http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VqoyQNUrGls
Milton (Paradise Lost) was trying to understand, what is the nature of evil?
"Evil is the force that believes its knowledge is complete. And that it can do without the transcendent And as soon as it makes that claim it instantly exists in a place that's indistinguishable from hell. And it could get out merely by admitting its error. And it will never do that." -Jordan Peterson
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So I was wondering the same thing this evening, and that led me to search the internet for "Why are the Democrats evil" (because I know they are - not the people, necessarily, but the organized belief system of the party). And I got back some interesting answers, including one written by a pro-Democratic apologist who wondered how anyone could say such horrible things about Democrats when the party was merely trying to eliminate poverty and inequality and to right historic wrongs (yada yada yada).
And reading that, from that Democrat, felt so unsatisfactory that I had to search deeper and deeper. Which eventually brought me to Jordan Peterson and his analysis.
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Excerpt from my follow-on post, with a longer J Peterson video (which, it turned out, was actually an excerpt, itself, from an even longer and more profound presentation I started off with (previous post here):
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=MLp7vWB0TeY
The whole video (as with the prior) is filled with wisdom, but there is a point where he gets back to the nature of "evil". The first thing, he says, is that it essential to distinguish evil from tragedy. Tragedy is painful, but it we recognize it is NOT evil. What is the difference?
"Evil for me is differentiated from tragedy by its lack of necessity and its volunteerism." -Peterson
That defines the Democrats (Socialists) and distinguishes them, in broad measure, from the MAGA (Conservatives).
What I think, at this point (and this is coming upon me rapidly, now, although it has been in gestation for years) is that Peterson is right. Humans absolutely are stuck between the finite and the infinite and that is intolerable if we don't have transcendent meaning. And the key is “transcendent” -- that which goes beyond, and hopefully rises above, the tragedy and the pursuit of achievable goals.
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