Evil is when everyone else in the peaceful fairy forest is frolicking having happy time and and a big feast, and you are stealing and hoarding the food, stopping people from having fun and forcing them to do military training instead, trying to drive away or even kill the new fairies from the other forest, and so on. Now why in the world would you be evil like that?
Because winter is coming and the other fairies have forgotten that summer doesn’t last. Because things aren’t so peaceful outside the forest and the undead are being seen in disturbing numbers. Because the fairies from the other forest aren’t just like you, and are actually fleeing others like themselves.
We have recently gotten very rich and comfortable, and it’s gone to our heads. The big jump has made us too optimistic, but also taken the fight out of our hardworking ambition. We imagine that it will always be like this, so we can just iron out a few details and everything will be perfect. We’ve forgotten how mean reality is, and started overdrawing our accounts to maintain the illusion. We’ve taken to accusing anyone who dissents from this rosy picture of being evil.
One of the central fallacies of progressive thought is that you can naively avoid the ugly realities, like that some people’s lives are going to really suck, or that we have to do hard things in the short term to survive in the long term. If you don’t make sure fertility is eugenic, Gnon will destroy you. If you deconstruct all your social technology because it hurts some people, Gnon will destroy you. If you bend all your resources towards making sure no one has it significantly worse than anyone else, Gnon will destroy you. If you reason that we don’t have to take drastic steps to keep civilization running, that civilization grows on trees, Gnon will destroy you. If you decide that fighting, mining, blue collar work, and dirty industry is too ugly to be done, Gnon will destroy you. If you take necessities from your future to pay for luxuries in the present, Gnon will destroy you. While we may at some point through grit and hard work be as rich as we think we are, we are currently not. For now, reality is harsher than anyone is willing to admit.
We can either take the pain and sacrifice and become metal enough to face that head on, or eat the seed corn and get destroyed by Gnon. The former is evil, but the latter is naive.