The Relationship between Ignorance and Evil

If everybody were to be suddenly made aware to the absolute the utter and brutal consequence of sin and hate as well as the utter glory and bliss of righteousness and goodness the world would instantly become a paradise.

        If evil flourishes in one place more than any other it is in the darkness of the minds of humanity. Even though there is malevolent, willful, calculating evil in this world and in existence, much of the evil I have encountered in my life was not necessarily out of outright malice, but out of a blindness. A darkness in the minds of people in my life or in the world around me.  

It is the same darkness of the mind that has led to the persecution of divergent views, the attack and dehumanization of the different, and even the murders of divergent people who fail to meet a standard of acceptance within their communities or society. Even the death of Jesus can be attributed to this kind of blind evil aside from the malice involved.  .

      When he called God to forgive the soldiers gambling away his garments, Jesus said, "father forgive them for they know not what they do." Jesus, in a way, was asking God to extend mercy to these men because he recognized the root of their evil and sin; blindness. Darkness. 

      If the Pharisees and their Roman overlords had known who Jesus was (what He was), they wouldn't have dared kill him. They wouldn't have touched Him.  Ignorance isn't inherently evil in itself, but it is exploited consistently and with great effectiveness by evil and evil people. Blindness, the inability to see what is true and real, is extremely exploitable and extremely binding. 

Blindness of the mind and of thought puts you into a slavery that can be exceedingly hard to break out of because you often don't even realize you are a slave. In this state, you become a tool to be utilized and sometimes even weaponized by people and forces who have more power over your own mind than you would like to believe or are fully aware of. 

 Slavery of the mind creates the appearance of liberty, but just hijacks your will and makes you willing to be in servitude and out of your ignorance you are tricked into thinking serving that master is in your own best interest. 

 It's a particularly deceptive state, and quite nefarious, as you think you are serving something out of volition, out of choice, but your mind is hijacked by the idea of what you are following and what you are serving. You become a slave who thinks he is free. 

 In this state of ignorance, where the truth and the light of reality are overshadowed and blotted out by darkness and deception, you can be led to commit atrocities and egregious violations of the rights and sanctity of others around you. Your ignorance is exploited for the benefit of an evil objective or an evil agenda.

 Even though you yourself wouldn't consider yourself to be evil, the blindness you are under justifies depravity and repugnant behavior to where you think there is no consequence or you think you are doing the right thing.

 I look no further than the average citizen who partook in the holocaust, or the average psychiatrist who stuck needles into the eyes of innocent mentally ill patients in the performance of a lobotomy, or military leaders who ordered the committing of war crimes to see the full scope of the exploitability that ignorance and blindness of the mind carries in humanity. Darkness is indeed where the monsters dwell, but there are few places in existence darker than mankind's minds. 

Most people aren't evil, but they can be used for evil purposes, even unwittingly, and even can be deceived into thinking that the evil is actually good.  Yes, in our efforts to learn about a reality we as humans are not born with an inherent or thorough understanding right on the onset of our lives (we have to learn everything we know), we will make mistakes. We will have flaws. We will fail and have moral shortcomings. Even so, some of the worst atrocities and crimes against our species that have ever been committed have been done in "the interests of public good" and even in the interests of scientific and technological advancement. 

 You can be extremely knowledgeable about one field of knowledge, but extremely deficient in another at the same time. You can also be wealthy in knowledge about the sciences and technology but painfully morally bankrupt in the same condition. That is often a recipe for atrocity and disaster. It's not knowledge you are ignorant of in that condition, it is ethics and morality that make up your ignorance. 

     Science without some sort of ethical code and moral spine will always lead to some sort of atrocity or cruelty. The ignorance of morality, ethics, and why human life should be treated as intrinsically valuable is, from my perspective, the greatest form of ignorance. Far greater than the ignorance of technology or the ignorance of science. This ignorance always has unpleasant results. This ignorance is the most exploitable by evil.