Evil Makes You Stupid: A Case Study

Yes, as most of my readers are probably aware by now, I’ve relocated. It’s been a little less than two years now since my wife Sara died; it’s been a rough road since then but I’ve dealt with it about as well as I’m ever likely to, and over the holidays just past it became very clear to me that I needed new faces, new places, and opportunities of a sort that Rhode Island just doesn’t supply. So I’ve just moved to a quiet, pleasant one bedroom apartment in Silver Spring, Maryland. Why Silver Spring? It’s a supremely walkable town, with excellent transit connections all through the Washington DC region; it’s got all the amenities I like; DC these days is a bubbling hotbed of Masonic and occult activities―I’ve already been invited to join four different magical lodges, for example―and, for those concerned about rising seas, my new place is 341 feet above sea level. I expect to have a good time here.

I’ve moved once or twice a decade all through my life, so the process is familiar and untraumatic. Each move has one or two unexpected wrinkles, though, and sometimes those have their own lessons to teach. I didn’t anticipate that this move would offer me a sudden glimpse into the heart of our nation’s social and economic dysfunctions and the nature of human evil. I certainly didn’t expect that to come by way of a bit of petty spite on the part of my former phone and internet provider, but then I’ve noted before that I don’t generally get to choose my sources of inspiration.

Here’s what happened. In the process of getting all my Rhode Island utilities shut down and all my Maryland ones switched on, I contacted my former provider―to keep the lawyers at bay, let’s call the firm Dorx Communications, shall we? You can get almost any other imaginable service from the Dorx website with a few clicks, but shutting off service is a different matter entirely. You have to go to chat, put up with the maunderings of their clueless robot, and get transferred to a supposedly live agent, who then does everything possible to keep you from doing what you’ve come there to do. I slogged patiently through the process, and finally got the allegedly live person to agree that my service would be shut off on January 30.

The moment the chat ended, my phone and internet access shut down. When I walked three blocks to the local public library to get online and contacted Dorx to inform them politely that they’d made a mistake, I found that my shutoff order had been redated to that day, January 18. What’s more, once I was in my account, I was unable to access the chat function at all. It was a pretty obvious middle finger from the dorks at Dorx.

As it happens, none of this caused me any significant difficulty. I don’t use the phone much, and I like to live in the kind of urban neighborhood that, among its other features, has plenty of coffee places with free wifi. Thus the only difference their outburst of nastiness made for me was that for a few days, instead of spending an hour each morning doing internet stuff while sitting in my living room, drinking green tea and listening to classical music, I spent an hour each morning doing internet stuff while sitting in a pleasant little café a block and a half from my apartment, drinking green tea and listening to old Azorean men argue about soccer in Portuguese.

No, the disadvantages belong to Dorx, in an indirect but important sense. The service I got from them might best be described as “uninspired,” and it was certainly overpriced―I’m paying significantly less for the same services now―but I might have considered them as a provider after some future move, or if my new provider gets unusually stupid. Now? Not a chance. Of course I’ve also recounted my experience to others, and there’s at least a chance that this will influence their future choices among internet providers.

That’s not a minor issue. My American readers will doubtless recall America On Line aka AOL, which was once the 500-pound gorilla of internet providers. Their service wasn’t that good, but what made them really stand out is that you couldn’t get them to shut off service at all. No matter what you did, they would keep on charging your credit card unless you put a stop payment order on your credit card or bank account. The result? Everyone started calling them AO-Hell and nobody would sign up for their service if they had any other choice at all. The collapse of their customer base and their dominance of the industry followed promptly.

Microsoft, for that matter, is well on its way to the same fate. Its web browser, Internet Explorer (IE), once had an overwhelming market share. Over time, though, too many people caught on to the fact that Microsoft’s business model consists of making buggy, third-rate programs and then trying to bully people into using them anyway. IE was one of the main venues for that bullying; its market share collapsed accordingly, and its reputation remains so bad that Microsoft ended up renaming its browser to try to get out from under all the bad publicity. (It hasn’t worked; the Microsoft browser only accounts for a tiny market share these days.) The same process is happening now with Windows, as the dismal quality of the last three releases has driven more and more users to try other options. We’re not quite to the sort of critical-mass point at which abandonment of the old standard changes from a trickle to a flood, but it’s on its way.

