How simplistic!
How droll!
How utterly expected of the human race.
Settle in, folks, this might be a long one.
As a social outcast, and especially as a neurodivergent disabled person, I’m well-used to the proliferation of such simplistic ideas as good and evil, as if the universe wasn’t a magnificent orchestration of chaos imbued with the laws of physics and the machinations of string theory.
See… I’m evil.
Yep.
Keep that in mind. I’m gonna use that statement to make a point later.
In this edition of The Pickup Truck Diaries, we’re going to deconstruct the basics of what exactly that whole “good” and “evil” thing might mean, as well as explore the framings and falsehoods society loves to use and abuse to change narratives and dictate social norms.
Because at the end of the day, that’s really what humanity uses terms like “good” and “evil” for, right? A justification of the ethical and moral values that each individual person holds independently.
Are some of those values forced upon them by society? Yes. OF COURSE THEY ARE!
Next question.
Seriously though, we often like to reduce these things down to their basest natures, when really we’re codifying our language to force a sort of conformity to the social contract.
Now, what is a social contract, you ask?
Well, my friend, you’re in for a treat. The Social Contract is where we’ll start.
The social contract is the invisible force that holds together our society, based on quiet interpretations of rules and guidelines like national laws and ideals like “politesse” that dictate our actions and belief systems. It’s pretty simple when you really think about it.
Do people run around murdering each other, a la a portrayal of The Purge movies?
No?
Why not?
Well, it’s because within our various societies, regardless of where on our lovely planet Earth you find yourself, humans have established rituals, norms, and expectations for behaviour, based on normal social functioning.
It started a long time ago, back in the cradle of civilization that was Mesopotamia, and likely even earlier than that, back on the plains of Africa when us Homo Sapiens Sapiens were persistence hunters, following herds of animals across the Savannah.
The premise was simple. Humans have always been pack animals, affixed to familial social structures and beholden primarily to a Patriarchal society in many cultures, much to my disgust. There are some schools of thought that surmise our bipedal nature, more strongly established than our primate brethren – other apes, is all due to this strategy of picking off the weaker members of herbivore herds.
Being able to walk for hundreds of miles upright was a crucial trait that we needed as primates, to keep an eye out for danger, all while inevitably scoring ourselves a free meal when one of the old, young, or injured members of the herd we followed dropped dead.
Sounds an awful lot like shepherding, right?
But McRae! How the fuck does being a pack animal wandering across the plains of Africa have anything to do with a social contract?
Well, it’s not so much the walking part, it’s more about the pack animal part.
We all come from the same source code, really.
Dumb apes just wandering around.
See, in humans, there’s this concept called “Tribalism,” which is a sort of loyalty to one’s own group. Whilst other tribes are seen as enemies, your own tribe or pack is to be helped and nurtured. And Tribalism is possibly one of our oldest and most toxic traits when applied unto our modern day 21st century context.
Humans still succumb to tribalism all the time, mostly along religious or national lines. Although that being said, we should never forget racism as one of the worst applications by humanity of tribalism. Apparently something as simple as the amount of melanin in your skin is enough cause to be a fucking asshole for many humans.
When you look back at history through that lens, most of the great conflicts are just amped up tribalism, really. The Crusades, Colonialism, Slavery, and the like.
It comes down to othering a person or group as distinct and different from oneself.
For our ancient ancestors, this meant warring amongst each other for the best resources, sex partners, territories, etc. And we straight up murdered each other for those sorts of things A LOT of the time.
In fact, we likely rendered all of our cousin species next to Homo Sapiens Sapiens like the Neanderthals extinct one way or another.
I digress.
Where does the social contract fit in?
You see, the social contract was the variety of rules, guidelines, traditions, and norms that kept each unique tribe or pack in harmony, more or less.
Not murdering each other was a pretty big one. Stealing and hurting each other were also pretty big risks to the well-being of a pack or group. That’s because if you couldn’t trust those closest to you, it made it nigh-impossible to let your guard down and rest.
Whilst some of these values and norms are ingrained in humans even to this very day, such as taboos around incest to avoid inbreeding, as well as the general aversion to murder and the like, vast swaths of these rules have come and gone based on the evolutions of different societies.
