Word: existing
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Dates: during 1990-1999
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...first question to be asked, of course, is this: Does evil exist? I know a man who thinks it does not. I know another man who spent a year of his childhood in Auschwitz. I would like to have the two of them talk together for an afternoon, and see which one comes away persuaded by the other...
Many writers have said that one of evil's higher accomplishments has been to convince people that it does not exist. Ivan Karamazov's bitter diabology was a bit different: "If the devil doesn't exist, but man has created him, he has created him in his own image and likeness." In a nightmare, Ivan meets the devil, a character of oddly shabby gentility, who mentions how cold it was in space, from which he lately came, traveling in only an evening suit and open waistcoat. The devil speaks of the game of village girls who persuade someone to lick...
...must ask what evil would be if it did exist. What does the word evil mean when people...
...well as quantitatively different. It is no longer a personal but a transpersonal evil, arising from some kind of collective unconscious. It is also possible that it is beyond the transpersonal and is truly transcendent, an entity outside as well as inside the human mind, an entity that would exist even if there were no human race to imagine it." So here evil rounds back again into its favored element, mystery...
That is not the only irony. The anti-Los Angeles mood, in fact, is profoundly ambivalent. Many inhabitants of secondary cities would dearly like to have the opportunities and higher wage scales that exist in Los Angeles, but without the tensions of expansion. As a result, the political consequences of the growth debate are frequently contradictory. In San Luis Obispo last spring, voters defeated a ballot measure that would have restricted new development one-third, to the statewide growth level of 2.4% a year. But just five months later, the same voters opted for a slow-growth majority...