None of this is a secret. The graveyard of dead brands is full of tombstones with mournful epitaphs reading DIED OF LOUSY CUSTOMER SERVICE. It used to be common knowledge among businesspeople in the US that treating customers decently, even if they were going to some other provider, was how you built your reputation, your brand, and your bottom line. Yet this sort of obvious common sense has gone whistling down the wind when it comes to Dorx and too many other corporations, especially but not only in the internet field. It’s a fascinating display of self-defeating behavior. It was while reflecting on the brain cramp that prevents companies from noticing how they’re damaging themselves that I realized what it has to reveal about the nature of human evil.

There are plenty of ways we can talk about evil. One that hasn’t gotten as much attention as it may deserve is to see it as a denial of otherness. People mistreat other people when they stop seeing other people as genuine others, and reduce them to arbitrary images in their own minds. Think of the 20th century’s major genocides: whether we’re talking about Stalin’s goon squads rounding up counterrevolutionaries, Hitler’s goon squads rounding up Jews, or any other example you care to name, what motivated the horror was the flattening out of millions of individual human beings into arbitrary counters in the minds of tyrants, assigned only such meaning and value as the tyrant’s own delusional fantasies place upon them.

The same thing is true of the pettier forms of evil: you take the first step toward abusing someone when you insist that they cannot differ from the images in your own mind. That’s why the guy from Nazareth talked about loving your neighbor as yourself, and treating others the way you want them to treat you. Both sayings, if you take them seriously, require you to recognize that the other person has an independent subjective existence, an interiority of mind and heart and will, of the same kind as your own, instead of treating other people as mere mannequins to be posed in your own internal melodramas. Lose that recognition and you lose the moral compass that keeps decent people from behaving like Dorx.

Carl Jung, whose more productive insights have been neglected nearly as thoroughly as those of the teacher just mentioned, had quite a bit to say about the mechanism that drives the erasure of otherness. He called it “projection.” The implied metaphor’s a good one: just as a movie projector takes images from a strip of film and splashes them across a movie screen, a person who is caught up in projection takes images from within his or her own mind and splashes them across other people.

Jung was especially interested in the projection of archetypes, the emotionally powerful images that are the subjective side of human instinct. Consider the anima or animus, aka the contrasexual archetype. It’s the subjective side of the mating instinct, and when it projects itself onto some hapless person of the sex to which you’re attracted, you fall in love. If you don’t have too much repressed material around love and sex in your unconscious, there’s at least a chance that this can attract you to someone with whom you can have a reasonably happy relationship. If not―well, we’ve all seen people for whom projection functioned as the great-granddaddy of all beer goggles, making them see beauty and other good qualities where none exist. It’s easy to laugh at this, but lives get destroyed by this kind of projection.

Far more reliably destructive, however, is the projection of the archetype Jung called the Shadow. This can be defined quite simply as the sum total of everything you can’t stand about yourself, and therefore project onto other people. It’s an addictive rush, not least because, for someone in the grip of a Shadow projection, pouring out rage and hatred at the target of their projection takes the place of any more positive or constructive activity. You don’t have to improve yourself or deal with your unfinished business if you can convince yourself that everything wrong with the world is due to that Bad Person™ over there!

Notice how the denial of otherness expresses itself in both these cases. The person caught up in a projection of the contrasexual archetype can’t see the target of that projection at all; whatever qualities the target might actually have are swamped by the contents of the projector’s mind. If, as often happens, you get two people projecting their own contrasexual archetypes on each other, they may be together for as much as a couple of years before either of them gets far enough past their own mental contents that they can notice the first thing about the other. You may have observed how often really intense relationships end explosively; this is an important reason why.

The person caught up in a Shadow projection is even less able to see past their mental imagery than the person caught up in an anima or animus projection. To get past a Shadow projection, you have to recognize that the nefarious qualities you’ve projected onto the target may not belong to that person at all, and this raises the hideous chance that you might notice that the qualities in question are your own. The result, though, is the same: whatever qualities some inoffensive shopkeeper might have as an individual, say, are completely hidden by the projection of the Evil Capitalist or the Sinister Jew, depending on which set of genocidal fantasies we’re talking about. Of course, any of the modern equivalents can fill the same role.

The erasure of otherness is so central to Shadow projection, in fact, that those of us who aren’t caught up in the seething hatreds of our time can use it to advantage. I’ve found, for example, that if I want to chase off extremists from both sides of the current political fracas with a few brief words, all I have to do is mention that I’m opposed to illegal immigration and the various other gimmicks (such as H1B visas) that big corporations use to provide themselves with indentured servants, but I’m very much in favor of legal immigration―the traditional sort that sees to it that potential immigrants are vetted to be sure that they’re likely to contribute to our society rather than becoming a burden on it.

