Is evil found only in certain people, or in all of us?
John has argued since 2009 that evil is no simple thing living inside certain people, though in 2014 he allowed that some crime comes from sociopathic monsters. Hank agrees the world can't be split into good people and Death Eaters, and says prejudice and many harms come from biases everyone has and from living and trying too hard.
Axis: evil is in all of us ... evil is in only some people
Positions by date: 14 records in 13 videos. The position was refined (2014), never reversed, in these records.
John
| date | how | position | video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2009-09-12 (said on 2009-09-11, implied) | first on record | John argues evil is not an uncomplicated thing living inside certain people; we want to believe the lie that evil is outside us. | Special Friday Video! (On Saturday) 00:01:07 |
| 2012-07-17 | restate | John says domestic abuse is disgustingly common and Hitler tragically un-extraordinary; sensationalizing him lets us feel fundamentally different from people who participate in genocide, which is not the truth. | Hitler and Sex! 00:02:50 |
| 2014-04-22 | restate | John says war is not, finally, a story of good versus evil, though we might wish it were. | Understanding the Central African Republic 00:05:09 |
| 2014-10-07 | refine | In a description edit John qualifies his claim that crime is caused by poverty, not evil: obviously some crime is caused by horrible sociopathic monsters. | I Kind of Hate Batman video description |
| 2014-10-07 | restate | John says crime is not actually caused by evil but by systemic disenfranchisement, poverty and lack of access to jobs and education. | I Kind of Hate Batman 00:01:56 |
| 2022-03-01 (said on 2022-02-27, implied) | restate | It is also true that we are monsters to each other, all capable of monstrosity: not only active evil like killing and war but banal bureaucratic evil passing over suffering as inevitable. | Hard Week 00:01:57 |
| 2022-03-29 | restate | Seen through generosity and presumed good faith, John says, injustice and inequity are not about terrible people or crappy systems but failures of empathy, resource allocation and will. | An H of G 00:02:55 |
| 2024-10-03 | restate | John says we must allow for complexity: humans have been both good and not nearly good enough at solving shared challenges, capable of great generosity and sacrifice and of short-sighted thinking and horrific violence. | Broadly in Favor of Humans 00:03:05 |
Hank
| date | how | position | video |
|---|---|---|---|
| 2011-06-03 | first on record | Citing Sirius Black via a commenter, Hank agrees the world can't be separated into good people and Death Eaters. | I AM A BAD PERSON! 00:00:41 |
| 2013-12-06 | restate | Hank says inequality is not the work of bad guys or a villain like President Snow; even Effie isn't evil, and complacent people like himself sustain it. | I Am President Snow 00:01:09 |
| 2017-08-18 | restate | Hank says her decision wasn't heroic and her thoughts don't make her a monster: she was neither hero nor monster, and he can still be proud of her. | What I've Been Thinking About 00:01:49 |
| 2019-08-16 | restate | Prejudice and privilege are not signs of interior rot or a disease monsters have, Hank says, but of biases everyone has and deals with. | ...Not My Proudest Moment 00:02:11 |
| 2022-04-01 | restate | Hank used to think the scars we leave on the planet and each other came purely from malice, evil or ignorance; now he sees many made by living, love, trying and pushing too hard. | I Don't Have a Good Title for This Video. 00:01:18 |
| 2022-04-15 | restate | Hank says he could have blamed social media platforms much more, but that oversimplification would make it seem caused by evil rather than a problem to be solved. | Are You Stuck in The Sad Gap 00:02:56 |
Dates are upload dates, which set the order. Where the speaker gives a different recording date in the video, it is added as "said on YYYY-MM-DD, implied" (derived from the date said in the video).