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"Evil isn't doing bad things, it's feeling bad about them afterward. There's no absolute value to behavoir. First of all---"

"Instituional inertia," claimed the Witch. "But whatever is the great attraction of absolute power anyway?"

"That's why I say it's merely affliction of the psyche, like vanity or greed," said a copper magnate. "And we all know vanity and greed can produce some pretty astounding results in human affairs, not all of them reprehinsible."

"It's an abscence of good, that's all," said his paramour, an agony aunt for the Shiz Informer. "The nature of the world is to be calm, and enhance and support life, and evil is an abscence of the inclination of matter to be at peace."

"Pigspittle," said Avaric. "Evil is an early or primitive stage of moral development. All children are fiends by nature. The criminals among us are only those who didn't progress..."

"I think it's a prescence, not an abscence," said an artist. "Evil's an incarnated character, an incubus or a succubus. It's an other. It's not us."

"Not even me?" said the Witch, playing the part more vigorously than she expected. "A self-confessed murderer?"

"Oh go on with you," said the artist, "we all of us show ourselves in ourselves in our best light. That's just normal vanity."

"Evil isn't a thing, it's not a person, it's an attribute like beauty..."

"It's a power, like wind..."

"It's an infection..."

"It's metaphysical, essentially: the corruptibility of creation---"

"Blame it on the Unnamed God, then."




END OF PART 1

PART 2 coming soon

Please discuss.