I expect this post to be controversial so please check the disclaimer before you continue.

Preface:

Here’s a little story:

You live in a world ripe with chaos, violence and corruption. It wasn’t always like that, you’ve seen the gradual degradation as resources became sparse and people started fighting for them.

You truly want to restore the peace, but you’re utterly powerless. One day you hear of a magic lamp that can grant any wish (Look, I never said it was an original story). With nothing to lose, you start your desperate search for that convenient plot device that can’t exist.

After a traitorous journey, having lost all the companions you met along the way, after defeating a cabal of antagonists, against all odds, at the other end of the world, alone in a secluded dark cave, you find the precious artifact.

Your adventure flashes in front of your eyes: the pain, the sorrow, the loneliness, the injustice of it all, but also the undying hope. Tears start welling from all these conflicting emotions. You rub the lamp, a genie comes out of it in a puff of smoke.

“I may grant you 3 wishes…”

A spark of greed ignites in your heart, “I wish for more…”

“No, no, no! Listen dude, every-single-time, you guys think you’re SO clever wishing for unlimited wishes before I can even explain the freaking rules!”

“I’m sorry.”

“You’d better be! So where was I? Oh yeah, I may grant you 3 wishes BUT there are two rules you have to follow:

1. No matter what, I can only grant you 3 wishes in total, so wishing for more is useless.
2. You must be really careful what you wish for.

Other than that, you can ask anything, any questions?”

“By being careful you mean like, if I wish for a new heart it would kill one of my friends -if they were still alive- so I can get his heart or something sneaky like that?”

“What? No! I’m not the devil! My business is wish-granting, not soul-contract-tricks-whatever. This rule means I cannot prevent any unforeseen consequences from happening, even though I will try to match the wish with your true intentions.”

“Alright, in that case my wishes are:

1. I wish that all my friends and family were still alive.
2. I wish that our resource crisis were solved forever.
3. I wish that all evil, war, violence and crime disappeared from this planet.”

“Your wishes are now granted.”

Smoke quickly engulfs the cave as the genie and the lamp disintegrate, and you’re left in a silent void.

After that, your memory is a bit hazy. You return home to find all your relatives alive and well. All the problems that plagued the world are gone.

Order is restored, society is rebuilt. Resources spent on military or police around the world are redirected towards education, welfare and civil technologies.

A few decades pass, you die happily while humanity progresses to new heights. Soon after, the Solar System is colonized and the first extrasolar ship is readying up.

Everyone cheers on the telepathic live stream for the ship’s departure when suddenly, in the blink of an eye, a swarm of strange apparitions starts disintegrating everything.

Chaos ensues as the Solar System is overwhelmed. The only weapons are mining lasers and hypergolic rocket fuel. In matters of months, all trace of humanity is wiped out by an unidentified foe.

Rocket fuel can't melt laser beams, I suppose.

Look, there is no clear-cut morale in this story. Without the third wish, maybe humanity would have self-obliterated much sooner in another war. This was just an intro to open today’s subject: the dark side of abolishing “evil”.

Roots of evil:

But first we need to understand better what we’re talking about. For each topic we’ll ask what is it, what are the causes and how to reduce it.

Evil:

Evil, in a general sense, is defined by what it is not—the opposite or absence of good. It can be an extremely broad concept, although in everyday usage it is often more narrowly used to talk about profound wickedness. - Wikipedia

Well, this is… vague. Plus, good and bad are highly subjective concepts with strong religious vibes. Discussing this feels like trying to grab… controversial fog or something.

It seems that evil encompasses antisocial behaviors (lying, selfishness, hurting other people…) as well as some personal habits (vices) but let’s just not dip in those waters and move on.

Wars:

War is an intense armed conflict between states, governments, societies, or paramilitary groups such as mercenaries, insurgents, and militias. - Wikipedia

At least this definition is tangible enough. So, what are the roots of war?

Bear in mind, I’m not a war historian, but my impression is that every single war origin story is a unique and tangled mess of events predating the war and the social, cultural, economical, everythingical context surrounding it.

Whether a stolen cow leads to a spiral of thousands of deaths or an assassination detonates the barrel of powder that was 1914 Europe, that rabbit hole is too big for this sub-section.

On the subject of how to reduce war there’s something interesting: there seems to be a decline in armed conflicts. It might be temporary and not every part of the world is seeing improvement, but it’s there.

So instead, let’s retro-engineer this decline. There can’t be a simple, definitive answer, but a good start is to postulate that wars have fewer benefits and higher drawbacks nowadays and try to understand why.

The first that comes to my mind is, in 1928, war was declared illegal. It sounds ludicrous and received lots of criticism since it’s non-binding.

Still, after World War 2, it may have contributed, or rather illustrated a shift in public opinion against war. This, at least in democracies, might have deterred governments from waging wars for fear of reelection and bad PR.

A good example of this is the lexical used for government branches supervising the army. They’re generally called “Department or Ministry of Defense” when they used to be called “Department of War”.

Another more directly influential factor is the advent of nuclear weapons. It is hard to go to war when the result is mutual annihilation, after all.

Finally, economic interdependence through globalized supply chains and international trade agreements. Again, harder to go to war when it might strike a blow to your economy.

This is not an exhaustive list, but let’s end it here. If this is correct, as long as those anti-war incentives stay and spread, we can hope this downward trend continues.

Crimes:

This part ended up so big it became its own article.

Unseen consequences:

Evil, wars and crimes are bad^{[overused joke]}. The suffering they bring upon those on the receiving side makes them highly unpopular, and I personally wish they didn’t exist. Getting rid of them will be tremendously beneficial to society overall.

