Since we think in the language of fairy tale, we overestimate threats we can call “evil” (crime, terrorism, tyranny) and underestimate threats we can’t (accidents, viruses, climate change), even though the latter are far more likely to lead to our extinction.
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We can have little control, and still have orders of magnitude more control over one category of phenomena than another. I think there’s a strong case to be made that’s the case here, though of the human scale issues you mention, terrorism dynamics are most like the set.
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Also, if we’re describing words like “evil”, we can pretty simply localize why humans possess a linguistic category for otherwise avoidable malevolence, and why we expend energy to control it to varied effect. Of course it gets more complex, but it’s simple at first order approx.
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