The Nature of Evil by Gregory Salmieri

A theme in Ayn Rand’s fiction is that the failure to understand evil is a source of error and unhappiness for good people. Drawing on the Objectivist corpus this talk will explore the nature of evil, including: the ways in which actions, motives, ideas and people can be evil; the respects in which evil is and is not important; and how understanding evil can help us to appreciate the good and to foster the best in ourselves and others.

Recorded live as part of The Objectivist Conference on September 01, 2021.

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[adamsmith]

The more I see of Salmieri, the more I like him. Very profound.

[georgeeinstein]

Evidence must be insisted on when someone says anything about there being a god watching over everyone, before any arguement is given...
Period . That would make people withdraw from saying anything stupid .

[periteu]

14:14 - Interesting
36:16 - free will and moral judgment

[zardozcys]

This must have been just before the sheer evil of the Oct 7 invasion from Gaza

[AndSendMe]

Classic, really excellent Salmieri treatment with real insight.

[georgeeinstein]

The foundation of good is the truth. The foundation of evil is the lie.

[soupeydoupey]

1:26:54 "Which of these guys do I [choose] to be?" - Brilliant!

[georgeeinstein]

Please have what started the war on the mind, which is " We sow our thoughts, then we reap our actions. Then we sow our actions and then we reap our habits. We sow our habits and then we reap our character. Then we sow our character and we reap our destiny....

[yagoisbored]

I had these questions myself, very good answer

[Oldcoots]

"People of the Lie" by Psychiatrist M. Scott Peck is informative on this subject.

[markgiebens]

You use reason to achieve your goal and work hard for it. example : you want a certain job, but reality turns out somebody else got the job and you are very disappointed. My question : Is disappointment evil ? Should you give up being ambitious for that job ? How do you know to give up or not when you are rejected ? How did Ayn Rand deal with disappointment ? did she give any advice on handling it ?

[maryahhaidery]

Another masterful talk from Salmieri - so masterful in fact, that if you don’t look too closely, you may easily miss (as I did for years) the circular, imprecise definitions, the heavy reliance on fictional characters to explain unintelligible behaviors, and the misunderstanding of the aims of most psychologists including why they emphasize accountability over contempt or shame wrt to inappropriate thoughts, motives or actions.

“The most devastating single omission in Objectivism” a psychologist who admired Rand once said was “the absence of any real appreciation of human psychology and, more specifically, of developmental psychology, of how human beings evolve and become what they are and of how they can change.”

This is true but understandable. Rand, was a philosopher who, by her own admission, was almost totally ignorant of psychology. And Objectivists philosophers relying solely on her corpus may find much there on how to “identify or judge evil” but very little about “how to *understand* it”. Are some people just born good and others evil? If not why would someone choose evil/death over goodness/life? If one is not a mind reader, how can we tell if someone is “willfully” evading the truth or “purposefully” acting irrationally or “choosing” to be unproductive instead of a more generous explanation - one that might incorporate the society they were raised in or the options they think they have. How can we tell when they’re evil “all the way down” instead of “occasionally” like (self-evidently?) good people who should ignore their “ugly thoughts” as “aberrations” of the “real self” and let them “wither away”? Salmieri seems to gloss over many of these concerns and inconsistencies in his talk.

But this again this is understandable. Attempting to understand evil or rather attempting to understand human behavior that seems harmful or destructive is *complicated* because humans are *complicated*. So too is the question of how to best to “appreciate the good” and “foster the best in oneself or in others”. This is where psychologists may provide some more satisfying answers.

Here are some suggestions of readings and studies by psychologists who have grappled with these questions and provide more insight about the answers than Salmieri’s concise and condescending “bullshit”






I highly encourage anyone serious about figuring out how to live a meaningful life to give it a try.

[maryahhaidery]

Of all the causes which conspire to blind
Man's erring judgment, and misguide the mind,
What the weak head with strongest bias rules,
Is pride, the never-failing vice of fools.
Whatever Nature has in worth denied,
She gives in large recruits of needful pride;
For as in bodies, thus in souls, we find
What wants in blood and spirits, swell'd with wind;
Pride, where wit fails, steps in to our defence,
And fills up all the mighty void of sense!
If once right reason drives that cloud away,
Truth breaks upon us with resistless day;
Trust not yourself; but your defects to know,
Make use of ev'ry friend—and ev'ry foe.

[maryahhaidery]

ἔοικα γοῦν τούτου γε σμικρῷ τινι αὐτῷ τούτῳ σοφώτερος εἶναι, ὅτι ἃ μὴ οἶδα οὐδὲ οἴομαι εἰδέναι.

[TreeLuvBurdpu]

Even locked in a cage with a beast, you can threaten to wound it, maybe. But with the true ideological evil self-sacrificial suicide-assassin, that doesn't even work.