On October 1, 2024, Townhall online allowed Dennis Prager to
write an editorial called, People Hate Those Who Fight Evil Far More Than Those
Who Are Evil.
Here is Prager’s editorial which I shall present and comment
on.
Prager: “I realized something very important about the human
condition when I was in high school. I realized that people tend to hate those
who fight evil more than they hate those engaged in doing evil.”
My response: I am amazed and astounded that a high-schooler
could be so wise, so early, when most people never become very wise, at any
age, though a good, developed and developing individuator serving a good deity,
would be infused with wisdom as a byproduct of good-living, good-doing and
self-perfecting.
I agree with Prager that people tend to hate those who fight
evil more than they hate those engaged in evil. I think that is the case, but
we must answer why that is so.
People are born with low-esteem, which means they naturally
hate themselves. Since I roughly have identified evil as hatred, fanaticism and
collective, whereas goodness roughly is love, moderation and individualism, in
a world where most people are born as nonindividuators, live their lives as
nonindividuators, and die as low achievers, it is only natural that they will
be largely filled with self-hatred, rage, resentment and bitterness. To lie to
themselves and feel worthy in some fake, spurious way, they must praise evil
sinners, and condemn the virtuous and holy, though they may all live in a
bubble of group lies, under which what is evil, they define as good, and what
is good, they characterize as evil.
Most citizens in any society most of the time are morally
average, rather decent people. They are not militant, committed, industrious evildoers,
but nor do they much or often exert themselves against evildoers.
The children of light in that society in that generation do
exert themselves to thwart evildoers, and their efforts might influence society
for the good. The loving, principled children of light, be they joiners or
individualists, create stress and social uneasiness when they rock the boat.
Most people in the community, nonindividuating, groupist,
morally altruistic, collectivist and group-identifying, are modestly, mildly
evil, unlike the fringe element of hardcore evildoers tearing things up in their
community. But the passive, sleepy, willless masses will not rise up very often
to vanquish or toss out of decent society the worst offenders, the darkest
children of darkness in their midst. They just want to get by and
metaphorically stick their head in the sand. They go along to get along and do
not stand out in the crowd, so the minority of radicalized evildoers grow in
size and number, who will remain substantively unopposed by the decent majority
until the evildoers threaten to tear society apart by destructive, lawless,
criminal, disorderly chaotic means. and chaos.
And the majority, though moderately sinful, are naturally
and socially vested in enjoying or tolerating evil because it is their
tradition and custom.
When reforming children light burst onto the scene, they are
causing trouble and stirring things up, making the consciences of all uneasy, and
filling them with doubt, rousing them when all they want to be is to be told
how wonderful there are, how good things are and go back to sleep.
The majority can bury their consciousnesses and consciences
under lies and fake narratives as long as no reformer rips their veneers of
normalcy away from them leaving them naked, scared, uncertain and anxious.
The commotion stirred up by the reforms is causing the sleeping
masses to suffer so they hate those who fight evil more than those who do evil,
because the latter are fatalist and liars and groupists, to they seem normal,
the status quo.
For the majority it is easier to hate and silence the few
reformers than go hate and go against the few radical evildoers.
Prager: “What made me come to this conclusion was the way in
which many people reacted to communism and anti-communism.
To my amazement, a great many people—specifically, all
leftists and many, though not all, liberals—hated anti-communists far more than
they hated communism.
Because of my early preoccupation with good and evil,
already in high school, I hated communism. How could one not, I wondered. Along
with Nazism, it was the great evil of the 20th century. Needless to
say, as a Jew and as a human, I hate Nazism. But as I was born after Nazism was
vanquished, the great evil of my time was communism.
Communists murdered about 100 million people—all
noncombatants and all innocent. Stalin murdered about 30 million people,
including 5 million Ukrainians by starvation (in just 2 years: 1932-33). Mao
killed about 60 million people. Pol Pot and his Khmer Rouge (Red Cambodians)
killed about 3 million, one in every four Cambodians, between 1975 and 1979.
The North Koran communist regime killed between 2 million and 3 million people,
not including another million killed in the Korean War started by the North
Korean communists.
For every one of the 100 million killed by the communists,
add at least a dozen more people—family and friends—who were terribly and
permanently affected by the death of their family member and friend. Then add
another billion whose lives were ruined by having to live in a communist
totalitarian state: their poverty, their loss of fundamental human rights, and
their loss of dignity.
You would think that anyone with a functioning conscience
and with any degree of compassion would hate communism. But that was not the
case. Indeed, there were many people throughout the non-communist world who
supported communism. And there was an even larger number of people who hated
anti-communists, dismissing them as ‘Cold Warriors,’ ‘warmongers,’ ‘red-baiters,’
etc.
At the present time, we are again witnessing this
phenomenon—hatred of those who oppose evil rather than of those who do
evil—with regard to Israel and its enemies. And on a far greater level. Israel
is hated by individuals and governments throughout the world. Israel is the
most reviled country at the United Nations as well as in Western media and, of
course, in universities.
Israel is a liberal democracy with an independent judiciary,
independent opposition press, and equal right for women, gays and its Arab
population (20% of the Israeli population). Its enemies—the Iranian regime,
Hamas and Hezbollah—allow no such freedoms to those under their control. More
relevantly, their primary goal—indeed, their stated reason for being—is to wipe
out Israel and its Jewish inhabitants. Hamas and Hezbollah have built nothing,
in Gaza and Lebanon, respectively. They exist solely to commit genocide against
Israel and its Jews.
Why do so many people hate anti-communists more than
communism? And why do even more people hate Israel more than Iran, Hamas and
Hezbollah?
The general reason is that it is emotionally and
psychologically difficult for most people to stare evil in the face. Evil is
widely described as ‘dark.’ But it is not dark; it is easy to look into the
dark. What is far harder to look at is blinding bright light. Perhaps that is
why Lucifer, the original name of the Christian devil, comes from the word
‘light.’ “
My response: People live in a world of lies, so it is
emotionally and psychologically easier to deny that evil exists by hating and
attacking those that call evil what it is, let alone inviting the silent majority
to rally and support reform to fight the evildoers.
Prager: “Why this is so—why people will not call evil
‘evil’—is probably related to a lack of courage. Once one declares something
evil, one is morally bound to resist it, and people fear resisting evil. The
fools who mock Christianity—whether through a work of ‘art’ like ‘Piss Christ’
(a crucifix in a jar of urine), or the Paris Olympics opening with a ceremony
that mocked the Last Supper, or the Los Angeles Dodgers honoring ‘Sisters of
Perpetual Indulgence’ (men in drag dressed as nuns)—would never mock Islam.
They fear Muslim wrath; they do not fear Christian wrath. Yet Islamic wrath has
done and is doing far more evil in our time than Christian wrath.”
My response: People fear evil, so they do not condemn it or
call it what it is, because they do not want to have to oppose it. The human
race is a twisted, perverse race in many ways.
Prager: “And there is one additional reason for hating
Israel—one that is specific to Israel—rather than those who seek to exterminate
Israel: Jew-hatred, better known as antisemitism. The people who introduced a
judging God and gave the world the Ten Commandments have been hated for
thousands of years. Not those who systematically violate those commandments.”
My response: Nothing will change as long as
altruist-collectivist morality is the morality of humankind. It is hard to hate
evil when one is evil and likes evil, and selfless morality promotes
self-hatred, and that forces people to love evil even while sickening and dying
form ingesting this poison.
The children of light that fight evil are people of
self-esteem, and they are the enemy of the selfless masses because the former
seek to defeat evil, and that is the cherished way of life, the tradition
savored by the majority, the selfless children of darkness.
