Malism is the belief that the world is fundamentally bad. All existing institutions and power relations are more or less evil.

This is not a criminal, material, or existential claim, although those could also be made. It's a socio-political construct.

The world is evil because the majority believes the world is mostly as it should be. The imposed order of society mostly balances out all the individual chaos. No amount of rhetoric, logic, or pleading can help. In fact current arrangements are mostly right for most subjects, within current imagination limits.

Society is not nearly as advanced as it seems. It's an accumulation of monopolies, an efficient deception evolved to sustain itself, permanently rebuilding without improving much. It's good to make your peace with it. Those who don't may get depressed.

This notion is automatically rejected by the majority consensus, but that's just how they've programmed themselves.
People suffering indirect tortures at the hands of smug politicians will go ahead and vote for these same politicians until they become incapacitated. I've seen terminal patients begging to be put out of their misery go on to vote for rigid conservatives, and donate their remaining money to traditional churches.

Only a negligible minority is willing to suggest things should not be this way; and even fewer have the courage to take action.

Evil is the real force that makes the world go round, and it infuses every level of society.
It's not the evil of destruction but of useless creation, of turgid bureaucracy lubricated by learned helplessness - also known as acceptance.

It's the experience of using a Microsoft Windows 'powered' PC, the inexhaustible stream of torments and ordeals, the near impossibility of understanding these errors, and the near unanimous agreement of users that this is normal and to be expected.
And I'm not just talking about Dell PCs here (those fall under the criminal category).

The tiny subsection of society that tries to protest or resist is marginalized as if they are the ones with problems.
Deliberate failures manifest across society, both online and off, even in our extended websites and blogs: Livejournal.com randomly changes the web address of every post after a while, making it impossible to link to them directly. Many rants and venomous screeds have been lost.
In a similar manner, the three web counters installed in these pages stopped working without explanation, though their websites remain in business.

These actions are only barely in the top forty most evil crimes of all time.
Still, there's no conceivable reason for Livejournal and the webcounters to arbitrarily make things harder. Intentional disruption is a fundamental force of society.

Evil is hard to fight because it thrives on resistance. When different types compete, they can actually strengthen each other.
Most evil exists only to fight a second evil in a way acceptable to a third evil: for example the zoning laws in the liberal Walhalla known as Portland, Oregon, that are 'subconsciously' intended to keep scary blacks out in a doctrinaire politically correct way.

Evil needs to be studied and perhaps brought under control, but not here.
These columns are not really about the source of evil or even about hate, worthy as those subjects may be.
They're about the desire for revenge.

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It can't be said often enough: there are simple solutions that could make the world almost tolerable.
We could have ultra-low-cost housing, full employment for those who want it, and ten times cheaper healthcare, but such experiments are forbidden by law and custom. In a global pathology, our political hirelings block all meaningful change with tireless dedication and even intelligence: an instinctual rejection.
Voters prefer politicians who establish and maintain restrictive control systems, as long as they're not too arbitrary, an annoying holdover from more primitive times.

A few critics of the status quo go further: the world isn't merely evil, it's a hoax.
Regardless of whether that's the case, how much do things actually suck?
Here's a short list for your convenience:

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You can't buy good paint brushes in the USA
Let's start with the worst outrage: fine brushes suitable for painting thin lines are simply not sold here. If you ask an associate at a Big Box store, they can't understand the question like a syntax error.
Fortunately there are other things you can buy much easier here than elsewhere: recreational vehicles, oversized homes, luxury yachts, private jets, ranches, skyboxes, senators and so on. (That last one is a bit unfair. They can only be rented.)
* 2015 update: This remains true.
* 2025 update: No you still can't.

Healthcare
The most successful and expensive monopoly in human history is also the most exclusive. Every American will be paying tens of thousands of dollars to further entrench that monopoly. Five seconds in a waiting room cost more than an hour's wages, and the experts in charge have no intention of letting costs drop through natural market forces.

