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Also,, wherever i put quotes around stuff (like "evil") I mean it's a subjective opinion, and I'm just writing down the common thought in my western-world. The same argument could still work if you completely flipped the meaning of all the quotes.Everyone wants peace, everyone would love peace, provided it was their definition of peace (heh). Thanks to this, people come to odds over some issues, and arguably, one side is the "good' side, and one side is the "evil" side. People talk about preventing others from doing wrong things, whether it's threats of jail sentences or whatever, but inevitably people will still try because they think they can beat the system. However, people would probably be more loathe to try if they knew they'd undoubtedly be caught.
On a flipside, this increases peoples 'want' to break the rules and do the wrong (or right) thing, since people are generally incredibly independant and don't like to be dictated to,,, thus trying to bring about peace may inadvertently cause more chaos. Yet people would still seek, and even demand, peace.
Specifically, I think about today's "war on terror" (and it'd be nice if this could stay non-political). To summarise very briefly,, "evil" people attacked during 9/11, and the victims demanded action for vengeance, stability, and in their minds, peace by bringing those responsible to justice or otherwise. In order to achieve this, things were put into motion to make any such coordination more difficult.
Even before anybody was charged/invaded/killed under these new acts, people were already concerned about the far-reach of these things, laws, juristictions, the military, whatever. To relate a story here at home, the Indian Doctor Haneef charged and released here in Australia realised a couple opinions in my sharehouse, one specifically being "What's wrong with giving someone a SIM and telling them to never use it",,, bringing into question the systems brought in to bring about "peace" and prevent people from doing "wrong" things.
And people have been right, there have been abuses of power, as seen in the media, there have been "wrong" things done by the people given these powers.
Now, lets make a little assumption. There's undoubtedly people with these powers who are "good" people, who wouldn't abuse it and who would do the right thing, and who *are* doing the right thing,, and inevitably "striking fear into the hearts of evil", since their tasks are to bring justice to those who would do evil. Yet at the same time these people are stifled by the people they seek to protect due to their well-founded belief that these authorities are doing the "wrong" thing. Further, people start to question "When am I going to be charged for some simple act",, then paranoia kicks in and those who wanted to bring about a 'good' world are now percieved as 'wrong' and 'evil'. Specifically, people fear the power that these authorities have to quite literally destroy lives, in *exactly* the same way those "evil" people in 9/11 had the power to destroy their lives. Yet that power is what lets them bring "evil" people down.
OK,, thats the end of the real world example, just wanted to try and relate it to something people understand.
To summarise what I'm curious about, in a more traditional, simple world, a world with the common person, evil people who would try to benefit off the common's expense, and the good people who would protect those people, is it actually impossible for evil to be "stamped out" because people fear a power which can destroy all evil more than evil itself? Ergo, when all the evil people are destroyed, the common people will just find more evil people to destroy until nobody is left?
Meh,, end of my rantings, back to late-night work :(
