QUOTE OF NOTE: Steve Talbot on Evil
"I was raised a traditionalist conservative, and one of
the rock-solid virtues of that mindset was a vivid
awareness that the line between good and evil runs
through every individual heart. This, of course, was
why one distrusted all schemes for salvation-by-
government and favored the notion of checks and
balances. No excess of power should be vested in any
one place, because no group of people can claim fully to
have healed their own hearts of that fundamental schism.
"When we begin to believe that we've fingered the true
locus of evil "over there" rather than "in here" -- when
the battle between "us" and "them" is equated with the
battle between good and evil -- then we have placed
ourselves above all evil. This is to make gods of
ourselves.
"Yes, we must resist evil in the world -- resist it for
all we are worth. We must strive to represent the good
against the evil. This endless, internal striving --
never wholly successful, never finished once for all --
is, in fact, the decisive thing. But when the evil
turns out, after all, to be over there, the striving is
no longer necessary. It becomes *nothing but* a matter
of dialing in the coordinates and calling down the
bombs.
"This is how disastrous moral reversal occurs. To focus
on the evil over there is to forget its strategic
alliance with the evil in oneself, and to forget the
evil in oneself is to turn one's own good -- now
untethered from modesty and rendered tyrannical -- into
a magnified power for evil. If we follow this path of
arrogance, the destruction we call down upon the world
may be unparalleled. "
Stephen L. Talbott, Editor of NETFUTURE: Technology and
Human Responsibility, in NETFUTURE, Issue #129, March 12,
2002
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