SDCT0017: Science is supposed to be value-free — it’s not supposed to make moral judgments. In the eyes of science, things are just as they are; they’re neither good nor bad. But, can science form a systematic definition of morality? Moral judgments of good and evil are important to the human mind, so why shouldn’t a science of the mind try to address the question, “What is evil?”

A zone of excess extroverted social assimilation can be thought of as a “zone of evil,” because the characteristics of this mental posture match up with the traditional folk understandings of what it means to be sinful or evil.

This episode compares Big Circle political parties, such as the Democratic Party in the U.S., with Small Circle “tiny bubble” political parties such as the U.S. Trump-Republican Party. As illustrated in Venn diagrams discussed in episode 2 (SDCT0002), the size of the zone of extroverted assimilation (which could be the size of the zone of evil) is inversely proportional to the size of the circle of accommodation. In other words, a Big Circle political party cannot have a big zone of evil, because accommodation and extroverted assimilation are contradictions in terms. By definition, it is impossible for a Big Circle political party to be “evil” toward the majority of its social environment. If it was, it wouldn’t be an authentic Big Circle political party.

On the other hand, it’s quite possible for a Small Circle “tiny bubble” political party, which has small circles of accommodation but large zones of assimilation, to be “evil” toward the majority of the social environment. An evil Small Circle political party would lack empathy or compassion, be dishonest, manipulative and mean-spirited, cruel, sadistic, unlawful, immoral, unethical, and generally antisocial toward the majority of the social environment — toward the majority of the citizens or of humanity in general.

This episode focuses on the Trump-Republican White House, and its policy of prosecuting all unlawful U.S. border crossings as crimes requiring immediate imprisonment, for which families must be separated, and where parents are sent to jail while their children are housed in detention centers. This policy (which Trump reversed the same day this episode was published) has been termed “cruel and inhumane” by all but the far right Small Circle side of the political spectrum. We also note Donald Trump’s advocacy for torture, which he’d like to see as “worse than waterboarding,” his suggestion that the U.S. should be as vicious and violent as terrorists (“We have to fight fire with fire,” June 29, 2016), his comment that he would kill the innocent children and family members of terrorists (“You have to take out their families,” Dec 2, 2015), his moral equivalence between Nazis and those who oppose Nazis (August, 2017), his casual cruelty and bullying, and his overall lack of respect for the rule of law, for honest communication, for other norms of civilized behavior, and for moral and ethical standards.

All of these characteristics of Trump, his supporters, and of the “tiny bubble” Trump-Republican Party show a basic lack of human empathy, as well as a meanness and cruelty, that matches up with both the expected characteristics of excess extroverted assimilation, and Western culture’s traditional folk understandings of evil as described by “The Seven Deadly Sins.”