A Good Lie, Or The Virtue Of Evil (TGCE1)
Raising children is a straightforward affair that can be easily reduced to simple logical principles. The most useful gift you can endow your offspring with is true freedom to act, to be masters of their own fate. Creating and educating a child, indeed planning a life can be seen to be frequently modelled in computer gaming form; you control a character in a fixed world, you can follow the rules laid out or you can seek to subvert and circumvent them. Playing the game as given to you can bring some satisfaction, of a predictable, mundane sort - but ultimately the player is just running the course already selected for them by the designer. Finding exploits or unique ways of doing things that the designer never intended brings things to a higher level, helping you rise above the game to essentially create a new way of behaving.
In our society and life, whether you believe it was created by a divine being, natural social evolution or a shadowy secret order pulling at hidden strings, there is undeniably a system in place which is eminently manipulable. The best way to train your progeny to triumph over the system is to encourage and reinforce their evil behaviour whenever you can, punishing any hints of good behaviour they display lest it take root and corrupt them.
The historical origins of goodness in many senses can clearly be seen to have religious overtones. But what is religion itself? Forgetting the mystical dimension, can religion be seen to have a useful societal purpose? The priest of old would be an enforcer of the moral code - the rules that were devised/evolved to protect the health of the society as a whole. Rules for eating certain animals or observing marital strictures would serve to keep the society disease-free and preserve the integrity of the family unit. This moral code is important, it helps society to run smoothly - but it is not interested in the individual. The advantage clearly belongs to the individual who does not bow to the rules, but bends them to their advantage. When everyone else follows society’s moral code, they become that much easier to outmanoeuvre and control.
By evil, I do not mean causing pain simply for its own sake, or taking pleasure in the suffering of others - these are just weak and ultimately self-destructive actions of unbalanced people. I mean teach them to disregard rules, exploit them for their own purposes - the purest evil is merely selfishness taken to the logical extreme. Familiarise your children with the rules of life’s game, but force them to rise above it. Societal perceptions of ‘goodness’ are there to be taken advantage of. The key, of course, is for them to appear to be good to the outside observer - their evil actions will be blunted if they’re telegraphed by their appearance. True freedom and mastery of their own fate comes from being the unseen evil in a good world. So teach them the good lie.
