The Two Hands of Order

An authorial inquiry into good, evil, the maintenance of order, and the banality of harmful obedience

Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut
Inner Transformation · An authorial series

“War is father of all and king of all; some it has shown as gods, others as humans; some it has made slaves, others free.”

Heraclitus of Ephesus, fragment DK B53, as rendered in the archive through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

Archival editorial note. The source’s subtitle argues that good and evil serve one end—bringing humanity to order, voluntarily or through coercion—and that real evil is banal rather than demonic. These are the authors’ philosophical propositions, not scientific conclusions. Thermodynamic entropy does not measure moral disorder, functional comparison does not justify violence, and knowledge does not guarantee justice. The translation retains the full argument, examples, and qualifications while marking important overextensions. Historical figures, numbers, quotations, and references have not been newly verified.

What This Essay Is About

We are accustomed to picturing a world divided between two forces: light and darkness, decent people and scoundrels, builders and destroyers. History then seems to be a struggle between the two, leaving us to choose a side.

The authors propose looking beneath that picture. What we call good and evil, light and darkness, can appear in their account as two hands engaged in one work: order. Living things and human institutions resist disintegration. Building and coercion, mercy and violence can all be involved in preserving a form rather than letting it fall apart.

The essay pictures a benevolent state guiding people through care and law, and a cruel one through fear and force. It argues that a shared function can coexist with profound moral differences. Its claim that order therefore has no side should be understood as a philosophical analogy, not a reason to regard violence and protection as ethically equivalent.

A second, more disturbing proposition follows. Great historical evil is often committed by ordinary people embedded in institutions: through incompetence, thoughtlessness, or obedience. The source says evil is almost never radical or deep, but banal, and therefore dangerous. That is a strong interpretation associated here with Arendt; it does not explain every perpetrator or exclude ideology, hatred, and deliberate intention.

The third proposition concerns knowledge. If thoughtless institutional participation enables harm, the authors argue, thinking and learning can interrupt it. They read five centuries of print, education, and political thought as evidence that distributed knowledge gradually reshapes institutions toward greater justice. They also describe United Wisdom as part of that quiet work.

The route passes through physics and philosophy, alongside Egyptian, Vedic, Zoroastrian, Daoist, and Greek traditions. The authors present these as witnesses to a common question while promising not to erase their differences. Their proposed convergence remains a comparison, not independent scientific confirmation.

I. What This Essay Does Not Do

It does not excuse evil. Calling evil banal does not make it forgivable. The source notes that Hannah Arendt supported Eichmann’s death sentence, citing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Understanding a mechanism does not remove responsibility.

It does not morally equate good and evil. There is a real gulf between feeding someone and killing them. Its intended distinction is between moral content and systemic function: very different actions may be drawn into efforts to maintain an order. Moral discrimination remains necessary even when a functional resemblance is noticed.

It does not offer the cold relativism of “everything is one, so nothing matters.” Its response to thoughtlessness is thinking, knowledge, and independent judgment. It seeks a direction for effort, not an invitation to surrender.

Nor does it propose a simple dualism of two equal gods. The archive then goes further, saying no mature tradition treats darkness as equal to light and that evil is almost everywhere secondary: a lack, shadow, lie, or absence without its own substance. That sweeping cross-traditional statement is not established here. The traditions discussed contain different accounts that cannot all be reduced to privation.

II. A Universe of Entropy—and Local Order

The source begins with the second law of thermodynamics, associated with Rudolf Clausius’s work beginning in 1850. It describes spontaneous processes as increasing entropy in a closed system, calling entropy a measure of disorder. A more careful formulation concerns nondecreasing total entropy in an isolated system; “disorder” is a limited explanatory shorthand, not a universal measure of chaos.

Ludwig Boltzmann gives entropy a statistical interpretation. In the source’s image, relatively ordered arrangements are few, while other arrangements are vastly more numerous, so systems tend toward more probable macrostates. Heat disperses, buildings deteriorate, forms wear away. These examples lead into the essay’s metaphor rather than constituting one precise physical account of every kind of decay.

