[ExI] Regarding Wickedness (was beowolf)

[hkhenson]

At 12:26 AM 11/25/2007, Lee wrote:

snip

>and Keith replied
>
> > An EP view of such awful actions has no room for "evil" any more than
> > lions keeping down the population of zebras is evil.
>
>which is a sentence in "truth mode".  An interesting question to me
>has always been "how effective in changing the world can one be by
>remaining purely in truth mode?".

I think you might want to qualify this as "changing the world in 
*desirable* directions."  Consider OBL and 9/11.

>Of parallel interest: Do enemies
>gain an advantage when you refrain from hating them but they
>freely indulge in hating you?

People in the grip of hate tend to be irrational.  To the extent that 
acting rational or irrational is more or less effective in 
accomplishing a goal, you gain or lose advantage.

>Is there any place for hate in Extropianism?
>
>Lee
>
>P.S.
>
>My own tentative answer to the first question is, "A person---or
>his or her civilization---maximizes effectiveness by alternating between
>truth-mode and partisan-mode", where the latter gives full vent
>to hatred of evil.

The problem here is "hatred of evil." We of the west consider it evil 
to flog a woman for being raped, while fundamental Islamics consider 
women driving cars to be evil.

>My answer to the second question is this: "To remain analytical
>towards criminals and towards wrongdoing is itself criminal and
>wrong", (even though western civilzation in its descent to selfdestruction
>often, sadly, deems this attitude self-righteous and atavistic.)

An analytic approach can be just as effective in dealing with those 
who are not in your group as any emotion driven behavior.  Of course, 
combining analytic leaders with emotion driven followers is probably 
the most effective when the goal is a serious reduction of the 
population. It really reduce to economics (or in stone age ecosystem 
productivity) and population growth.

An analytic approach to the world situation calls for either a 
substantial boost in technology or a reduction in population of about 2/3rds.

Keith