A friend writes, during the course of a good deal of correspondence discussing the failure of the Alaska Department of Transportation and Municipality of Anchorage to address the safety of bicyclists and pedestrians,
Might as well ask about the
To be just a hair less dramatic, aren’t we really asking whether Alaska or Anchorage are
- inept
- myopic
- a slave to inertia
- incompetent
- additional selections of your choice
or just plain
Thinking about this, my mind of course reaches out to bikers who work for these entities. How do they see themselves? I think it fair to say that if I can talk about a they, they feel they are doing a good job. I think this is consistent with the the delusional folk at Bike Anchorage and Vision Zero. By that I mean people who are high on the illusion they are “MAKING A DIFFERENCE“. But, the question remain, does that make them
John Stuart Mill said in 1867: “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.”1, which does not go quite as far as we are suggesting (that looking away, or deluding oneself is the essence of evil), but we I think close enough.
In other words, I am willing to settle on evil being something less some diabolic Flemingesque villain, something less dramatic than an advocate of heinous greed or boundless lust. I think the Shadow knows evil, and the evil in the human heart is perhaps crystallized in the icon for our era, Narcissus.
Which perhaps distorts the original nature of the question, but no more than the consuming Narcissism evident in our society distorts our reality.
- 1867 March 16, Littell’s Living Age, [Inaugural Address at University of St. Andrews: 1867 February 1], Page 664, Number 1189, Fourth Series, Littell and Gay, Boston. (Google Books full view) link