Against this background, living order seems striking. In What Is Life? (1944), Erwin Schrödinger described organisms as feeding on “negative entropy,” in the reference inherited through Wikipedia. The essay pictures life drawing order from its environment while exporting entropy to it.

The organism does not overturn the second law. The source says it locally “bypasses” it, but a living open system instead maintains local organization through exchanges that remain compatible with thermodynamics. Its identification of death with maximum disorder is likewise an image rather than a precise universal physical definition.

Norbert Wiener linked information, organization, and entropy. The archive quotes his contrast between information as a measure of organization and entropy as disorganization, then cites The Human Use of Human Beings, through The Marginalian, for civilizations as local, temporary islands of decreasing entropy in a world of increasing entropy.

The authors ask us to hold that image: states, cultures, and laws as islands of order maintained by effort. It is a social metaphor, not a literal thermodynamic measure of legitimacy or goodness.

Ilya Prigogine, awarded the 1977 Nobel Prize in Chemistry, adds another dimension. Open systems far from equilibrium can develop organized dissipative structures. The archive invokes his work with Isabelle Stengers and the idea that nonequilibrium can be a source of order. Its conclusion is poetic: chaos is not only order’s enemy, but also its womb. The relevant physical processes do not prove an ethical necessity for social chaos or suffering.

III. Order Through Coercion: Leviathan

Moving from physics to politics, the authors call human society another island of order maintained against disintegration. The move is analogical; political conclusions do not follow from the second law alone.

Thomas Hobbes’s Leviathan (1651) imagines a condition without common security as a war of all against all, bellum omnium contra omnes. Industry, knowledge, and culture cannot flourish under continual fear of violent death. The archive renders the resulting life as solitary, poor, bleak, brutish, and short, citing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.

The essay calls this social chaos or the “maximum entropy” of human coexistence. Again, entropy here is metaphor. Hobbes’s response is a sovereign: people authorize a common power in exchange for protection. The source emphasizes protection, rather than simply origin, in its account of authority’s justification. This is a compressed reading of a complex political theory.

Max Weber’s Politics as a Vocation (1919) defines the state through its successful claim to the monopoly of legitimate physical force within a territory. In the essay’s reading, force lies within the state’s definition, but as regulated and monopolized force intended to limit private conflict.

This supplies the first direct encounter with the thesis: coercion and protection can be related features of political order. Calling the first evil and the second good does not exhaust their institutional relationship. Yet neither Hobbes’s theory nor Weber’s definition makes every exercise of state force legitimate in a moral sense.

The archive also attributes to Hobbes the image of someone acting under authority as an instrument without independent motion, with the action belonging to the sovereign. It reads this as anticipating what later psychology would call an agentic state. The comparison is retrospective and cannot transfer away the actor’s ethical responsibility.

IV. Opposites and Their Interdependence

If good and evil are considered through a shared concern with order, the authors suggest that their relationship may go beyond opposition. They turn to Eastern and Western accounts of mutually dependent distinctions.

Chapter 2 of the Daodejing associates recognizing beauty with the emergence of ugliness, and recognizing goodness with what is not good; being and nonbeing arise in relation. The archive cites the Chinese Text Project. Its duplicated Chinese line is retained here in Romanization: tiānxià jiē zhī měi zhī wéi měi, sī è yǐ; jiē zhī shàn zhī wéi shàn, sī bù shàn yǐ.

The authors interpret this as conceptual differentiation bringing both poles into view: no summit without a foot, no named goodness without contrast. The sage’s wuwei, non-forcing, is then read as following an order rather than violently imposing one. The archive calls Daoism the earliest expression of this thought, a priority claim not verified here.

Heraclitus offers a Greek comparison. Fragment B67 places day and night, winter and summer, war and peace, satiety and hunger together in its account of the divine. B80 associates strife with justice and coming-to-be. The essay concludes that struggle can constitute an order rather than merely destroy it. This is a reading of the fragments, not a blanket endorsement of war.

Two millennia later, Hegel’s dialectic supplies Aufhebung, usually rendered as sublation: a movement that negates and preserves. The archive correctly warns against treating the familiar schoolroom formula “thesis–antithesis–synthesis” as Hegel’s own standard wording, then attributes that formula to Fichte. The exact genealogy of the formula still requires care.