That’s a moderate view; it’s held by a hefty share―quite probably a majority―of Americans these days; but it fits neither of the standard Shadow projections common among political extremists these days. Far more often than not, when I mention this opinion of mine, the extremists from either side don’t argue or push back. They simply vanish. The otherness they try to deny is too much of a threat for them to do anything else. After all, if I don’t conform to their fantasies of what Those Bad People Over There™ believe, where does that leave their comfortable certainty that all the evil in the world belongs to someone else?

These and all the other forms of projection have a common consequence that isn’t recognized as often as it should be. We can define intelligence, for practical purposes, as the ability to adapt your beliefs to fit the facts you encounter. The ordinarily intelligent person comes into a situation with a belief that claims to explain it, notices that the mental model underlying the belief doesn’t really work, and tinkers with it to find a variation that works better. The genius runs into the same mismatch and comes up with a completely new mental model that nobody has thought of before. The stupid person, by contrast, keeps using the failed belief even when it doesn’t work.

The consequence is that projection is a potent generator of stupidity. If you’re caught up in a projection, you can’t learn anything about the person onto whom you’re projecting, because every bit of genuine information about that person is hidden behind the internal image you’re projecting onto the person. That leads reliably to moronic behavior. We’re all used to watching this when people project the contrasexual archetype onto somebody; the impressively stupid behavior of the infatuated is a common experience. The same thing happens, though, with every other form of projection.

That’s why Stalin’s goon squads, in their frantic hunt for counterrevolutionaries, gutted the officer corps of the Red Army and made the Soviet Union’s victory over Nazi Germany much more difficult than it had to be. It’s also why Hitler’s goon squads chased off most of Germany’s best nuclear physicists―they were, as it happened, Jews―and so guaranteed that in the race to weaponize nuclear power, the Nazi regime would come in far too late to matter. Other examples of the same kind of self-defeating stupidity will doubtless occur to those who watch the current political scene, but we can leave that discussion for some future post.

The projection that drove Dorx to act like dorks in my case, and doubtless in many others, involved neither infatuation nor violent hatred. It derives, I think, from an archetype that has received far too little attention in recent years: the archetype of the Machine. What is a machine? In psychological terms, a machine is an object that has no interiority, no subjective dimension at all. It’s the opposite of a person. It simply and mindlessly does what it’s made to do, and never responds in any other way unless it becomes defective. Thus it’s the ultimate expression of the fantasy of ego omnipotence, the childish dream of a world made wholly transparent and obedient to the unfettered and unreasoning individual will.

I’ve discussed in previous posts―this one, for example―the disastrous results of the belief that neither human beings nor any other part of the cosmos can respond in any non-mechanical way to the generally harebrained schemes of our elite classes. The projection of the archetype of the Machine may just explain why this happens so reliably these days. Our current civilization builds and uses machines much more enthusiastically than any other known to history, so it’s not surprising that this particular archetype comes so readily to mind, among both our elite classes and the business corporations they own and run.

This is all the more ironic when we turn to generative large language models, the software currently being marketed under the deceptive label “artificial intelligence.” LLMs, to give them a more accurate acronym, aren’t intelligent; they simply generate statistically likely patterns of text, computer code, or pixels, and so are ultimately not much more than hypercomplex versions of the autocorrect feature that so reliably fills in the wrong word as you type. Yet the tech-bro faction of our current corporate elite has projected onto these programs a galaxy of features that don’t belong there, starting with the notion that there really is intelligence in there somehow, and rising up from that into overblown delusions of cybernetic godhood. So we have a substantial group of rich and influential people who project interiority onto machines that don’t have it, while denying it to human beings who do.

None of this bodes well for the survival of our civilization. If Arnold Toynbee is right that the death certificates of civilizations ought to list the cause of death as suicide, and the evidence certainly backs him up, projection as a source of artificially induced stupidity may well play a very large role in setting the stage for that dismal outcome. Given the role of projection in driving evil behavior, it’s also reasonable to sum up the lesson implied in all this by the nice straightforward sentence “evil makes you stupid.” This being the case, it seems worth suggesting, to my readers and others, that a certain amount of skepticism toward one’s own internal imagery is a skill worth cultivating. It really will make everyone’s lives easier if we all make an effort not to act like Dorx.