Most of the more basic rules have been codified into law in most modern countries, such as body autonomy, a right to freedom and liberty, and the like. Some have not. Personally I think it’s archaic that in some countries, there is pressure via the social contract to force women to cover up their perceived “shame.”
Sheesh. Women are just sacks of meat like the rest of us, honestly. Some bones inside, etc. I’m personally 100% pro body-autonomy, so at the end of the day it’s everybody’s own meat sack to do with as they please, you know?
I hope you’re already seeing how the social contract is a little bit bullshit.
All in all, from primates to now, it culminated in a sort of loose framework for existence that most of us choose to adhere to, with some obvious exceptions like serial killers and the like. There are any number of social norms in your region of the globe that you are coerced into following in public. Might be based on wealth, gender, whatever.
So, you might think to yourself… Is following the social contract “good?” Is breaking it “evil?”
Fuck no.
Don’t even go there.
Largely, that’s because the social contract has been fraying along lines of classism for the past century. Additionally, it’s also collapsing because the social contract requires that the vast majority of society adhere to and abide by the invisible code that it represents.
When you have a bunch of people with obscene wealth a la the 1% doing whatever the fuck they want, be it raping children as a buddy of Epstein, or manipulating politics to deny people their most basic liberties, the social contract becomes a tool of control to enforce a status quo that only applies to some sections of a society.
Most people get bullied into following the social contract even though it no longer offers enough concrete benefits to be worth following in the first place!
Back in the day, there were these two thinkers, Hobbes and Locke. Hobbes you might recognize as a certain stuffed toy tiger from a certain comic strip. A motherfucking metaphor in a comic strip.
Now, these two men agreed that having a Monarch was a good thing. I mean, according to the social contract of the time, they’d likely be killed for treason if they spoke out against having a king or queen, of course. So it was a bit of a foregone conclusion. But regardless of similar conclusions on monarchs, they still had different beliefs on what humans were like.
Locke favored humans as elegant and orderly, being capable of great things when they bowed before a greater power that kept them in line and utilized them to their greatest effect as an external power.
(I’m reducing their entire philosophical thought down to brief anecdotes for the sake of this redneck article, of course, which I’m sure you’ll understand the reasoning for.)
Hobbes, on the other hand, thought humans were inherently nasty and brutish. He thought of people as barbarians. Without a monarch to keep them in line, humanity would devolve into complete barbarism and anarchy.
I’m curious as to what such men would take me as, the barbarian woodsman turned queer politesse a la Pygmalion.
Both of these men believed that “good” came from upholding social order and by living piously, being as a large part of the social contract in Europe at the time was dictated by the various Abrahamic churches and religious texts such as the different bible printings.
Now, I’m torn, because while I’ve been privy to both the highest and lowest echelons of Western society, I can see both arguments.
Look at the scientists and engineers pushing us upwards towards the cosmos! Could you really say that such brilliant minds wanting humanity to push the limits of science and knowledge are brutish and nasty? Alternatively, there are still neo-nazi assholes waving flags based on misunderstood applications of the refuted sciences of eugenics and phrenology, which were excuses to uphold a social contract that saw people of color as lesser beings.
Examples abound for both cases.
But we’re here to talk about good and evil, right?
We can mostly look rationally at the scientists inventing tools to help our everyday lives and say: “These are the good guys.”
Inversely, we can look at the far-right crazy conspiracy theorists and say: “These are the bad guys.”
Well, the world is more complex than that, which is ironic as hell for a person with ADHD to say, as our brains tend to love pattern recognition and black and white thinking. Not that I wouldn’t give up my vow of pacifism in a moment to punch the shit out of a nazi a la my grandfather in WW2.
Yes, indeed, we find ourselves in a world of gray-scales, in which good and evil are leveraged by framing and manipulation of the social contracts of history to gaslight the majority of the population into compliance towards norms.
Because it doesn’t matter whether you think Hobbes was right or Locke was right.
At the end of the day, you’ll form your own opinions.
What does matter is how the ever-evolving social contract has dictated what our concepts of right and wrong are up until this very day.