Hegel’s “cunning of reason,” List der Vernunft, becomes the essay’s boldest historical image. Passions can serve ends their bearers did not intend, while individuals bear costs and suffer damage. The authors read ambition, greed, and war as material through which history moves toward freedom. This is a philosophical account of history, not evidence that harmful acts inevitably produce progress or are justified by a supposed higher result.

V. Evil as Privation

The essay next distinguishes the interplay of opposites from a theological account in which evil is not an independent substance but a lack or corruption of good.

Augustine passed through Manichaeism before rejecting it. The source describes that religion as belief in two equal gods, an oversimplification of a complex dualistic tradition. It dates On the Nature of the Good to 399 and attributes to it the account of evil as privatio boni, privation or corruption of good. The dating is inherited rather than checked.

Darkness as absence of light and illness as damage to health illustrate the thought. The source distinguishes an efficient cause from a deficient cause: evil arises through falling short rather than possessing an independent positive essence. These are theological categories, not a denial that illness and injury have real causal mechanisms.

Leibniz’s Theodicy (1710) supplies another privation account. The archive quotes the root of evil as limitation in created beings and adds the image of shadows intensifying colors and a well-placed dissonance contributing to harmony. A lesser evil can make a good more perceptible within the whole, in this philosophical argument.

The essay reads evil as a shadow in a painting, subordinate to light but incorporated into the composition. That is Leibnizian theodicy as interpreted here; it does not entitle an observer to justify another person’s suffering by declaring it necessary for harmony.

The Greek pharmakon—φάρμακον, remedy and poison—offers a different kind of ambiguity. In Plato’s Phaedrus, writing is discussed through this term. Jacques Derrida’s Plato’s Pharmacy explores its resistant double meaning, as described in the archive’s Wikipedia reference.

The same means can help or harm depending on its use and setting. The authors extend that ambiguity to order: what organizes can become destructive in excess, while something destructive in one setting may have a different function elsewhere. This linguistic and philosophical analogy is not a license to call any harm therapeutic.

VI. The Banality of Evil

If evil is not an independent substance, how can history contain so much horror? The essay’s turning point is the proposition that immense evil can be carried out by executors who do not appear monstrous.

Arendt’s account of Eichmann, an organizer of deportations, emphasizes an ambitious bureaucrat unable or unwilling to think critically about what he was doing. The archive cites the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy for her discussion and her letter to Gershom Scholem: evil, in that formulation, lacks depth or a demonic dimension yet can spread over the world like a fungus; only good has depth.

The authors hear a distinction between shallow thinking and enormous consequences. This preserves Arendt’s provocation but does not settle the contested historical account of Eichmann’s ideology or establish that intentional fanaticism plays no part in atrocity.

Milgram’s Yale obedience experiments then supply a psychological comparison. The archive dates them to 1961–1962 and reports 65% continuing to the maximum shock setting. Participants believed they were administering shocks; the learner’s shocks and distress were staged. The source’s description of the maximum as labeled “lethal” is not a reliable account of the apparatus’s labels. The familiar 65% belongs to a particular condition, not every variant or all populations.

Milgram’s agentic-state explanation describes a person experiencing themselves as an instrument of another’s wishes and displacing responsibility. The archive quotes his warning that ordinary people doing a job without personal hostility may become agents in a destructive process. It links that image back to Hobbes’s instrument. Neither explanation nor obedience cancels responsibility.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer supplies a third voice. The source introduces him as a pastor involved in resistance to Hitler, writing from prison while awaiting execution, and dates the essay on stupidity to 1943. The chronology of After Ten Years and its later publication among prison writings is compressed here and should not be treated as verified.

In the archive’s rendering, stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice: evil can be exposed and opposed, while argument may fail against thoughtless submission. Bonhoeffer’s concern is presented as social rather than a measure of intellectual capacity. Concentrated power can encourage surrender of independent judgment; the power of one needs the unthinking compliance of another.

