Treating a person as a thing

Evil is what happens as, when, and to the extent that, a person is treated as a thing. This statement of the concept is plain, clear and easy to understand and it can be rigorously applied to any situation we think about or find ourselves in.

As human societies become ever more complex and ever more dependent upon world wide communications and trade, it is essential to use this concept as a basis of judgment about relationships, communities and the behaviours of people and organisations. Furthermore this statement of the nature of evil helps bring into sharp focus the potential for evil to occur through the depersonalisation and loss of empathy which seem to be intrinsic features of legally constructed corporate entities.

In other words, one of the greatest dangers that threatens our modern world is the eradication of "soul" - which really is just an old word for empathy - from bureaucratically organised social organizations. We can say with a fair degree of confidence that, natural disasters aside, all the great and devastating wrongs of the last couple of centuries as well as all the insidious erosions of empathic community, have come about as the result of non-empathic people, I mean psychopathic narcissists, gaining control of large, bureaucratic social organizations.

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Also see: Government Guiding Principles