Sadly, I came to the realization that getting rid of all these things, if that was even possible, might have noxious consequences. But before that, let’s go on a tangent:

We are the result of a long natural selection process^{[no, seriously]}, wasting resources could mean death. This is why our bodies will go to great lengths not to feed unnecessary parts. Stop using your arm? Muscle atrophy. Your haircut blocks the view of one eye? Boom, amblyopia.

Next, let’s talk about our immune system. It’s an astonishingly complex machine that has been refined to fend off threats trying to hijack us for their own benefit. The issue is, the threats are constantly evolving and so is our immune system. This leads to an arms race where each side tries to outplay the other.

I’d love to go deeper but it’s not today’s topic. If you want to see a deep dive in another evolutionary arms race, I can’t recommend you enough this documentary on mimicry.

I talk about those phenomenons because they happen in society, to some extent.

In 2003, an outbreak of SARS ushered funding to study coronaviruses. But as the outbreak receded and time passed, public interest and funding faded away… Until the COVID-19 arrived.

Now look, this is a normal phenomenon. Funding and interest will generally go to the newest pressing matter. That’s due to recency bias, sure, but it’s also genuinely smart to handle the more urgent pressing matters first. Anyway, how to prioritize problems and maintain interest in a slow, hard to grasp, yet potentially devastating problem, is a topic for another day.

Regarding arms race, an example of one in society would be computer security:

• At the start, protections are minimal and communications are visible for all to see.
• Then, malicious hackers exploit those weaknesses for their benefit, so we start putting passwords, ciphering transmissions, monitoring accesses…
• In return, hackers try to bypass protections, steal passwords… It goes on and on to this day.
• In addition, as security gets increasingly complicated, it costs more to both sides, expanding our knowledge on attacking and defending those systems but locking resources that could be used otherwise.

If we apply this to our subject, it means that if, say, armed conflicts were to disappear, armies and their respective military–industrial complex would quickly lose funding and wither away. It’d be especially drastic since they are significant worldwide expenses. It has come to this because of a literal arms race between countries, further reinforced by the lobbying to maintain the many jobs that depend on it.

It’s good news, right? Imagine what we could do with all this extra funding, not forgetting that it’s less chance to destroy ourselves. Well, that’s one way to see it, but it also means that our know-how of organizing armies, information warfare, building and maintaining complex weapon systems will also disappear.

Maybe I’m exaggerating, some civil applications will maintain some of those aspects (e.g: civil aviation), and we still have the literature from the past. Still, at the very best it means our knowledge is stagnating and should the need to defend ourselves arises again, like in my vignette from earlier, it’ll take some vital time to get operational again.

You know me, I’m a man of resiliency, I like to pursue all the options and consider every possibility. I think losing defensive and offensive capabilities would be too dangerous, too naive. I despise violence, yet I recognize it as a tool we need to keep mastering if we ever need it.

Alleged picture of my mind.

Another example would be the disappearance of crimes. Police and investigators would lose funding and, in turn, we would lose our capabilities of maintaining order or investigating crimes. Again, this is something we shan’t allow.

Other reasons would include the economic downfall. Sure, crimes and wars are terrible to build trust in an economy, but the threat wars and crimes aren’t so bad. They surely have a net positive effect since they create new needs (army, weapons, police, guards, security systems…) and the jobs that go with them.

Finally, evil can be a motivation source: Anger, revenge, injustice are powerful motivators. To be clear, I’m not suggesting that people getting killed or robbed are worth the resulting “lust for retribution”. I might be stretching the argument here, but as I’m suffering from bouts of avolition (I’ve been writing this for like 4 months…), I feel like every source of motivation is worth mentioning.

In a nutshell, eliminating evilness would inevitably bring down other aspects of society with it. Things like police, armies, weapons, security systems would be rendered useless. It will also remove the use of aspects within ourselves, like wariness, the ability to recognize lies or to avoid misinformation.

You have the right to think it’s a good thing, to me, it’s too risky and naive not to maintain and improve all of these, let alone discarding them. I still want to reduce crimes and wars as much as possible though, we just need to think everything through, and with some planning, maybe everything I just said isn’t a fatality.

Going beyond:

Here’s what we could do to mitigate this issue. We could start by trying to anticipate and simulate threats. That could be:

• Raising public awareness on issues like misinformation
• Plan for hypothetical scenarios in advance, for a future pandemic for example… oops!
• Train for emergency situations, just like fire drills.

This can maintain preparedness in the absence of a real threat, but I don’t trust the public to maintain interest in a hypothetical, invisible threat. Look what happens when we have a slow, not immediately consequential, world shattering crisis to prevent.

We don’t have a choice to maintain a certain level of pressure. In effect, since we can’t get rid of evil, it won’t disappear but just in case it’s not enough on its own we must have a back-up plan.

This could take the form of “beneficial wickedness” (I’m not good at naming things, in case you haven’t noticed). Basically, it’s based on the white hats in computer security.

They’re a group of people that look for exploits and weaknesses in computer systems, not for their own benefits, but to reinforce them, and bounty, sometimes.

If we generalized this culture of ethical hacking, we could have a non-evil pressure force to maintain our defensive and offensive capabilities. Actually, I think it’d be interesting to enforce it even right now as it could help find loopholes in our laws, flaws in information vetting…

You might argue that we don’t need bounties, that a good citizen would report exploits and flaws for free. I don’t disagree, but I trust incentives more, if you’re a good citizen you can just refuse the bounty.

Conclusion:

Abolishing evil is a noble but unattainable goal, if we could, it would be beneficial but also lead to losing valuable skills and knowledge regarding our defenses against nefarious acts.

Hopefully, we may mitigate this issue by having preventive measures and replicating a bounty system à la white hats. Note, the main purpose of these measures is to prepare society against harmful events and identify security flaws. It means they could (and should) be implemented right now.