Carlo Cipolla’s The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1976) approaches a related theme with satire. The archive defines the “stupid” actor as someone who harms others without gaining a benefit, and repeats Cipolla’s claim that such a person is more dangerous than a bandit. A self-interested wrongdoer may at least have intelligible incentives; destructive irrationality may be harder to anticipate.

The authors conclude that institutionalized incompetence can be dangerously consequential. Cipolla’s satire and Bonhoeffer’s moral reflection are not clinical classifications, statistical laws, or grounds for labeling populations intellectually inferior. The categorical claim that incompetence is always more dangerous than deliberate wrongdoing is not established.

VII. Order in Religious and Philosophical Traditions

Returning to order, the essay brings together traditions that long predate thermodynamics. It claims that societies without contact independently described a primordial order opposed to chaos and made its maintenance an ethical task. The lack-of-contact claim is too broad to assume; the comparison must be made without turning different concepts into synonyms.

Egypt: Ma’at. Ma’at is both a goddess and an account of truth, justice, and cosmic harmony; the archive glosses the name as what is straight. Isfet represents disorder and injustice. It describes the weighing of the deceased’s heart against Ma’at’s feather and the task of pharaoh and person alike in sustaining Ma’at, citing the World History Encyclopedia. Order requires participation rather than simply persisting without action.

The Vedic world: ṛta. The source describes a cosmic regularity associated with the sun, seasons, and moral order, guarded by Varuna and Mitra. Its violation is anṛta. It links later dharma and karma with this background, citing Britannica. These historical and conceptual relations require more nuance than a single identity of terms.

Zoroastrian traditions: Asha and Druj. Asha concerns truth, rightness, and order, while Druj concerns falsehood and disorder. The archive insists on an asymmetry: Asha as existence and falsehood as nonexistence, with Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu in a struggle whose final victory belongs to good. It cites Wikipedia and Britannica.

This differs from its simple account of two equal powers. Yet Zoroastrian traditions themselves have varied accounts of cosmic conflict, so the passage cannot establish one exhaustive doctrine. The ethical triad of good thoughts, good words, and good deeds supplies the essay’s practical emphasis.

China: Dao. The authors describe a natural order followed through non-forcing rather than broken by coercion, citing the Chinese Text Project.

Greece: logos. Heraclitus’s B114 relates human laws to a divine law, as cited through the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. The authors interpret logos as a shared ordering principle.

The archive also notes the linguistic relationship between Avestan asha and Vedic ṛta through an Indo-European root, then refers to scholarly comparisons with Heraclitus’s logos. Linguistic kinship in the first pair does not prove identity among all five concepts. The authors’ common question is how human action relates to a larger order; the traditions answer in different ways.

VIII. Why Consider Order Without Choosing a Cosmic Side?

The essay assembles its picture. Physics concerns entropy and local organization. Political philosophy asks how coexistence is maintained. Dialectical thought explores relations among opposites. Privation theories interpret evil through lack or corruption. Arendt and obedience research raise questions about thoughtless participation. Religious traditions connect conduct with broader accounts of order.

The archive compresses these into a single convergence. Their different methods and objects prevent that convergence from being a proof. What changes if we nevertheless use the comparison as a lens?

The authors identify two illusions. The first is that one side in every dispute embodies light and the other darkness, so choosing the right camp is enough. Their counterpoint is that antagonists may share institutional assumptions. They repeat that this does not erase moral differences between particular decisions.

The second is that evil will retreat once a villain is exposed. If harmful conduct is also sustained through routines, incentives, and unexamined obedience, identifying a perpetrator alone may leave enabling conditions intact. The archive’s phrase “there is no one to expose” is too strong: perpetrators remain accountable even when broader mechanisms matter.

The authors then propose knowledge and independent judgment as an antidote to unthinking participation. Instead of simply exchanging one camp for another, they imagine more people able to ask what they are doing and view the world from another person’s position.

In the source’s metaphor, order remains but becomes less blind. Its claim that knowledge is the sole antidote or that order is a moral law established by physics is not supported here. The following history illustrates ways ideas can contribute to change without proving a guaranteed movement toward justice.

IX. Knowledge Reshaping Institutions from Within

The authors caution against the dream that merely enlightening people will automatically make a system good. They turn instead to a historical narrative in which changes in what people know alter institutions from within. The narrative is selective, not a controlled test of one cause.