Software
The best way to realize the world should be instantly destroyed is to use software. The rage will evaporate the greatest grief like dew before the dawn. It makes all other concerns seem trivial. Nothing else matters but the roaring hatred, the red firestorm of all-obliterating fury.
Software is so bug-ridden, unreliable, unusable, restricting, and occluded that it can only be described as malevolent.
We know software isn't really evil. The programmers are, on a truly gargantuan scale.

Get rich quick schemes
Wonderful solutions for desperate people abound: make money at home in your spare time without working hard. Most crackpot schemes involve reselling cheap merchandise, or repetitive tasks a machine could do. Others involve manipulating financial instruments.
All these scams attempt to acquire existing wealth from other people who've done the hard work of creating it.
What if everyone tried to make a living that way? We'd run out of envelopes and trinket factories.
The scam works for the same reason many people want to be artists: there are no barriers to entry. If you're self-employed, your boss doesn't insist on social skills, a rigid schedule, or impossible bureaucracy.
Unfortunately, the powers-that-be don't want life to be simple. They want complicated distractions full of busywork and low-grade fear. People are mailed credit card applications instead of job applications.
A real get rich quick scheme would work if everyone followed it. Ideally, it would allow people who otherwise have nothing in common to cooperate.

Work
So many people hate their jobs, the dread of being wage slaves in a pointless society. They're stressed out and feel numb. Real progress has slowed to a crawl.
Where are the robots to do all the hard work?

Stress
Most problems can be solved with the simplest prescription: do nothing.
In places with more violence than intelligence that is too much to ask. People feel an overwhelming need for dramatic action. Most conflicts are caused by the stressful overreaction to a problem, not the problem itself (see: shaken baby syndrome).

Tyranny
Mankind has lovingly fostered a long line of corrupt regimes dedicated to controlling their lives. Countries like North Korea enforce their delusions with cheerful oblivion.
Why do subjects tolerate such impositions? Because they are partially insane, and want to be dominated. The few relatively open societies are also crazy, just not as badly. They can't be as bad. Consistent evil is full-time work.

The concept of evil
Too few people believe in evil itself anymore. Instead, they prefer to believe in unhappy childhoods, communication problems, or that the fault lies with them; yet the truth is so much simpler.

Avoidable death
A million agonizing deaths each year could be avoided by following some common precautions. A million more merely by doing less bad things: by lowering speed limits, discouraging left turns, encouraging tele-commuting and more flexible working hours. (Also by better tracking of dangerous people, reducing drug patents, replacing half the meat consumed with protein substitutes, and providing free sterilizations.)

Overpopulation
Quantity does not equal quality. It's easier to push out a billion babies than to evolve one civilization with solid property rights.
Evolution requires failure on a massive scale to proceed. It takes many attempts to generate one useful mutation. Unfortunately, this means most organisms are redundant.

Jury duty
A group of randomly selected slaves must decide if the defendant is guilty. They have to give up their income for the duration, aren't fully reimbursed for transportation, often have to pay for their own parking, and can't control the trial in any way, except for the outcome.
The judge runs the courtroom as his personal fiefdom while the jurors listen. Cases can drag on for months. The lawyers and other courtroom professionals are handsomely reimbursed.
In all our encounters with the 'justice system', the lawyers have wasted a staggering amount of time, not for the jurors' benefit, but for the appeal judges' subsequent convenience. Jurors have been fined and even jailed for yawning or falling asleep, for talking, for watching the news in their own homes, for faking illnesses, or for not showing up at all.

Alimony
Societies sacrifice their most compliant members.
There's been a steady increase in alimony/child support horror stories. Often the person forced to pay alimony isn't the biological father. He has to pay a large amount each month until the offspring has graduated from college. If he loses his job or income, he must rapidly find another job or go to jail.
For ex-husbands it's a dead-end existence, toiling endless weeks just to live in a high-crime apartment complex with floating rats in the pool. It's a bit like slavery, except slaves sometimes found the courage to resist.
The countless defenders of this system point out the 'fathers' could have abstained from having a relationship at all. Celibacy is cheap.
On the other hand, many actual deadbeat dads evade paying altogether. The worst offenders have more children, and pass on their genes: a clear case of evolution in action.
Why has no victim dared to really fight back? Possibly they're secretly dosed with serotonin.

