This one is a bit of a two parter as questions go… I think it’s best to start with the first part and I suspect you may know what the second part will be by then…
I have asked myself this question constantly since March 2003 but it’s only over the past 7 years that it has become much more personal and more nuanced.
“Do bad people know they are bad? Do evil people know they are evil?”
I gave up smoking on the 19th of March 2003, it was the only thing I could do to stop the Iraq war. Isn’t that pathetic? I figured that it was the least I could do to deny the government of that tax money in case some of it went towards killing some poor sod in George W Bush’s quest to finish what his daddy started. I often wonder if Tony Blair knowns what he is, does he roll out of bed in the morning and think, “f%%k me! Did I kill a lot of people?” Clearly not, as his actions since are those of someone who regards themselves as a great statesperson rather than the war criminal that everyone outside of his close circle thinks him to be. That is part of question too I guess… is good subjective? Depending on who you speak to. Or is it that people specifically choose who they speak to so as to elicit the desired response? If that is the case though, do people know they are doing that? Do they hang around with those that will reinforce their conformation bias as a means to safeguard their self image? We are definitely into ‘inception’ territory here aren’t we?
I have had a lot of bad and evil done to me over the years and it is still happening. I could never have imagined that sham medical assessor Atos and the Work Capability Assessment could be unleashed on the sick and disabled and I am still amazed now about how few care or even remember the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people under the first wave of Tory austerity. The man in charge throughout this, Iain Duncan Smith, clearly thinks that he is a thoroughly decent human being, so much so that not only did he insist that protesters calling him ‘Tory Scum’ were arrested, charged and brought to trial but that they be tried again when the first trial found them innocent. The amusing upshot is that after the second trial upheld the defendants’ description of Smith as ‘Tory Scum’ we can all call him the same. Thanks Iain!
I’ve had evil upon evil done to me and everyone else for as long as I can remember, from Thatcher onwards, the Conservative party have torn this country to shreds. Do they know they are evil? Again, they band together with likeminded folks to justify their appalling actions. To the Tories, evil is contextual, they ‘other’ the rest of the population and tell themselves that they deserve their success and it had nothing to do with family money, school connections or some other systemic unfairness.
When I was being thrown out of my home I couldn’t believe just how many people would happily sign up to work for letting agents and do the bidding of greedy, vile, people. I would be threatened by court orders just because I didn’t want to vacate my home during covid in the coldest months because some potential buyer wanted to poke around in my home of 13 years that they only saw as a money making opportunity.
Most evil or wrong doing seems to be diluted in some way or another, the estate agents, the surveyors, the builders and trades people that make a living working for these people all make up little excuses in their heads to tell themselves that they are ok people. They can point a finger at someone else up the food chain and tell themselves that they are the bad guy, not them.
I wonder how that applies to the property developer that gutted the entire building around me over 6 or more months (I’ve blotted a lot of this out). He knew my mother had just died and he threw me out of my home because he saw he could make a lot more money if he jammed in a second bedroom; sure, there would be partition walls halfway across windows and rooms in perma-darkness but… money. he really liked money. He exposed me to constant noise and torment for all that time, invaded my space and poisoned my lungs when I should have been grieving for my loss in peace. If done out of sheer spite, that’s a prison sentence, if done as he did it, he’s an entrepreneur. Evil is indeed a matter of context.
I have had awful things done to me by those that know me for even less and those events hurt even more. I have been cheated on, lied to, had people try and intimidate me on the internet (hence no comments) and in the real world. Partly through this annoyingly autistic habit of speaking the truth and partly through the blowback of someone trying to cover their tracks whilst two-timing me. Was evil intended? I don’t think so, but it happened regardless. The concept of good and evil gets very muddied when the notion of virtue signalling comes into play. I was attacked by people who live in the most ostentatious house in their street, Where everyone around them scrapes by as renters in one floor as a flat, they own an entire building and yet woe betide anyone that questions their socialist credibility. Hypocrisy comes into much of this; homeowners gentrifying the area, championing renters rights after they have indirectly caused their plight in the first place, anti capitalists with awfully nice homes and cars and the fanciest of houses in the fanciest of areas, environmental campaigners who jump on a short hall flight at the first opportunity. It’s amazing just how quickly these people will turn on a disabled person who has suffered at the hands of the Tories, the Department of Work and Pensions and bad landlords when their left wing values are put into question.
