Venezuela through the lens of good and evil
I woke up yesterday morning happy and relieved that the Venezuelan people were finally free of their brutal dictator.
I ended the day angry and depressed that Trump, as it turns out, does not seek to turn over Venezuela to María Corina Machado and her inspiring democracy movement—the pro-Western, Nobel-Peace-Prize-winning, slam-dunk obvious, already electorally-confirmed choice of the Venezuelan people—but instead seeks to cut a deal with the remnants of Maduro’s regime to run Venezuela as a US-controlled petrostate.
I confess that I have trouble understanding people who don’t have either of these two reactions.
On one side of me, of course, are the sneering MAGA bullies who declare that might makes right, that the strong do what they can while the weak suffer what they must, and that the US should rule Venezuela for the same reason why Russia should rule Ukraine and China should rule Taiwan: namely, because the small countries have the misfortune of being in the large ones’ “spheres of influence.”
But on my other side are those who squeal that toppling a dictator, however odious, is against the rules, because right is whatever “international law” declares it to be—i.e., the “international law” that’s now been degraded by ideologues to the point of meaninglessness, the “international law” that typically sides with whichever terrorists and murderers have the floor of the UN General Assembly and that condemns persecuted minorities for defending themselves.
The trouble is, any given framework of law needs to do at least one of three things to impose its will on me:
- Compel my obedience, by credibly threatening punishment if I defy it.
- Win the assent of my conscience, by the force of its moral example.
- Buy my consent through reciprocity: if this framework will defend my family from being murdered, I therefore ought to defend it.
But “international law,” as it exists today, fails spectacularly on all three of these counts. Ergo, as far as I’m concerned, it can take a long walk off a short pier.
Against these two attempted reductions of right to something that it isn’t, I simply say:
Right is right. Good is good. Evil is evil. Good is liberal democracy and the Enlightenment. Evil is authoritarianism and liars and bullies.
Good, in this case, is Maria Machado and the Venezuelans who went to prison, who took to the streets, who monitored every polling station to prove Edmundo González’s victory. Evil is those who oppose them.
But who gets to decide what’s good and what’s evil? Well, if you’re here asking me, then I decide.
But don’t the evildoers believe themselves to be good? Yes, but they’re wrong.
It’s crucial that I’m not appealing here to anything exotic or esoteric. I’m appealing only to the concepts of good and evil that I suspect every reader of this blog had as a child, that they got from fables and Disney movies and Saturday morning cartoons and the like, before some of them went to college and learned that those concepts were naïve and simplistic and only for stupid people.
Look: I regularly appear, to my amusement and chagrin, in Internet lists of the smartest people on earth, alongside Terry Tao and Garry Kasparov and Ed Witten. I did publish my first paper at 15, and finished my PhD in theoretical computer science at 22, and became an MIT professor soon afterward, yada yada.
And for whatever it’s worth, I’m telling you that I think the “naïve, simplistic” concepts of good and evil of post-WWII liberal democracy were fine all along, and not only for stupid people. In my humble opinion. Of course those concepts can be improved upon—indeed, criticism and improvement and self-correction are crucial parts of them—but they’re infinitely better than the realistic alternatives on offer from left and right, including kleptocracy, authoritarianism, and what we’re now calling “the warmth of collectivism.”
And according to these concepts, María Machado and the other Venezuelans who stand with her for democracy are good, if anything is good. Trump, despite all the evil in his heart and in his past, will do something profoundly good if he reverses himself and lets those Venezuelans have what they’ve fought for. He’ll do evil if he doesn’t.
Happy New Year, everyone. May goodness reign over the earth.