Your papers please!
Before boarding a US airliner, you will need to produce a government approved identification document. Your REAL ID driver's license has to meet costly federal standards.
Traditionally, governments have used such requirements to prevent less popular groups from traveling, interacting, or even existing too much.
The public thinks it's reasonable to need government permission to own real estate or listen to the radio: Howard Stern expects his listeners to produce their birth certificates to get a state-licensed ID to get a bank account to get a credit card to get a Sirius account. He thinks you're crazy to think this is crazy.
It's true that airlines have to search passengers for weapons, but there's no non-political reason for the government to do this job. Since the passengers are out in public, there's nothing to prevent the airline from photographing everyone (unless cameras steal souls), and using facial recognition software to check for terrorists.
Apparently some tasks are so annoying the government has to do them: most licensing, nursing homes, divorces and wars. Prostate exams are next.

the absence of nudity on network TV
Violence and some bad language are OK, but Allah dislikes boobs to be seen onscreen. Or maybe it's just your parents when you're watching with them.

Bureaucracy
Bureaucrats provide a product that shouldn't exist, a monolithic maze of hidden barriers and entrenched power blocks.

Education
The violent chaos of the schoolyard is the flip side of authoritarian control. The real lessons learned in schools aren't listed on the curricula. The unionized bureaucrats wouldn't care anyway. Education is mostly about establishing hierarchies based on popularity and social talents: what you need to function in society.

'Victimless crimes'
People like Richard Paey are sentenced to long jail terms for using painkillers. Governments strive to control not only their subjects' actions but their very perceptions.

Asset forfeiture
When the government steals it's not theft. If someone is only suspected of selling or using drugs, the government will simply confiscate the property where the drugs were found, and sell it.

the 'Help' button function that came with most software products.
Few things are worse.

the Showbiz Delusion
Why do so many people want to become artists, actors, models, musicians?
Not because these jobs are more pleasant. They simply have the fewest gatekeepers. People can start right away, and easily visualize their next step. They think they can back out if they change their minds, or in the unlikely event a better opportunity materializes (it won't). It can take years to realize there is no market for their efforts.
If someone wanted to become a plumber, they might have to pay a year's salary in advance to enroll at a government-approved community college.
It's all or nothing: the barriers created by the devils-in-charge are rising, and the resulting collapse may be terminal.

Virtuosity
People enjoy making things seem more complicated than necessary without explaining them. It makes them feel more useful. This simple fact causes 37% of human problems. It goes back to the days when writing was the secret skill of a tiny elite, and religious texts were controlled by a priestly caste.
Some examples: musical notation, mathematics, jargon, apprenticeships, hazing, mechanical skills, higher education, languages and dialects, financial manipulations, cultural elites, the legal system, fashion, sports, professional monopolies and guilds.

Religion
The problem isn't that it's false, but that it makes life more tolerable for some, and thereby helps prolong existing problems.

Jobs
Did I already mention this? What will people put up with to survive? Usually, a fate slightly worse than death.

CEO salaries

Banks can steal your money and the cops will let them.
Some of the evil things that banks get away with:
-deceitful fees.
-cashing checks without verifying the existence of the funds in question. If you accept a check from a third party, the bank will add the sum to your account without bothering to verify if the check is valid. When the check bounces, the bank will steal back the money even if you already spent it, or 'returned' the money to the issuer, a popular scam that has affected many people.

Touch typing
(Also see: magic eye pictures) The clearest example of the reality hoax. So-called 'touch typing' is simply impossible to learn with the current horrendously inefficient methods. Why is no one researching ways to make the second most important communication method of our species any easier? There is a total lack of research. Why are there no websites, forums, papers, discussions on methods and theory? We challenge anyone to look closer.
Why aren't there finger rails and restraints, specially designed keyboards for hunt and peck typist, different key shapes, deeper keys, or software that detects and fixes mis-typings, by ignoring the weaker simultaneous key punch while adding a tiny shock to discourage this type of error?