The reason I put myself through hell to write a book about my experience of the housing crisis was to put a human face on it. Most evil is carried out through ‘othering’ as mentioned above. It’s easy to take someone’s money away if you tell yourself that they are lazy, it’s easy to move into an already crowded area and force the prices up if you tell yourself that you are improving the area, it’s easier to put up rents or force people out on the streets if you can tell yourself that you worked harder or they are lesser people. I wanted to show that you can be a tea total, drug free, hardworking, ‘decent’ human being and have your life utterly destroyed by a combination of bad luck and greed, there is not much in the way of those but the most dedicated of fascists or the most rabid of capitalists who could claim that I in any way brought my situation upon myself. Not that, in a fair and just society, those things I described should mean anything but, sadly, they do, everyone deserves a safe and warm home, they are just the basic building blocks of a sane and healthy society. I wanted to create something real, shockingly real, and very human to possibly nudge a few consciouses into some human beings that are clearly lacking them. From everything that I have learned about people, though, it is a bit of a fool’s hope but then I am not denying that I am a fool.
Imagine how I felt, though, when the person who had already aimed human hand grenades in mine and other peoples’ (I later discovered) path had now declared themselves to be an expert in the area of rental housing, despite owning their own home for longer than many of their fellow renters rights campaigners have been alive and being involved in numerous enterprises that have indirectly whacked up the housing and rental prices… Can you imagine how that felt?… Hang on! Can you though?
Much of what I have described is about empathy, could Tony Blair put himself in the position of an Iraqi child as smart bombs rained down upon Baghdad? Could the ‘healthcare professional’ that described me as perfectly fit for work despite being a shut in for the decade prior imagine the toll of a year of appeals had on my mental and physical health? (I have had ptsd from that ever since). Does Iain Duncan Smith ever imagine how many deaths he directly caused and feel the fear and desperation of all those that died? Did Margaret Thatcher ever stop to consider her destruction of British industry, the deaths of soldiers for a rain sodden island in the middle of nowhere or just what would happen when the council housing disappeared? Do the people who nailed my photo to lampposts still believe that I am a ‘bad man’ because someone else told them so and I dared to question the sense of what they were doing and the damage it could cause, did they imagine how it must feel to have that much hate and those sort of threats directed at you from unnamed sources? Do the estate agents who threatened me with court action even remember my name? Would the guy who profited from my being slung out of my home of fourteen years so he could make an extra few thousand pounds even recognise me if he passed me in the street? It’s amazing the mental gymnastics that some people go through just to make what they do seem okay and the juggling that they go through to justify their continued wrong doing.
Which brings me to the situation right now. Does the person who knew me and now is blocking my path to promote my book on the housing crisis locally know that they are causing harm to me and to the whole cause of improving the housing crisis and, if so, do they care? The truth is, I haven’t a clue. To be honest, I honestly don’t know who that person truly is and I doubt that I ever did. Their actions seem entirely insane to me and completely unfathomable.
This brings me, finally, to the second part of the question… Am I a good person?
Surely this one fact must have a massive effect on who and what I see as wrong or indeed evil.
In a way, I am the last person to even judge that as I cannot separate myself fully from my actions to judge. The fact that I don’t think I am is actually a sign that I’m probably better than I think but we are getting into the realms of circular logic here. I can be ratty sometimes, I swear a lot and I am less forgiving than I’d like to be, I could be better at recycling, I didn’t go to my own mother’s funeral and I would never go on a protest march, however the last two are down to autism but I still didn’t do them and they haunt me. There are things I know upset other people that I don’t feel in the slightest bit sorry about, like not going to weddings or their social gatherings (autism again) but the ones that really upset people are the drawings… I have done some horrendous drawings of people over the years (I can’t judge as to their technical competence or ‘badness’) but, to be frank, I’ve just held up a mirror to them or the situation so those that are offended always deserve it (although , to be fair, I would say that, wouldn’t I?)… and that is about it, I think. There are a lot of people that hate me though… although I have a good idea who instigated most of that and why.
Autistic people can put people’s backs up, there is no secret to that. It’s sometimes because of the uncanny valley thing of trying to act more ‘normal’ (whatever that is) and allistic people sensing that somethings is ‘off’ or the complete honesty thing upsetting someone or the sensory processing disorder meaning that we have massively misunderstood something or have been misunderstood ourselves. We are disabled in some very unique ways that are hard to comprehend and these are some of them and it causes us to often be disliked ‘just because’.
I don’t even want to write this bit as I can’t bear vanity or virtue signalling and I make a point of keeping much of what I do very private…. Do you know what? I’ve written and deleted this paragraph of good things that I’ve done a number of times and it nauseates me. I don’t keep a score of this stuff and it would be indelicate to list who I’ve helped and why. You are going to have to trust me on this… But that is part of the point isn’t it? I have found that if you look in the papers and online sites, the shittier a human being is, the more mentions they seem to have. You will not have heard of the nicest people I know and never will as they hate publicity.
We have hit an impasse then in that how can we actually know who is good and who is bad? If the bad think they are good and the good won’t admit that they are, then how can anyone judge anyone’s actions? And my answer to that is….
Have you had a good look at the state of the world recently?
You can buy my book about the housing crisis here.
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