There once was a man called Rousseau who wrote a book containing nothing but ideas. The second edition was bound in the skins of those who laughed at the first. – Thomas Carlyle

I suppose people could look at this morning’s post about philosophers tackling the subject of evil and dismiss it as academic wank, even as one writer, Douglas Murray, gave examples from recent events of what happens when the philosophical idea that evil is merely banal or even non-existent, spread out into societies and result in us being unable to confront evil even by calling it what it is.

But we now have an even more recent example than that, the cold-blooded murder of a Health Insurance CEO on the streets of Manhattan by a very wealthy, privileged, educated – and unhinged – young man, which I already covered in the post Crime and Punishment In An Amoral Society, focusing on the surge of support the killer was getting.

But while much of that could be dismissed as the usual insanity of social media algorithms the following can’t be:

The Emerson College poll found 41% of voters ages 18 to 29 saw Thompson’s murder as “acceptable,” while just 40% found it somewhat or completely “unacceptable.”

It gets worse, because even as you can laugh at some of these supporters as being horrific in body and soul…

… there are plenty more, especially young woman it would seem, who think the killer is “hot” both physically and morally.

This extends to late-night American “comedy” and light entertainment shows:

  • Earlier this month, Jon Stewart of “The Daily Show” alerted his audience that Mangione had been captured after a brief manhunt. The crowd’s reaction? Boos. “Look, I’m sorry, guys,” Stewart said without missing a beat. Did he know something we didn’t? Was he truly “sorry” that an alleged killer had been corralled?
  • Over at “Jimmy Kimmel Live!,” the host shared his colleagues’ lust for Mangione despite his alleged crime. Turns out “Kimmel” female staffers dig his abs without caring about what he’s accused of doing – killing a father and husband in cold blood. The bit aired with a few chuckles from the same host who cried on camera over Donald Trump’s Nov. 5 victory.
  • And then there’s “Saturday Night Live”….“Weekend Update” co-anchor Colin Jost heard what The New York Post called “raucous cheers” erupting after he name-checked the alleged murderer.

These shows have dehumanised opponents of the Left for years so it’s a little surprising that they haven’t caught the wave of the latest Lefty hate object. But perhaps what we’re seeing here is not a celebration of evil but the usual human rationalisation that proclaims that what is being done is good being used against evil? That has been the explicit argument I’ve seen from many online that the CEO was a cold-blooded murderer himself, because of his company denying health care insurance claims.

In the movie The Usual Suspects, one of the memorable lines from the antagonist is this :

The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn’t exist.

For the supporters of this murderer the Devil does not exist and is not tempting them; they are simply committing an act of justice that will lead to more justice – like a 100% government run healthcare system for the USA, like that of Britain and Canada. But none of them can surely think, as the old Anarchists of the 19th century did, that merely one murder will be enough?

Similarly Eichmann thought that the Jews had corrupted Western civilisation and would specifically destroy Germany; an act of evil, so driving them out or killing them was an act of justice and good against evil. The difference (so far) was that he then went on to enable large numbers of like-minded people to commit vast amounts of murder in pursuit of that goal, aided by him avoiding the question of his own evil by not performing any murders himself, up close and personal as Luigi Mangione might say – although there is no evidence that Mangione thinks what he did was evil, any more than his supporters do. Perhaps Eichmann would have been thrilled by such killing, given his eager support of the whole Wannsee plan.

At least one university student wrote recently of another poll, conducted at his university that yielded much the same results

But here at Princeton, a poll of nearly 1,500 students on the Fizz social network revealed that 25% found Mangione’s action “completely justified,” with another 22% saying Thompson’s death was “deserved.” Only 13% managed to say the killer was purely “in the wrong.” 

Unlike the rest of America he is not surprised by this at all, given his experiences at Princeton with his age group:

I’m seeing far worse on my Ivy League campus every day — the logical result of the morality crisis running rampant throughout “elite” academia and among many of my generation….To far-left young Americans, on any given issue, the world is divided into two buckets: oppressor and oppressed…. There is little room for nuance, and next to none for negotiation.
…
Just last week, the Daily Princetonian published an article exploring the campus dialogue surrounding Israel, or the lack of it. I told the paper I’d certainly be willing to sit down and have a conversation with a student supporter of the Palestinian cause.
…
“You don’t go around asking oppressed people why they don’t have conversations with their oppressors,” a pro-Palestinian senior scolded the paper.

He goes on to argue that this is not just a university problem, but that it has far-reaching consequences.

The institutions tasked with educating our (supposedly) brightest minds have instead become breeding grounds for moral equivocation. Universities that once championed critical thinking and open inquiry are now dominated by ideological conformity and simplistic binaries — and we risk raising a generation that cannot distinguish right from wrong.

I’d say he’s missed the boat. That university-academic environment, plus schools further back in the supply chain, has already raised at least one generation, Millennials (or Gen Y if you prefer) that think along those lines. Possibly also Gen-Z, although the latter were raised by Gen-X and may have sufficient scepticism about everything, to disable any such mass movement.

The thing is that, despite all these articles above bashing the Left, in the last couple of weeks I’ve encountered a number of people, right-wing Boomers and Gen-X, who – while not openly celebrating the murder of Brian Thomson or supporting Mangione – merely shrugged their shoulders and implied that he got what he deserved.

As the Nazis and Communists well knew, mass movements also need such cynical apathy.

So does the Devil.

The thing is that those people would likely react much the same way were someone to kill Dr Fauci, whereas the supporters of Thomson’s murderer would switch their moral outrage 180 degrees.

=============

More of a chuckle but yet another example of the university education being doled out in the USA today that is a “twofer” in also producing extremist activists, ‘Islam Is Magic; Magic Is Science; Science Is Empire’:

What are your tuition dollars buying these days? Well, let’s see. At the University of South Carolina, you can learn all about how “Islamic Magic” can be used both as a weapon against the evil Western world and a remedy for the damage it has done. Yes, this is the kind of thinking that gets formerly ordinary kids joining Antifa and living in pup-tents for Hamas.