Zoning laws
After years of imposing high property taxes based on expected resale values, the authorities can make someone's land worthless overnight by eliminating the ways in which it can be used.

Taxes
Everyone who does anything useful is punished. The tax code shows that most problems are man-made. Every taxpayer is automatically suspect. If they're lucky, the audit won't hurt too bad.

Perverse Paths
Suffering tends to maximize the number of victims.
Nature favors quantity over quality. Organisms will fill every available niche. That's why there are no uninhabited tropical islands. Evolution drives species toward their natural limits. Given time, any society will end up in the worst (for the individual) condition in which it can still survive. Evolved from failure, humans live in a permanent emergency.

IMAX
For some reason, the most impressive display technology ever invented is used to make the dullest movies.

the tyranny of the mainstream
Most people will unthinkingly defend the status quo. The world's features have been chosen by democratic majority. This is what they have selected out of all the possibilities.

Confined mobs
Prisons, the armed forces, refugee camps, slums, public housing, and poverty prove that hell is other people.

Engineered scarcity
Society has many built-in layers of deception and bureaucratic control. Powerful monopolies protect themselves with barriers and restrictions, making their products more valuable. There are no WalMart-equivalent hospitals, schools, lawyers, or even housing. This makes life more expensive and less predictable. That's exactly how they like it.

Engineered ignorance
There are many knowledge monopolies. Science hoards the truth.
Popular books about relativity or quantum physics keep repeating the same few metaphors, complete with false explanations. With luck, there might be one new idea that can be explained in a few sentences. These nuggets are few and far between.
It's all or nothing: accept the few oversimplified explanations, or give up four years and $ 100,000 to the education-industrial complex. Love of learning only applies to the liberal arts.

Respect for life
Contempt for life would be more honest. Humans are the arbitrary outcome of brutal evolution. Logically the pain will only get worse without end.
Political leaders care deeply about stem cells that can't feel a thing, but not at all about the millions of animals killed painfully every day.

Polygamy
If one third of men have two wives, one third of men will have to stay single. The most common form of polygamy is serial monogamy.
Some of the worst polygamists are gay. Trying to avoid being 'outed', they keep up appearances by dating a chain of pretend girlfriends. There's a reason gay genes have thrived for so long.
As always, the primary victims (less successful men) applaud those who commit the offense, delusionally hoping to emulate the successful polygamists.

Free software
'The Gimp' is a free image manipulation program that didn't even bother installing the help files. Want to crop, rotate, edit, or modify an image? Perhaps there's a tool for that. Not that it matters: any change undoes the previous one.
All software is brutally hard, but free software is just that little bit eviler. Our suggestion: make it 100 times simpler, and make it so that it works. Or perhaps a simple version that only does a few things, then adds functions as needed?

Porn
Is porn crude because the consumer is aroused by deliberately coarse behavior, or is porn crude to make it seem unlifelike? Definitely.

The denial delusion
Entertainment is about distraction, not about the society in which it takes place. The biggest idols are those persons who can make the biggest problems seem trivial, not those who can actually explain them. Popular sitcom and movie characters have well-paid jobs (impresario, producer, designer, ad executive), and live luxury lies, sorry, lives. How can a 24 year old yuppie have such an expensive apartment, without mentioning those forces that prevent that from happening?
Anyone looking for new ideas should toss their TVs.

No more frontiers
Our economic system may stimulate growth, but it also maximizes stress. Instead of having to rely on others, some would like to solve their own problems, even if their personal economy was to be radically simplified. They would be willing to sacrifice their standard of living for more stability. But there is nowhere left to escape to.

Modern SF
Are SF stories set in the past or the future? We can't tell anymore. Commercial SF is all about genre tropes, which now take an effort to learn. As characterization becomes more important, it's rare to find new scientific ideas. Instead, it's all about social alienation, intrigues, organic societies, pseudo-magic, and other standardly fantastical elements.
You can tell what kind of story you're dealing with just from the first few lines, and often from the title alone.
For the dwindling handful of readers who still like old-school SF in the style of Arthur C. Clarke: books with many specific nouns are better. It only takes a glance at a random page to tell.

