Evil and immorality doesn't exist...

I love playing poker.  There was a time I thought I could have turned pro.  Just needed the balls to go out there with my life savings and just believe in myself.  I had a pretty good run for many years and even entered in the 2006 Main Event at WSOP.  Made it through day 1 and halfway through day 2.  Not bad for my first go-round.  Even as a cash player I was good.  Made a consistent positive ROI but as I played in higher limits, I couldn't adjust my game to newer knowledge.  Every good player is constantly learning to improve their game and often times it's to fix what they've been doing wrong for such a long time.  During this adjustment period, you can often feel frustrated because as you're learning to plug holes, your play is negatively reinforcing the new behavior.  I often times compare it to fixing a faulty, but functional, golf or tennis swing.  You could make it work at a certain level of play but to advance to a higher level play, you have to do away with the bad habits and adopt new ones.  So as you're changing your golf swing or tennis serve, you get a little worse in the transition.  That's what happened to me in poker.

What I got out of poker is many life lessons including the intent of this posting.  Morality and the philosophical discussion about good and bad is about uncovering misconceptions and "fixing" faulty methods.  This is what sort of got me thinking about the subject.

No sane, rational person deliberately picks the wrong or immoral decision.  What I mean is typically no murderer or thief accepts that the actions they chose were immoral or a choice at all.  There's usually a reason that every criminal will use to justify their actions.  So what they do is they paint a picture or some type of context in which to judge the content of their actions.  At the end of the story or when the whole painting is complete, it is supposed to look "correct."

This uncovers what I think is the central conflict when discussing philosophy or more specifically the concepts of good and evil.  Evil is never deliberately picked.  The only chance Evil has is to appear Good.  Only in the sheep's clothing of "good" can "evil" be chosen.  So how does Evil get picked over Good?  This can only be accomplished through a faulty understanding of what is to believed as true.

So let me illustrate with an example.  I like to draw on things from personal experience and what comes to mind is taken from the world of fitness.  Most women who work out, including my wife, really shun working with free weights or even any kind of real strength training.  Why?  Because they don't want to look like "her."  Of course, "her" is either some girl at the gym who takes steroids or they refer to a female bodybuilder.  This is a faulty understanding of reality.  The reality is muscle size is largely due to the presence of the hormone, testosterone.  Most women naturally have some testosterone but nowhere nearly enough to illicit a training response to grow enough muscle to look like a body builder. At the same time, these same women want to lose body fat and get slimmer.  No matter how many articles I show or the science behind it all, I cannot convince my wife or her friends to start training with weights seriously.  Is this immoral?  No, but it is the incorrect choice because of a misconception about reality, which is analogous to making an immoral decision.

Somewhere along the way of how someone thinks, there is a misconception of something they thought was true.  Now it is certainly very possible that our misconceptions arise out of sheer ignorance.  We simply do not have the knowledge yet and we are still operating on a wrong hypothesis.  But another possibility is that our misconceptions are due to being lied to.  In other words, someone with knowledge is deliberately passing off a falsehood as truth.

Since no one would pick falsehood as truth, the falsehood has to be marketed as truth and then one could only hope that the poor victim will simply trust or accept the falsehood as truth.  This is how successful poker is played.

The markings of a poor poker player is Consistency.  If you always bluff, you will lose money.  If you never bluff, you will lose money.  Inconsistency is the winning formula.  Gaining power over your opponents can only be achieved through inconsistency.  When they think you're zagging, you're zigging and vice versa.  But the only way to get them to make the wrong decision is to first appear to be one thing but in reality be the other.  So in order to win the maximum amount, they have to think you're bluffing when you're not bluffing and also think your not bluffing when you are.  The facade has to always appear like it's real.

This is how power and evil still persist in the world.  Lies are perpetuated and passed off as good knowing that rational people consciously choose good.  The normally successful player's strategy wouldn't work if he knows his opponent's objective is to lose money.  Then you wouldn't need to play poker.  Through the lies, the people peddling the stuff remain in power and that is their objective.

Just like in the movie, 'Enter the Dragon' : "The enemy only has images and illusions to hide behind, where he hides his true motives.  Destroy the illusion and you destroy the enemy."