The "good and evil" paradox

Plus, Bill Gates vs. Barack Obama, how to end slavery, and Dave and Ramaswami try (and fail) to make the world a better place.

Here are 3 quotes — I want you to guess who said them:

“I have no purpose, directly or indirectly, to interfere with the institution of slavery where it exists.”

“There is a physical difference between the White and Black races which I believe will forever forbid the two races living together on terms of social and political equality.”

“If I could save the Union without freeing any slave I would do it.”

You know who said that stuff? It was Abraham Lincoln.

Why did Abraham Lincoln say this stuff?

Well, he didn’t actually believe it.

Historians and biographers have searched long and hard for evidence that Lincoln treated black people contemptuously and they haven’t found even one example. Frederick Douglass said that Abraham Lincoln was the only white man who ever treated him like an equal, even including white abolitionists.

He probably said that stuff because of politics. Even if Abraham Lincoln saw blacks and whites as equals, other people in 1860’s America certainly didn’t. Equality between blacks and whites wasn’t in the Overton Window in 1860. So if Lincoln had announced that he wanted to free all slaves and give Black people equal legal rights, he would have had no chance of becoming president.

In other words, Lincoln couldn’t end slavery without telling a few little white lies.

The paradox of good and evil

The paradox of good and evil is that a) you need to do evil to do good, and b) if you do evil, it stops you from doing good.

That paradox probably doesn’t make sense to you right now, and that’s fine. I’ll explain everything, just keep reading:

#1: You need to do evil to do good

Let me introduce you to Dave and Ramaswami, 2 fictional characters who I’ll use to illustrate my points in this article.

Dave is a beach hippie. His days consist mainly of surfing, playing the acoustic guitar, smoking pot, and chasing girls.

Dave is always complaining about how corporations mistreat their workers. “Corporations treat their workers like cogs in a machine,” he says, even though he himself has never had a job in his life.

Ramaswami is a Buddhist monk. His country, Brunalasia, is currently invading its neighbor Lowadesh in an unjust war. Brunalasia is an incredibly corrupt country, and it’s an open secret that all of Brunalasia’s politicians take bribes from the country’s military contractors.

6 years ago, Ramaswami decided he needed to purify and inoculate his mind against corruption. So he went into a faraway forest, found a dark cave, sat down, and started meditating.

Ramaswami has been meditating in that cave ever since, except for once a year when he feels he has inoculated his mind enough to return to the real world. When that happens, he goes to the market in a nearby town, then immediately gets frustrated because the prices are higher than he remembered due to Brunalasia’s out-of-control inflation. Ramaswami notices the frustration, decides that he must do more work to purify his mind, and goes back to the cave.

What do Dave and Ramaswami have in common? They both complain about problems, but they don’t do anything to actually solve those problems. Instead they run away from them.

Now imagine that one day, Dave gets so fed up with corporations exploiting their employees that he forms an NGO to stop it. And Ramaswami gets so fed up with Brunalasia’s unjust military campaigns and corruption that he decides to seek political office.

All of a sudden, both of them would have tons of difficult problems. Dave would probably have to hire employees, and sometimes he would have to mistreat them in order to get stuff done. And Ramaswami would probably have to deal with some corruption in order to make any headway in ending the war.

In other words, if they want to do good, they’ll have to do evil. That’s because in order to do good things, you need to get power. (If you don’t have any power, then all you can do is complain.) And if you want to get power, you usually need to do something evil.

This is why Abraham Lincoln had to lie in order to end slavery. If he had come out as an abolitionist, he wouldn’t have become president in the first place.

On the flipside, take Justin Amash. Justin Amash took a principled stand. And today, Justin Amash is out of a job.

If you want to get stuff done, then sometimes you have to violate your conscience. Because getting shit done is hard, and sometimes you have to sacrifice one thing you think is right for another thing you think is right.

#2: Doing evil stops you from doing good

Imagine that Dave’s NGO starts to get some traction. He can’t do all the work all by himself anymore. So he hires a guy named Robert to help him out.

Dave swears to himself that, unlike the big, bad evil corporations out there, he’s not gonna mistreat his employees. So he’s incredibly generous to Robert. He gives Robert a generous salary, a generous vacation package, and the ability to set his own hours and do the work he wants to do.

Robert notices this, and realizes he can take advantage of Dave’s good nature. He can leave work early, slack off, and make Dave do all the hard work that Dave hired Robert to do in the first place. Soon, Dave is paying him a hefty salary to sit around doing nothing.

One day Dave gets fed up with this. So he tells Robert, that’s it, you’ve gotta start earning your keep around here. Either get off your ass and start working, or you’re fired.

Robert, frustrated, writes an op-ed about how badly Dave treated him. That op-ed is published in The New York Times, and Dave’s reputation is ruined.

Everyone who thought he was fighting for the little guy now sees him as an evil hypocrite, just as bad as the people he rails against.

All of Dave’s backers hear about the op-ed. So they stop donating to his NGO, and they refuse to take his calls.

Dave gets frustrated and goes back to his little beach town. Then, he resumes his past life of surfing, smoking pot, playing the acoustic guitar, and chasing girls.

Dave ran into the first reason why you can’t do evil and still do good: because anytime you do something evil, your reputation suffers. People start trusting you less. And when people don’t trust you, you don’t have as much power.

Now for the second reason. Let’s say Ramaswami wins his political campaign, and he’s elected to Brunalasia’s parliament.

Due to the demanding nature of his job, he rarely finds the time to meditate anymore — he maybe does 5 minutes every other week.

He’s still publicly talking about how he wants to end the war. The problem is, the other members of parliament don’t want to end the war. They’re getting paid millions of dollars in bribes by Brunalasia’s military contractors, and they’re spending the money on cocaine and hookers and expensive vacations and lavish gifts for their mistresses. So ending the war is a political nonstarter.

