Evil and the Loss of Intellect
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Taking my cue from Dante’s phrase that hell is populated by “those who have lost the benefit of the intellect,” I argue that earthly hells are the result of a certain kind of mindlessness on the part of people entrusted to be the brains of their respective collective. Dante understood that the presence or absence of mind involves more than merely performing cognitive operations. His conception of the intellect is shaped by an ontology in which love is the source of all. Hence where love is absent, or targeting the wrong object, the intellect does not fulfil its real function, and doing evil is bound up with the intellect not being guided by love’s light. Concomitantly, those in hell are not there due to an inability to provide “reasons” for their judgments and deeds, rather there is a hiatus between the illusions they have about what they are doing and what they actually do: the damned are unable to see the world they are making until it is too late. Hell becomes inevitable when a group becomes sufficiently steeped in its illusions that it does not see the awaiting terror. Concomitantly, when a group reaches this stage they cannot be touched by true words: the group, then, literally belongs to (the d)evil.