Killers

We are surrounded by destroyers and killers. No matter how far away they are, they are still a threat as their behavior is very predictable. Let's look at a few examples.

Reading The Executioner’s Song, by Norman Mailer, it is impossible not to think that there are people who seem to have evil inside them since childhood. They are born evil, remain evil and continue to be so until death. As long as they live, they have the need to do evil, and to create problems for others and for themselves.

The Executioner’s Song is a book about the evil in the heart of man, about people for whom everything has gone wrong. It is a work about a murderer and about poverty (in many senses of the word), frustration, abandonment and cruelty. It is a reading experience that is at once dark and enlightening.

The book once again shows the fascination that many people have with criminals and murderers – the fascination with evil. Here is an excerpt: “He drew all eyes, all lenses. Schiller was not twice impressed with Gilmore [the murdered sentenced to death] as an actor. He did not rise to this occasion as a great ham actor, but chose to be oblivious to it.”

In The Executioner’s Song, from the moment Gary Gilmore is sentenced to death and the date of his execution is set, everything turns into a great narcissistic spectacle, a theater of negotiations, financial and otherwise, between lawyers, relatives of the condemned man, judges, police officers, journalists, film producers and various associates and bystanders.

It is as if death and evil badly needed to prevail and, in many cases, triumph. We should not expect common sense from people like these, nor from their most powerful representatives – which in many cases end up being ours too.

It is a circus. As Mailer says, “it is like “throwing a little meat to a lot of lions. (…) The perfect definition of a circus.”

Since the beginning of time (as in the Roman Empire), crowds have loved circuses, stages and other farcical scenarios, which continue to this day with the Internet. One of them is the so-called virtual reality. I don't know how far along its evolution is, but I have three expectations.

The first tells me that either inside or outside virtual reality, human nature will be the same, with all that it has of good and bad. The second tells me that evil will be ever present, and always stronger than good.

The third warns me that polarized mind will continue to dominate, as this is of interest to finance and is its main instrument. Under its influence, we will increasingly live in an artificial, rudimentary and dichotomous world.

Evil, stupidity and social networks seem to be closely related and feed on each other with great glutonery. On the Internet, everything indicates that their power will continue to increase, which reinforces the progression in the use of binary logic and the greedy mentality.

All of this blocks the paths to peace. Throughout our history, we have not been able to live in peace, without fear and threats, which keep people and communities in constant tension. Everyone claims to be averse to war, but we are always at war. Our nations are always signing agreements, pacts and treaties, such as those aimed at limiting greenhouse gas emissions, but which often only serve to be broken.

The attraction to death seems to outweigh the will to live. This is commonplace, but worth repeating: if anyone has any doubts, just compare the budgets allocated to wars and the arms industry with those allocated to education and health – at any time and place.

Now machines directly wage wars: they drop bombs, shoot, set fires, kill who they are programmed to kill, destroy what they are programmed to destroy. Through them, death rains from the skies and emerges from the seas. But machines do not yet decide who should die and why they should die. It is humans who decide that.

Machines work with increasing efficiency and, as we know, they are constantly improving. Humans, however, have improved little or not at all, and that is what should scare us the most.

Therefore, it is the evil that comes from humans that we must worry about, especially the diffuse and anonymous evil that, in the words of Hannah Arendt, seems to be “committed by nobodies”. Nevertheless, as we can see nowadays, it can thrive in some well-known individual – and does so in such a way that condemns him to be a hideous disseminator of fury and destruction.

So we shouldn't just fear the robots of the future and the possibility that they might turn to evil on their own. We also need to fear the robots of the present, because it is certain that there will always be human beings who will lead them in that direction.