If you’re a proponent of the social contract, good for you! I’m glad you see everything in our society as hunky-dory and free of any corruption or malicious or ill-intent.
What a lovely little ball of naivete and ignorance I wish I could dwell within.
If you look closely at the social contract, you’ll see that many of the “expected norms” are usually pertaining to realms of control. Is murder bad? Sure is. We developed diplomacy and negotiation as a way of coming to compromise and consensus on issues because of the horrors of war and the harms of killing.
However, some of those same social contract norms are then overextended and forced upon the populace to deter people from disobeying or attempting to change society as a whole. A great example is how the mainstream media objectifies and interprets violent actions.
Violence against people without provocation is always wrong.
But violence against property, belongings, and the like?
The middle and upper classes have equated belongings, assets, property, and capital as worthy of the same respect as human bodies. And this is where that whole grey-scale piece comes in.
One of the most important actions throughout history has been public protest and civil disobedience. The American Civil Rights Movement, The French Revolution, etc. Yet over the last few hundred years, the ever-churning machines of capitalist-monopolized media have framed public demonstration as bad.
It doesn’t much matter what side of the spectrum you’re on – just take a critical look at the news when protest moves into vandalism, damage to buildings, or mean words. Almost without fail, the media gets in a tizzy and tries to villainize entire movements based on these sorts of acts. I’m sure scholars and PHDs all over the place have looked into the outcomes and framings around the BLM movement in mainstream media.
Oftentimes, the talking heads of the mainstream media will equate violence against objects as violence against the people that own these objects, regardless of if the people involved are doing things to hurt, harm, or infringe upon the rights of their fellow citizens.
A building can be fixed. The only thing lost is artificial value when something burns down or needs repairs. Objects are very much UNLIKE an individual human life that cannot be magically restored when taken. And ongoing traumas of people in a society are much more pervasive than the year or so it takes to construct something made from concrete and glass.
Yet, the elites of our western societies have framed people moving against the system as “bad” in the media, regardless of whether folks are protestors or not. The long-term injustices, struggles, and inequalities are often downplayed using this strategy in allowing the upper classes to continue to manipulate those beneath them.
So when did speaking out against corruption, injustice, a lack of autonomy, etc.
When did it become “bad?”
When did “bad” get conflated with “evil?”
And furthermore, why is the establishment so fixated on telling people that they are bad for wanting progressive changes?
Because it’s been this way for a long time. From the murder of pro-union workers in the Ludlow Massacre, to the beating, imprisonment, and harassment of black civil rights activists in America, the status quo is always portrayed as inherently “good.”
Any perceived threat or change to the status quo then by default becomes “evil.”
I could waffle on for a hundred years with historical examples of this, but ultimately we have to take a step back and think critically about why things are framed the way they are.
In lieu of such simplistic concepts such as good or evil, which are determined individually, why are we not trying to break down or destroy the sources of such busted framing? Mainstream Media is particularly guilty in this, with dozens of examples of heavy manipulation of events in order to match whatever narrative the owners of the business dictate to their employees.
But what about the social contract?!
Well… As I alluded to earlier, the social contract has been fraying for a long time.
Ultimately, one of the most basic tenets of the North American social contract is the idealism that anybody can belong, succeed, and make something of themselves within the greater economy. Now, this was false from the start, as plenty of people have been screwed out of access to these things based on race, gender, religion, political affiliations, etc.
But at least since 2020, and certainly much earlier, the wealth gap and subsequent oligarchical controls over society have reduced the majority of people, those without much capital, to rats in a maze.
You can blame it on inflation, market pressures, whatever you want.
I just know that the rich are getting richer, and everybody else is having to work harder and harder just to afford food and a roof over their heads, let alone medical access and the plethora of other things I think every citizen of the world should have access to.
The social contract promised that if people played nice and lived according to the colonial systems, they would be able to not just survive, but thrive in society.
It lied.
Or at least, the people touting the social contract as this monolith of prosperity and community lied.
When the social contract purported to ensure equality is part of the toolbox used by the oligarchical elite to oppress society, where the fuck does good and evil fit in?
Well, I’d argue that good and evil never existed in the first place.
Which brings us to my early declaration.