Literary SF
According to 'serious' critics, the only good SF is not SF. It needs more human emotion and less science. Much less science. Let's just abbreviate it to F. When trying to read modern SF, I'm always cursing it's so boring. Too many characters and no extreme science. Nothing wrong with that, but call it 'fantastical' fiction then.
Also, don't try to create a 'plausible' future, they're boring and inevitably wrong. Create an unexpected but just barely possible one.

Social depression
A big part of the human brain is dedicated to detecting competitors in the environment. When they're too numerous and too far ahead, the brain gets discouraged and tries to find some other activity with fewer competitors to specialize in.
Unfortunately, these fields also have the fewest customers. The losers' discouragement manifests itself passive-aggressively, with rare outbursts of violence. They go into conservation mode and try to make do with less, making it even harder to escape the cycle of failure.
This helps explain rigid social hierarchies, homelessness, cults, radical Islam, failing revolutionary movements, and the entire dysfunctional Third World. It's why there exists more than one country.

Coming of age
A mixture of rude instinct and suppression. No sex (or handholding in high-polygamy areas) allowed by order of God.

The normalcy assumption
New ideas are presumed wrong by default. People think that their civilization is the normal one, and all others are nuts (the second part is technically true).
Civilizations could be described as wobbly towers that have to be constantly rebalanced to prevent a collapse. Many possibilities had to be missed on the way up.

'magic eye' pictures
Of all the non-stereoscopic 3D picture illusions, these are the worst. A good example of the Virtuosity Effect: it would be easy to create a simple 'magic eye' picture that almost anyone could see, but now they're all ultra-detailed brain-busters that only cause splitting headaches.

literature
Most Nobel Prize-caliber fiction is infuriatingly boring, wallowing in unpleasant details and emotions. Serious authors act as if they're important, but they fundamentally accept the world as it is. The ultimate agents of the establishment, they monopolize NYT book reviews, PBS panels, and liberal arts courses.
Someone should dare to think about the rest of the universe, the taboo truths of this world, and the fundamentally unknown.
The truth is that real life is crap, a mix of hidden codes and competitive deception. The mundane doesn't deserve the respect that serious authors bestow on it. Life needs to be described from the outside, like an ant colony or an infection, things most people never even think about.
Arthur C. Clarke didn't write about characters or relationships but made them seem insignificant. That's how history should be taught; a mess of population pressures, changing landscapes, and semi-random violence. The truth lies in the numbers.

Sycophantic book reviews
They praise the author's literary skills without revealing anything about the plot. You can find many examples in the Barnes and Noble bookstore magazine, if it still exists.

X-aggeration
A made-up term for when a mass-market 'edutainment' program tries to 'sex up' an incredibly spectacular event in the most sensationalist way they can imagine, completely unaware that their efforts are hopelessly inadequate. It's accompanied by dramatic music and narration.
One example is when the Discovery Channel used file footage of flowing lava to illustrate the period when the earth's entire crust was molten. Worst of all was when they tried to use CGI animation to depict a supernova, and even showed stars in the background.
In the future, those puny efforts will look as dumb as those nineteenth century postcards that predicted zeppelin bicycles by the year 2000. Except those might have actually worked.

Lawyers
Dozens of Bill Clinton aides racked up huge legal fees when they were deposed during the political inquisitions of the late nineties. Many were 'forced' to go into debt to afford legal representation. At no point was it suggested that people shouldn't hire attorneys if they didn't do anything wrong.
Perhaps this entry shouldn't be about lawyers, but about the legal system itself, except it's not possible to opt out of the latter. At least you can still represent yourself in civil and criminal court, even if few falsely accused defendants dare to do so.

Cell phones
Everyone is hearing voices these days. As Unabomber style outcasts (only with less steady hands), we don't expect to own chatterboxes ourselves unless they're free.
Why do people need to talk so much? It's all about the illusion of control. Technology is increasingly used to create pseudo-improvised, unplanned lifestyles, in the same way that people would rather watch a video than read an explanation. Anything to keep busy and not have to think.

