Checkered Premises

Have you ever gotten yourself dead set on a mission? A case where you find it near impossible to give up doing something? I know I have. It generally involves a disagreement with a number of people on the Internet, people who seem to all be making the same error. And I take it upon myself to correct them all. To stamp out the error. After a while, though, I realize I may be embarrassing myself. I start to feel like a fish on a hook, and all the stupid  or erroneous  is just drawing me in. I end up a sucker. The solution, ultimately, is to admit I can't win. It's also to admit that I've been fixated  on a particular goal, and I've stopped paying sufficient attention to other things which require attention. I'm reminded, here, believe it or not, of Dr. Death. As portrayed in the NBC series, Dr. Christopher Duntsch is a man who lives by committing to missions. His first mission (as a young man) is to succeed in football. But he's terrible at it. He confuses his lef...

In order to understand human nature fully, we need accurate portrayals of unexcused human evil. Today, all too frequently, we see dramatic antagonists motivated by a malevolence explained by early-life circumstances. What we don't see nearly as often are villains explained by nothing other than their own errors of thought, and their unwavering, unyielding commitment to those errors despite nearly overwhelming evidence. The evil man's mantra is: "There is no way I'm wrong about this." The evil man cannot (without great personal cost) admit his own error. The degree of evil is the importance of the uncorrected error. Self-deception is the act of accepting a false belief which serves to flatter one's own image or situation. It can be as minor as "I'll call him back tomorrow" when one actually has no such intention, or as major as "He deserved to die" after committing a murder. It can be as modest as "I have more important things to do...