly influential to me within True Life – now it’s an anthem, or a motto of sorts. It even applies to the greater evil itself. Hey, big evil thing – sorry I love you more than you love yourself.

I mean that, too.

With all that being said, let’s pretend for a second this isn’t the context that I find myself in. Let’s pretend I didn’t die, that True Evil was still something abstract and diminishing. If I were to ask myself what evil wasn’t, it might sound more like this:

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evil isn’t as sneaky as we might give it credit for – its not the antithesis of love nor is it secretly hiding in all of our hearts. Evil isn’t the money in your pocket, the awkward pauses in conversation, the unwillingness to learn. Evil isn’t choosing to take care of yourself rather than cater to others. Evil isn’t the inability to connect, isn’t low intelligence, and isn’t fear. Evil isn’t hermitude, isn’t the love of attention, and isn’t the struggle to balance the desire to do both. Evil isn’t being human. It’s not vanity, not selfishness or greed, not pride, not anger. It’s not laziness, not lust, not cowardice. Evil isn’t frustration, isn’t jealousy, isn’t lack of emotion.

Don’t get me wrong, evil can take on many forms, including the things above, but evil is not defined by these things. Evil isn’t anything other than the habitual desire and action to harm and destroy others.