The Voices of Good vs Evil

So the question was asked in our recent Middle Nation content talk. Why is the voice of evil always louder than the voice of good? It's a good question. And there's a there's a number of ways that you can approach a question like that. So necessarily when you decide to approach it in a certain way as I will have to, you neglect exploring all the other ways that you could potentially approach it.

That that doesn't mean that the way that I'm gonna approach it now is definitive or authoritative. It just happens to be the way I'm gonna choose to approach it. So there may be equally or even more useful ways of approaching it. So let me just say that as a disclaimer. Good and evil are not simple or small topics.

As the question was asked in the context of discussing Western and particularly American violence and oppression and our struggle against it, and more precisely in the context of Muslim preparedness and strategizing and sort of preemptive, proactive confrontation with the forces of Western domination. Because of that, I think I will look at it less as philosophical question and more as a pragmatic question, more a question of perspective. Because this is a sentiment a sentiment that you will feel when you are someone who is involved in confronting the forces of oppression and violence because that's what you're focused on. It's not necessarily that the voices of evil are louder. It's just that you, are more attentive to those voices.

Evil is more conspicuous. It stands out because your own instincts are to identify and oppose it. And you identify it as evil because it conflicts with the interest of what and whom you care about and prioritize. So what you identify as the voice of evil will be amplified in proportion to the extent to which you care about and prioritize those things or those people. In other words, it's your love that makes their hate seem louder.

I mean, an old lady does something in the street that's embarrassing and people laugh at her, people find it funny, you might feel sorry for your for her or you might be amused yourself. You might be amused, but not if it's your mother. If it's your mother, anyone and everyone who laughs at her will become in your mind horrible people, And their behavior might make you lose your faith in humanity's decency because your love for your mother amplifies the evil of anything wrong that might ever be done to her. Now I'm not saying that good and evil are relative, but anytime you think that the voice of evil is louder or it's more prevalent or more effective or more dominant than good, anytime you think that the that the voice of evil is louder than the voice of good, well, that's a matter of perspective, and that is relative. In my opinion, it is objectively wrong.

The voices of good constitute the soundtrack of our lives. Again, evil is conspicuous because it is out of tune. It's like when there's feedback on a microphone, or imagine if like a trombone suddenly interrupted the moonlight sonata. It's out of place. It's disruptive.

But overwhelmingly, in my opinion, people are good. They do good. They want good. They're nice to each other. They don't cause deliberate harm to one another, and most of us live our lives peacefully.

And that peace is made possible by everyone. Most places in the world, most societies, even, western societies exist as a sort of tapestry of the general goodwill between people. The fitra of all human beings is Islam, so there's no question about the fundamental core goodness of people. And furthermore, it's precisely that core goodness, that inclination to goodness that Shaitan uses to attract us to evil. He beautifies evil.

He makes evil seem good, and he has to do this or else we wouldn't be drawn to it. He has to make us think that we're doing good. People do evil thinking that they're doing good most of the time. And this is often down to just being unable to distinguish between what is independently and objectively good and what is just self interest or self gratification. And it's also down to not being able to properly weigh the actual value and importance of our self interest and our self gratification against the consequences to ourselves and to others of us serving our own self interest and us serving our own self gratification.

We don't weigh the consequences of that against how actually unimportant it really is. In other words, it's not worth it. Because look, I mean, very, very few people do wicked evil things with a deliberate conscious intention of doing wicked evil things. They do what they do because of some rationale, some justification that seems good to them. They convince themselves or Shaitan convinces them that they're doing something that's justified, something that's rational, something even that's fair, even while it is actually heinous and criminal.

So we're actually talking about people engaging in actions that they think are good just as we think that we're pursuing good by opposing them. You know? They must be asking themselves why are the why are their voices so loud? Because like with Gaza, there's massive ongoing protests. The whole world has been calling for a ceasefire in the United Nations.

You know? American companies, western companies are suffering significant financial losses due to boycotts. Israel has been brought before the ICJ on genocide charges, on and on. Our voices are quite loud. So to a certain contingent of people, they might think that the world has gone mad because of us and not because of what they're doing.

They see us opposing genocide and think humanity is ruined. They think we're antisemitic. They think we're terrorists, and they really believe it. You know, the majority of Israelis genuinely believe that not enough people have been killed in Gaza. They genuinely believe that genocidal mass murder is good and justified against women and children and babies in Gaza.

They really believe that. To a certain extent, this is just because, you know, the Jews, the Israelis have been fed a steady diet of indoctrination their whole lives about antisemitism, about the holocaust, about, you know, Israel's existential precariousness and so on. A diet of paranoia and histrionics and racism. And, of course, this is all substantiated by some realities in history like the Nazis, like the the fact of European historic persecution of the Jews, and then by some personal experience maybe, personal experience with anti Semitism or anti Jewish bigotry or something like that, which gets magnified and inflated by politically motivated propaganda and indoctrination. But they legitimately feel that it will be evil to not commit a genocide against the Palestinians.

