Resisting Evil

Tolstoy advised us not to resist evil. I’ve always resonated with that, sounds Jesus-like to me. And I wish to extend it: Don’t resist evil -- lest you become evil.
I don’t claim any necessarily causal relation, but insist that the tendency will be there.
I write this after bailing out of a PBS program on American military torture of suspects arrested as terrorists and held at Guantanamo Bay.

At the same time I wish to insert a couple of qualifiers:

1. Watch out for self-labeling. It’s ludicrous for me to say, "I am good." Do I expect to be believed? It’s more ludicrous for countries to claim that they are good or that their enemies are evil.
   We could wait till God tells us what’s what at Judgment; or we could take all such claims with a grain of salt; or we could at least attempt to Inventory opinions:Jesus doesn’t seem to have said that he was good, Paul seems to say that Jesus was good, Francis seems to agree ...
2. We all have a general sense of what "good" means and what "evil" means; but beware of thinking that such attributes can be applied to actual organisms or to actual groups, living in time and space. One’s words, the other’s creatures.
   Can there really be any one-to-one correspondence? I doubt it.


3. But most important: what basis does ANY human bean have for thinking that they can tell right from wrong? Good from evil?
   Vanity vanity.
   Though I won’t agree that All is vanity! That’s just another Liar’s Paradox: if all is vanity, then so too is that statement!

I feel a nostalgia for the America of a near century ago when some US official refused to open the doors of his office to spying. He said, "Gentlemen do not read each other’s mail."
Of course we got rid of him, and have been spy spy spying ever since.

So. Did we become evil?
I see us to be evil: as I see any other kleptocracy.

PS Note in this context that human beans are forever attributing to themselves and their group impossible things. The law promises no censorship, but then squelches all sorts of things, sponsors (and coerces) environments (schools, churches, board rooms ...) in which only predisposiitons are likely to flourish. We go to Geneva, adopt conventions, then redefine them out of existence when push wants to shove.
As I said to a lawyer, "Homeostasis is a natural law; it cannot be legislated against."
But natural law doesn’t deter us. Vanity vanity.
Hey, why don’t we have a society in which anyone who want to write laws first has to prove that their cosmology, their physics, their psychology, etc. is perfect? First we should know whether time is finite or infinite, then we should know whether space is likewise, then we should know if the universe and the cosmos are coextensive or very different ... We should know which gods are true and which false ... We should prove that our understanding of the god is perfect ... Then we could talk about law.