I am evil.
It’s a pretty simple deduction as to why I might be viewed as evil by the establishment.
My beliefs are that the current social structure of colonized western society is damaged at best, and utterly broken at worst. Why? Well – people can’t ascend from their station, as there is less and less transition or movement between socioeconomic classes, and anybody with two brain cells to rub together can see that the wealthy elites in our globalized society have assumed control over most aspects of our government, economy, and power structure.
By this statement alone, I have labelled myself as disrespectful and in disobedience of the social contract. Not only have I blasphemed against the status quo, breaking the social contract, which as we know is a big no-no as the mainstream media have confirmed again and again, it quickly becomes a slippery slope argument for those who might want to brand me in a specific light.
“They don’t want to be part of society!”
“They care nothing for manners or politesse!”
“I bet they’d run around murdering people if they could get away with it!”
By correlating my refusal to bow to norms as disrespectful, arrogant, violent, or whatever, it becomes a dichotomy of their perceived ethical and moral decisions versus my own.
You become othered and ostracized for not conforming, and thereby, non-confirming becomes labelled as dangerous, evil, or bad.
How else do you build a society modelled on 1984?
You kill independent thought, duh.
Greyscales are hard, and people are generally stupid.
Speaking as a renounced hick.
That means any false dichotomy is presented as a moral or ethical value judgement instead of a more nuanced and in-depth look at belief and action.
It’s part of why I run around these days admitting to being evil. People aren’t quite sure what to do with it, because at first glance it appears to be that I’m running around admitting to committing atrocities.
Now, I don’t want to give you a full rundown of each and every one of my beliefs based on years of research and soul-searching.
But I’m an anarchist ecosocialist who believes strongly in autonomy, independence, and taking care of people. That extends to education, healthcare, and civil rights.
Yet, it doesn’t matter.
Because remember, simply going against the status quo can get you painted in a negative light, whereas breaking the social contract is taboo. Does it matter whether you’re fighting for clean drinking water, people’s rights, or access to healthcare?
Not really.
To the elites of our society, any actions against their power structures or systems of control are going to be reflected the same way each and every time.
Do a quick media test, see for yourself.
Watch news coverage of protests, demonstrations, or similar events. Read the tone or framing of the talking heads and consider whether they are being portrayed in a positive or negative light. Almost always, any sort of public protest will be painted poorly for being disruptive of everyday life!
So am I evil?
Sure!
But I’d rather be viewed as evil whilst retaining my independence, freedom of speech, and thought. Hell, I’d do a lot of things before I ever bow as a complete lemming before a flagrantly corrupt and oligarchical system.
Which brings us back to that whole idea of “good” and “evil.”
Do they exist?
No.
Not really.
Because everything can be boiled down to a value judgement, can’t it?
My values are very different from your values.
I’ve met very few whose line up entirely with mine.
Something you would look at and see as purest abject good, I might pick apart as self-serving and unscrupulous. And vice versa. I actively root for people protesting and demonstrating for their rights and autonomies. While many more rooted in our economic and societal systems would see them as evil ne’er-do-wells sowing chaos!
So at the end of the day, you’re better off doing some self-awareness work, in reflecting on your own moral and ethical values, as well as closely examining your place and status within both the social contract and greater society.
Are you enriching yourself off the hard work of others, producing record profits while not giving anything back to the people you’re profiting from?
Are you actively doing harm to other people in order to get ahead financially or in regards to power?
These are the sorts of questions I like to ask.
Because trust me, if you asked most people whether they were good or evil, they’d likely tell you that they’re good in some fashion. And there’s not much point in digging any deeper if they’ve already made up their mind.
So perhaps the next time you find yourself reducing something down to simpler ideas like good or evil, maybe stop and ask yourself some questions…
Because we live in a world of greyscales.
Pure good, pure evil? They simply don’t exist.
You and I just have to learn to live with that. And figure out what that means each and every day, when we navigate the world around us.
I call myself evil because I’ll be paying penance for my sins until the day I die.
The supervillain shtick is just to keep me laughing whilst I pay said penance.
What are you, eh?
Heh.
Let’s get the fuck out of here.
-McRae
