Some People Are Just Evil And Their Whole Political Project Is Promoting Evil

There are real-life cartoonish villains

Wisdom will save you from the ways of wicked men, from men whose words are perverse, who have left the straight paths to walk in dark ways, who delight in doing wrong and rejoice in the perverseness of evil, whose paths are crooked and who are devious in their ways.

—Proverbs 2:12-15

I recently saw a Tweet that set me off a bit, from someone who was cheering on the PEPFAR cuts.

This person isn’t just some fringe crazy person—they are followed by J.D. Vance on Twitter, and have about 65,000 Twitter followers. The Tweet was liked by almost 3,000 other people. Now, obviously they’re not, like, some sitting member of congress, but nor are they a fringe figure, and quite a few people seem to be in agreement with them.

Let’s be clear on what this person is gleefully cackling about: the death of millions of people, including millions of children, from HIV. PEFPAR provides people medicine so that they don’t die of AIDS. More than half of people with HIV are women, and many are children. Captive dreamer is in favor of cutting this off to own the libs or something.

I think most people are decent. Sure, most people have profound moral blindspots, but they exemplify, to at least a minimal degree, various virtues. They’re not just in favor of cruelty for its own sake. They do not support sacrificing children at the altar of being based and owning the libs.

But there are a decent number of people who are evil or at the very least pretending to be. These people are totally blind to any sort of moral considerations. They have no problem shutting off the PEPFAR program, even if this would cause lots of kids to die, so long as the people dying are far away and will not negatively affect America.

While there is such thing as compassionate conservatism—and it is the norm—there is also uncompassionate conservatism. A kind of conservatism that thrives primarily on delighting on performative cruelty and malevolence, wherein people get off on watching immigrants cry because their immigration hearing was cancelled. There is a kind of conservative—very online, very on Twitter—who delights in hurting the vulnerable, whose sole agenda seems to be stomping on the face of the powerless and laughing about it. This is the sort of person who would see a video of a trans person crying about being bullied and post in reply a laughing emoji, conjoined with the words “cry harder.”

I think many of these people are not psychopaths in the clinical sense but something rather stranger. They’re distinctly political psychopaths. If they saw a grieving mother with an AIDS-infected child wasting away, they might even shed a tear over her circumstance. But they manage to switch off their empathy when doing any sort of political analysis.

This sort of person is well-summed-up by Scott Alexander’s recent (excellent!!!) article Everyone's A Based Post-Christian Vitalist Until The Grooming Gangs Show Up:

Whenever I talk about charity, a type that I’ll call the “based post-Christian vitalist” shows up in the comments to tell me that I’ve got it all wrong. The moral impulse tells us to help our family, friends, and maybe village. It’s a weird misfire, analogous to an auto-immune disease, to waste brain cycles on starving children in a far-off country who you’ll never meet. You’ve been cucked by centuries of Christian propaganda. Instead of the slave morality that yokes you to loser victims who wouldn’t give you the time of day if your situations were reversed, you should cultivate a master morality that lets you love the strong people who push forward human civilization.

Now, Scott notes that many of these people who seem to revel in cruelty, who he terms “based post-Christian vitalists,” aren’t really serious about not having any moral principles. While they cackle with glee when African children die of AIDS, they’re very outraged by British Pakistani grooming gangs. As Scott notes:

So it was revealing to watch some of these people trip over themselves to say we should invade Britain because of its tolerance for Pakistani grooming gangs.

In case you’ve been under a rock recently, in the early 2010s, several organized child sexual assault rings got busted in Britain - but only after the police spent years deliberately ignoring them, because the perpetrators were mostly Pakistani and busting them might seem racist. A recent legal dispute got them back in the news, and since social media is less censored now, the topic went viral in a way it didn’t before. Now the entire Right is demanding investigations, heads on pikes, and (in some cases) the American invasion of Britain.

Obviously this is extremely bad and they’re right to be angry. I criticized the media for not covering the Rotherham gangs more at the time, and I’m glad they’re finally getting more attention. But since everyone else is talking about the criminal aspects of it, I hope it won’t be too inappropriate for me to make a philosophical point: all the people who claim a principled commitment to not caring about the suffering of poor kids in foreign countries suddenly care a lot about the suffering of poor kids in foreign countries.

(Captive Dreamer is one such person).

Now don’t get me wrong: I think we should be outraged by Pakistani grooming gangs. I think it is bad when young girls are violently raped. But this is because I have a little something called a moral compass: I think that some things are bad (like children dying and being raped) and that other things are good (like foreign aid programs that prevent children from dying). If, however, you gleefully cackle at performative cruelty, all the while getting outraged about bad things, then it seems you are not consistent in your worldview. You have become the most debased kind of moral imbecile, where you’re only outraged by genuine evil that runs contrary to your political inclination, and you delight in other kinds of wickedness.

You have become like the CNN anchor who is more outraged by Fox News than ISIS but worse: you’re like the hypothetical CNN anchor who is pro-ISIS because being anti-ISIS is right-coded. You have become, in a very deep sense, unable to grasp anything about morality—a person who is blind to, if not in favor of, profound evil.

GEM Anscombe once said of a hypothetical utilitarian “I do not want to argue with him; he shows a corrupt mind.” Now, obviously I do not think this is true of utilitarians. But there are some people who have been so twisted by politics and the internet that they can no longer be easily argued out of their evil views. I do not think there is much I could say to Captive Dreamer to convince him that it is bad when kids die of AIDS. While much of politics should be about coalition building, it is worth recognizing: there is a distinct subset of the online right that seems to have moved beyond having anything resembling empathy or compassion. The political project of those who revel in evil and fiercely hate the good should be opposed across the board.