Ramaswami devises a strategy. He notices that he actually has great power in Brunalasia’s parliament: party lines are split about 50/50, meaning Ramaswami frequently has the power to cast the tiebreaking vote on key issues.

One day, another MP comes to him with a deal. He wants Ramaswami to cast the tiebreaking vote for his bill. In exchange, he will vote to end the war, when the time comes around to do so.

Ramaswami adamantly refuses. He says this is exactly the sort of corruption he wanted to stop when he ran for office.

“Be reasonable, Ramaswami,” says the MP. “Isn’t it worth a little corruption to save millions of innocent lives? Don’t you want the war to end?” Ramaswami is persuaded, makes the deal, and casts the tiebreaking vote.

Word gets around that Ramaswami’s vote is up for auction. So every time there’s a controversial bill about to be passed, the other MP’s come to Ramaswami’s office and bid for his vote.

By the time he’s up for re-election, he has about 60% of the votes he needs to end the war pledged. But, he needs money to fend off his political opponents. Guess who steps in to offer him some money? The military contractors that are bribing all the other MP’s to not end the war.

Ramaswami reasons that he can take their money and then stab them in the back when the time comes to end the war. After all, these military contractors are scumbags, right? Shouldn’t it be okay to steal from them? So Ramaswami takes their money, wins re-election, and continues his strategy of collecting pledges to vote to end the war.

After a few years of this, Ramaswami finally gets enough votes. But there’s a problem. Ramaswami doesn’t want to end the war anymore. He’s getting all that money from the military contractors, and he’s spending it on his own cocaine and hookers and lavish vacations and gifts for his mistresses. If he ends the war, then all of that stops.

In fact, when the war dips in popularity and other MP’s propose a bill to end the war, Ramaswami votes against it.

What happened? Politics changed Ramaswami’s brain. His mind is no longer pure, like it was when he spent all day meditating in a cave. Now, his mind is the dirty mind of a wheeler-dealer politician, who would rather take a bribe from a military contractor than end the suffering of millions.

That’s the second reason why you can’t do evil shit and still do good shit. The more evil things you do, the more you rewire your brain to do evil things. Then when the time comes to do good things, you don’t know how anymore.

If you don’t believe me, there was a study about lawyers done a while ago. It found that when a new lawyer graduates from law school and joins a firm, they’re honest about the hours they bill. But by the time they’re 3 years in, they’re bill time for all kinds of crazy bullshit.

This is what happens to most bright-eyed, bushy-tailed young people who go into politics. They go in thinking they’re gonna make the world a better place. Then they realize that in order to keep their job, they have to do stuff that violates their moral conscience.

So they suck it up and do it, hoping that one day they’ll get promoted to a position where they can do some good. But by the time they actually get that promotion, they’re too used to doing evil shit to stop.

How to solve the paradox

I wrote this article about how it’s hard to do good, because doing good requires doing evil and doing evil stops you from doing good.

But, I started off this article talking about Abraham Lincoln, who did manage to do evil and still do good. Lincoln didn’t get his reputation or his brain destroyed. So what gives?

Well, Lincoln got lucky.

The story we’re usually told about the Civil War is, the North wanted to end slavery, the South wanted to keep slavery, so the North went to war to free the slaves.

The truth is that the South was afraid that the North would take away slavery, mostly out of paranoia. (The North wanted no such thing, aside from a few radical abolitionists — most Northerners just wanted to prevent slavery from spreading to the West.) The South tried to secede, and the North fought a war to try to stop them.

During that war, Abraham Lincoln saw a chance to end slavery with the stroke of his pen — and help the war effort in the process. So he wrote a document called the Emancipation Proclamation, which freed all the slaves everywhere, except in the border states like Kentucky that were still loyal to the union.

In other words, by the random dice roll of history, Abraham Lincoln got a chance to end slavery. He saw his chance and he took it.

So, do you want to do some good in the world? Then put yourself in a position of power and then try to get lucky.

You also have to deal with your reputation getting destroyed and your brain getting destroyed. How do you do that?

Well, for the reputation part, consider Bill Gates and Barack Obama. Barack Obama was the president of the United States — on paper, the most powerful man in the world. Yet it’s estimated that Bill Gates’s foundation has saved 122,000,000 people’s lives. How many people’s lives has Barack Obama saved?

The reason why Bill Gates has saved more people’s lives than Barack Obama is because Barack Obama had limited political capitol. Obama could only be president for 8 years, and when he was president, he could only pass laws and get stuff done if he could get Congress on his side.

Bill Gates doesn’t have those problems. That’s because he doesn’t have a mainstream establishment job. Instead, he has heaps and heaps of money from Microsoft that he can use to solve the biggest problems in the world, even though his ex-wife hates his guts, half the country thinks he wants to put a tracking chip in them, and he has ties to Jeffrey Epstein.

So to solve the first problem, try to become cancel-proof. Get to a position in the world where you don’t need people to like you in order to get shit done.

And to solve the second problem, let’s return to our friend Ramaswami. If he had set aside the time to meditate and kept in better touch with his gurus, he probably would have had much more moral fortitude. He might have been able to resist the lure of corruption and bribery and actually end the war.

So take care of yourself. Keep an eye on the big picture, meditate, take long walks, and take frequent time off. That will help you zoom out and prevent your day-to-day existence from slowly corrupting you.

Hey! Thanks for reading.

My name’s Theo and every Monday I publish an article like this one about whatever was on my mind the week before. Usually it’s some weird big idea in social sciences that’s rolling around my brain, or something about how the world works, or something about psychology or long-term trends in society.

Did you like this post? Then feel free to hit the purple “subscribe” button right here:

Happy trails!