“When something is good, or EXTREMELY good, there is that impulse to tear down, damage, and destroy.”

Miss Rand made this exact point. “Hatred of the good for being the good.” We read The Brothers Karamazov in college. I remember it as being interesting; I think it was too focussed on the Dark Side for Miss R.’s taste, but the Great Frog knows I could be wrong. Long time since I read her opinion.

Anyway, yes, the Imp of the Perverse does seem to find a comfy nest in us. Still, I think it doesn’t entirely control us — I mean, not every-man-Jack of us — even though lord knows it does set up a fuss in many of us from time to time.

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Deco, I have no idea what you’re on about. :>(

. . .

DNW, I took it for granted that Dr. Wood is Catholic, probably because he’s so vocal about his Christianity and teaches, or taught, at Fordham — not that you have to be Catholic, or even Christian, to teach at Fordham, of course. (Reminder to self: Try not to do that.) Thanks for the correction.

M. Scott Peck’s book impressed me back in the eighties.

Some quotes from his “The People of the Lie” are here.
http://www.gurteen.com/gurteen/gurteen.nsf/id/X0038E2E2/

Julie, she appears to be referring to a working paper published about six months ago under the byline of a Scott A. Shepard. The working paper doesn’t have a single data table in it, much less a delineated actuarial model. It has no bibliography. None of the footnotes refer to any academic literature other than some working papers (some of whose authors are like the one who wrote this one). Mr. Shepard isn’t an economist or an actuary or a finance maven. He’s a lawyer. Again, why are you citing this?

… if you’ve run across the Catholic professor Dr. David Wood, what would you say about the evils he committed in his youth? He’s said that he had no real conscience at that stage of his life, or at least that’s how I remember what he said. I’d be really interested to know what you make of his story, if you happen to know it.(If anybody’s curious, see https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DakEcY7Z5GU )”

and

“As for Dr. Wood — the video at the above URL isn’t quite what I remember seeing several years ago, when I first came across it. This one has a somewhat scripted quality, and it has “production values,” a kind of polish, including the darned “music.”

Hi.

As best I can tell and remember this video is the same video as was originally posted.

And Wood is an Evangelical Christian, not a Catholic last I knew.

The Video: Wood’s edit free delivery and narrative continuity and the coherent and systematically unfolding presentation, are indeed a marvel from many perspectives; and impressed me mightily when I first saw it. Right from the beginning with the Plato’s Cave allusions, accompanied by a literal decent into subterranean realms, you know you are witnessing something else again.

In fact, I would say that Woods seemingly casual review of morality’s central question through the lens of his personal history and attitudes, is despite the horrific content, one of the best, probably THE best and (given the subject’s complexity) succinct presentation of the issue I have ever seen. Only Lewis’ “The Abolition of Man” compares (or possibly William Lane Craig’s debates) to some degree; and what Lewis presented largely as logically implied hypotheticals (placing aside the historical times in which he lived), Wood lived out.

We don’t really see this honesty anywhere else. Singer is a dweeb. Nietzsche was no Ubemench himself, apparently never tried, and went insane. Half a dozen philosophers who have progressed, so they imagined, beyond the moral perspective, simply fizzled out in death or suicide; and their political disciples have never really done much more than take a lot of innocent people along with them, as they stepped over the brink, never to return with a coherent explanation. Rorty’s answer is to rule the question out of court. Wood however, has faced it squarely.

Whether his perspective is a byproduct of sociopathy, or a retrospective construction built of past experiences, his unflinching confrontation with the logical issue which almost every commentator, right or left or center flees from or sidesteps is the most powerful I have seen.

The gutless, grasping at straws circularity of most argument of this sort, and I cite Sam Harris here, is itself morally contemptible in its head hiding dishonesty.

Whether you embrace moral nihilism on the one hand, or Aristotle and/or Jesus on the other, in either case you are being more honest than the clowns who squeal, “let’s pretend” and “We don’t have to ask that question” and “You can be a nice person without all that!”

Yeah, you can; until there is some cost involved.

When something is good, or EXTREMELY good, there is that impulse to tear down, damage, and destroy. Dostoevsky gets this very well with his characters. The new “socialists” of America are all about this — no one with reasonable rationality could espouse the doctrine after the last 100 years of history; the people still lunging for it today are indulging a desire for power, a desire to wreck the system we have no matter how good its results have been. Right? It is pure, perverse, human nature. In some ways, maybe, related to the impulse to hate the NY Yankees or the New England Patriots — envy of their success and the power that it brings them. We humans are perverse.

Thanks for your interest in my comment.

When you come right down to it, I have to disagree with Jordan Peterson and most genuinely religious folk: I don’t actually believe that there is a Malevolent Force that exists as a fact of Nature, so to speak. I think that what we call “evil” is certain human behaviors and human character traits that arouse in us a sense of the deepest repugnance and revulsion.

Unlike the evolutionary biologist Bret Weinstein, I do believe that there are actual abnormalities underlying certain behaviors and what I’ll call “psychological conditions,” such as sociopathy. It would seem that indeed David Wood had such an abnormality. He thinks it was corrected when he found God; I think that it was corrected as a result (or as a complex of results, really) of actual changes in the way his brain functioned.

There’s a lot to unpack there, on the subject of “what exactly is evil,” but I’ll leave it at that. I would note that it occurred to me that the sociopath might well not so much take delight in his evildoing as find it mildly interesting in a rather boring or meaningless world. That, if true, also needs to be connected up with a Theory of Evil — or, to put it more accurately, a Theory of What We Mean by the Word “Evil,” both in what we mean by its actual nature and in our “beliefs” about it, meaning the emotional meaning that the term has for us.

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As for Dr. Wood — the video at the above URL isn’t quite what I remember seeing several years ago, when I first came across it. This one has a somewhat scripted quality, and it has “production values,” a kind of polish, including the darned “music.” But it seems to me the other one had more detail, with more incidents, and that it was really more shocking.

Still, it raised the same question in my mind. I wondered if it was on the up-and-up, or a good dramatic story to tell in order to promote himself somehow. To tell the truth, I’m not that crazy about his other videos either. They seem so suave…. Anyway, I too looked for some corroboration, but I didn’t find anything.

per the Mercatus Center at George Mason University.

“liabilities that are guaranteed to be paid are $272.54 “

includes this result:

#48 | Ranking the States by Fiscal Condition: New Jersey | Mercatus …
https://www.mercatus.org/statefiscalrankings/newjersey

Oct 9, 2018 – Total unfunded pension liabilities that are guaranteed to be paid are $272.54 billion, or 49 percent of state personal income. OPEB are $85.42 …

Follow the link to this URL:

https://www.mercatus.org/statefiscalrankings/newjersey

Who are you quoting? And why aren’t you quoting the primary source?

* * *
One of the reasons the Left’s Gramscian March has been so successful is that they totally channel Humpty-Dumpty: “When I use a word, it means exactly what I want it to mean.” Their genius has been in getting the Right to go along with their branding and lexicographical sleights-of hand.

They had good teachers.

https://theworthyhouse.com/2019/01/11/book-review-the-language-of-the-third-reich-victor-klemperer/

Victor Klemperer is famous today for his diaries covering the Nazi era in Germany. But those were published in 1995, thirty-five years after his death. The only book he published in his lifetime was this one, in 1947: The Language of the Third Reich. Its original title, Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen (i.e., Notebook of a Philologist), with the Latin evoking Imperial Rome, is more precise and informative, but I suppose we’re too uneducated today for that title to be used. Either way, this book is fascinating in its description of the twisting of language by the Nazis, who, like all ideologues, turned words to their own ends of power.