Star Trek
In the late nineties, the corporate owners of the Trek franchise tried to sue Trekkies into oblivion for the crime of creating unauthorized fan sites. The final straw was when Deep Space Nine changed the date of Khan's first appearance. That was even worse than the Kazon storyline in Voyager.
The series' main problem is that the writers don't realize how advanced their own imagined technology and future society really is. Most episodes could have been set in the past by changing a few details.
It's time to start an open source shared multiverse with many different worlds that can be improved without end.

Cities
There are no 'cheap cities'. In blatant violation of the law of supply and demand, the cheapest apartment in New York now rents for about $2000 per month, and it's already been sub-let.
To be fashionable, you don't have to be cool, you just have to be rich. Meanwhile, labor slaves have to commute for hours until they reach a suburb downscale enough to afford a thirty-year mortgage.

Universities
Flush with donations and paper wealth from the speculative boom of the previous decade, universities went on lavish spending sprees. Campuses abound with new recreation centers, stadiums, and study lounges. The cost of a top-brand college now exceeds $1000 per week. They make a big fuss about tradition and elite qualifications. They don't try to find new ways to make learning easier, since they're secretly afraid they might put themselves out of business.

Long-term care insurance
Why would anyone want to pay in advance to be kept alive as an incontinent mummy? Because Jezus, that's why. Instead of long-term care insurance, we believe in euthanasia insurance: a single .45 bullet.

Marriage
In this day and age, you have to be an insane optimist to get married. A marriage license is a lifelong servitude license in the event of a divorce, thanks to alimony and palimony. The rewards would have to be unusually large to put up with such a risk.

Offspring
My greatest asset is that I don't have any children (Not all Arcalon contributors are so lucky). It's the best thing in my life. Seriously, it's a great feeling. I'm a million dollars ahead by doing nothing. A lifetime of worries and obligations simply don't exist. Why create more hostages for the System to exploit, at incredible expense and effort?
If only there was some way to be paid for it.
This perspective needs to become more mainstream. Everyone has their own priorities. What works for most doesn't work for some.

Transgender pronouns
While persons who choose to have 'sex change' operations should be strongly supported in their endeavors, third parties should not pretend that transsexuals have actually changed genders. At most they have had a partial sex change. They still have male or female elements in their past, or at the genetic level. They should be considered a new, third gender.

Air travel
For primitive primate reasons, many social relationships can only be settled in person. Each airline flight adds over a ton of CO2 to the atmosphere for each passenger crossing the ocean. Airlines exist as part of a vast pre-existing infrastructure, solving problems they helped create.
The pricing is even worse. Seems like the only way to fill up a plane is to have as many ticket prices as passengers.

Movies in theaters
The last movie one of our contributors paid to see in a second-run theater was 'Titanic'. They were tearing down the back of the building while the end credits began to roll. Within a few months, it had been replaced by a full-cost first-run multiplex. Since then, ticket prices have been closely linked to the cost of health insurance and CEO salaries.

Top-down focus
In the Harry Potter and even the Star Trek universes, the basic principles and implications of society, history, physics, technology, religion, economics, and science are kept obscure. The focus is on intrigue and drama. The basic rules are ignored. Only the results matter.
That's exactly how people like things in real life. The details are more meaningful than the big picture. It's easier to lose oneself in the mundane facts of existence than to look too closely at its deep patterns, which can be disturbing. No one is responsible for society as a whole, only their own small portion of it. Most societies don't want to understand themselves too well. It would lead to uncomfortable questions.
Yet there are many simple statements that could change everything, if only they were believed. For example: the principles of evolution applied to humans, economic psychology, human biodiversity as it really is, skeptical thinking as a way of life, the notion that the universe is absurd, that metaphysics implies parallel universes, that there are infinitely more possible complicated minds than simple minds like ours, and that our universe is vastly more complex than it needs to be to allow us to exist.


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The most radical hard SF novel of the first quarter of the 21st century: Infinite Thunder by Jack Arcalon.
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