R.A. Grimes on recognizing Evil

You've learned your ABCs and 123s and now the time has come to think about values and what values strongly guide the direction you take in life. A basic value is to protect yourself against harm. A primary harm: Falling into the trap of evil. To protect yourself from evil, let's look into the mind of evil through the lenses of axiological science.

By understanding the values between nice and nasty, right and wrong, and good and evil, you give yourself a cognitive chest of tools to look into the mind and brain of evil. This understanding is your best defense against evil.

The mind of evil often reflects an ideology with chameleon and destructive dimensions. You see the chameleon on the surface with oozing smiles, words of hope, and sometimes a projection of great things to come that stir a sense of pride for being part of a greater cause. The destructive values lie beneath the surface awaiting discovery.

Beneath the surface, there is no regard for the individual and his or her uniqueness. There is a devaluation of others, contempt, depersonalization and dehumanization. There is an absence of empathy.

Through the eyes of evil, the world is filled with fools to be manipulated and exploited. Thus, this person cannot afford to tell the truth about the underlying plan. Lies, deceptions, half-truths are presented as facts and reality to mask the destructive core.

To start your lessons on spotting and protecting yourself from evil, consider the following:

1. Our values apply to the perception of people, achievements, and ideologies and ideas. These categories of thinking with values blend and direct what we think, feel, and do. This is a values framework for understanding not only what makes you tick but what also gives you an important angle for understanding how other think, do, and feel.
2. Evil is a distortion of normal human desires and values. You'll commonly find this distortion expressed through an ideology that disguises no capacity to care for people. The connection to people is through an ideology that favors evil. People are seen as mere objects or things.
3. You gain clarity by paying close attention to those who would come at you armed with pure ideology. They may create an illusion of love and acceptance, but in the end the goal is to subvert the individuality and uniqueness of you by brainwashing you into thinking through the prism of their ideology.

In life it's often more important to ask the right questions than to get answers. When faced with a question of evil, there are three questions (1) What is the ideology that this person peddles? (2) What is the most realistic outcome? (3) Who gains the most through executing the ideology? (4) What is the worst-case scenario? An evil outcome is the common result of buying into a depersonalizing ideology that is made far more important than people or achievements.