This is a was a writ large state propaganda and indoctrination. That's what that is. It's was was a on an industrial scale. And this is sort of where we can talk objectively about the prevalence of the voice of evil. I've said many times that the only true conspiracy theory that I believe in is the conspiracy of Iblis to derail mankind into and corruption.

So, you know, the same way that I've talked about how the most effective and logical strategy for social change is to lobby the in the society, the influencers. So influence the influencers, those with power, those with authority, those with reach. Either lobby them or try to become from among them. Well, it stands to reason that Shaytan, that Iblis would do the same thing to try to achieve his version of social change. In other words, Iblis logically would target the people in society who have the most power, who hold the most sway, the people who control the major institutions of influence, you know, that manufacture public opinion, the arbiters of society's values and standards.

Iblis will very likely concentrate his efforts on those people so that he can recruit their influence in society for his own goals. And I think this would be relatively easy for Chetan to do. The would be pretty straightforward. I mean, you're good. You know?

Your your power is deserved. The population doesn't know what's good for them. They need your wise guidance and control. You need to help them by keeping them in line. Because what's good for you is good for society after all.

You know, what's good for general motors is good for the country. That's what they said. Your self interest serves the greater good of humanity, etcetera, etcetera. In fact, God anointed you with power because you're so special, because you're so good. It isn't oppression.

It's fatherly discipline. If you don't crack down on these people, they'll destroy themselves. You're just helping them. You created a garden. They live in a jungle.

They're, you know, human animals. You have to keep them at bay for their own good. White man's burden and all that. You know, that the the that Shaytan would use on the powerful is is quite straightforward and pretty easy, and it's not that much different than the that he uses on all of us, just on a smaller scale. I mean, it's just a matter of justifying self indulgence and cruelty on moral pretexts.

But when it's the rich and powerful, who after all have primarily spent their life already pursuing self interest, when they completely surrender to Shaytan, all of the influence that they have, all of the institutions that they control, all of their power is directed in pursuit of Shaytan's agenda, of Iblis' agenda. So over time, this becomes an elaborate social, political, economic, and intellectual system, fortified and self reinforcing. And it becomes an institutional behemoth that is structurally designed to ensure that Shaytan's view of humanity is realized and that his objectives are advanced to ensure that human beings will live down to Iblis' opinion of them and his expectation of them. And this is the West, frankly. I mean, no so called civilization is more renowned for their sacralization of self interest and self indulgence and selfishness and self supremacism, which is the the nefs.

The self is the nefs, which we understand has to be suppressed and tamed and controlled. But their view is that everything else should be suppressed and tamed and controlled except for the nefs. And again, of course, this is largely useful to those in power because the nefs, the self, is impatient. It has a short attention span. It's highly susceptible to It's emotional.

It's easily amused, easily distracted, it's volatile. It's obviously given to short term gratification, the the gratification of desires and appetites. And all of these are qualities that make people very easy to control and manipulate. Your fitra, everyone's fitra has an innate need and an inclination to worship, serve, and obey Allah. But when that need and that inclination is misdirected and convinced that, for example, Allah doesn't exist, then the need to worship, serve, obey doesn't go away.

It just attaches itself to something else. And this is where people can end up taking their own selves as gods besides Allah. And, you know, you have this very popular, very western sentiment of follow your heart, which if you think about it, no different in substance than the satanic slogan, do what thou wilt, which is actually also just another way of saying the pursuit of happiness. Now this doesn't even actually require disbelief in Allah, in God. You'll still end up in the same place if the God that you worship and serve and obey is nothing but a vague concept with no defined method of worship and no articulated unambiguous duties that you're supposed to fulfill.

No clear commands and prohibition prohibitions to obey. So, again, anyone or anything else can just step in and provide those things for you. Your own desires, your peers, your spouse, the state, corporations, they'll teach you how to obey. They'll teach you what to obey. They'll teach you how to worship.

So all of these dynamics in the society undermine or sabotage any effort to organize and mobilize people for any sort of long term campaign or struggle against the very system that has made it hard to organize and mobilize people. You know, that doesn't mean that the people who don't organize and mobilize doesn't mean that they're evil. They're just operating inside of a whole system that just makes it much easier. It just it just facilitates their own triviality, their own lack of seriousness about their lives and about morals and about values and about responsibility and so on. So the movers and shakers in a society like this, the owners of institutional power are largely led by and the rest of the population is largely neutralized.

So there's a disparity of relative power and influence, not because there are, for instance, more people being evil, but because there is a segment of people who are being misled into thinking that evil is actually good, and those people are disproportionately powerful people. And they're operating within a system that was created and developed by the same types of people as them, who were similarly misled and misguided as they are. So there's what you can call systemic now. Systemic kuffer. And that's what we are confronting, and that's what we're struggling against.

So that's why it might seem sometimes that the voices of evil are louder or stronger than the voices of good, but they're not.