Print. Around 1450, Johannes Gutenberg developed movable-type printing in Europe, enabling many copies at a lower cost, as described in the archive’s Britannica reference. The source reports more than twenty million printed copies in Western Europe by 1500, and roughly 150–200 million during the following century, via Wikipedia. These quantities are retained as inherited estimates.

The press itself belonged to neither a good nor an evil side. In the authors’ argument, its importance was weakening concentrated control over texts.

The Reformation. Luther put forward his ninety-five theses on 31 October 1517; the source describes hundreds of printed copies spreading through Germany within weeks. It reports at least 2,721 works from Wittenberg printers between 1517 and 1546, totaling about three million copies, citing the University of Arizona.

Luther’s German New Testament appeared in 1522 and the complete Bible in 1534. The archive says vernacular translation removed exclusive elite or clerical control over words and the Word. That claim is rhetorical and historically incomplete, but it captures the authors’ interest in widened access.

William Tyndale, executed in 1536, is quoted as hoping to make a plowboy know Scripture better than a learned opponent if God spared his life. The essay links his translation work and death closely; the legal, political, and theological history is more complex than a single sentence can show.

The authors contrast storming a cathedral with texts circulating among many readers. The comparison highlights print without denying that the Reformations also involved conflict, state power, institutions, and violence. Circulation alone is not a complete explanation.

Literacy. The archive reports a global literacy estimate of about 12% around 1820 and growth in northwestern Europe between 1600 and 1800, citing Our World in Data. It interprets rising education as preceding and helping prepare modern societies. The claim that literacy always comes first and freedom follows is stronger than these historical associations establish.

The Enlightenment. Francis Bacon’s ipsa scientia potestas est, associated here with 1597, gives the image of knowledge itself as power. Kant’s What Is Enlightenment? (1784) offers Sapere aude: dare to use your own understanding. The source describes enlightenment as emergence from self-incurred immaturity, citing German History Docs.

The authors hear an affinity with Arendt and Bonhoeffer: the problem may concern the courage to exercise judgment, not merely possession of intellectual ability. Diderot and d’Alembert’s Encyclopédie (1751–1772), in their account, aimed to change how people think and place human reason above unquestioned authority. The thinkers’ different projects should not be collapsed into one program.

Power and knowledge. The essay turns to Michel Foucault’s interrelation of knowing and governing, citing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Changing what people know and regard as self-evident may change configurations of power. Foucault’s account does not mean more information automatically produces benevolent power; knowledge can also organize surveillance and control.

Gramsci’s Prison Notebooks (1929–1935 in the source) supply cultural hegemony and a war of position. Institutions endure partly because their arrangements become common sense. Change can begin when people recognize those arrangements as historically produced rather than inevitable features of nature.

Everyday action and reform. James Scott’s Weapons of the Weak (1985) describes ordinary, often quiet forms of resistance that can erode domination, as summarized through Wikipedia. This does not imply that all resistance is quiet or always succeeds.

Karl Popper’s The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945) contributes critical discussion in place of coercion and piecemeal social reform in place of a total revolutionary blueprint. The authors compare discarding failed policies with discarding refuted scientific theories, citing the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. It is an analogy concerning criticism and correction, not an identity between politics and an experiment.

Capabilities and public information. Amartya Sen’s Development as Freedom (1999) links development with expanding substantive freedoms, including capacities supported by education. The source invokes his argument about the absence of famine in functioning democracies to emphasize public information and accountability. The scope and qualifications of that claim matter; it cannot be generalized to every form of hunger or read as proof that knowledge alone prevents disaster.

The authors conclude that knowledge does not create justice instantly but can shift institutions toward it. Their stronger claim of a systematic, inevitable direction remains an interpretation of their examples.

Diffusion. Everett Rogers’s Diffusion of Innovations (1962) provides an S-shaped pattern: slow early adoption followed, in some settings, by broader uptake. The archive describes a critical mass after which change becomes self-sustaining and practically irreversible. Neither a universal threshold nor irreversibility follows for every idea, technology, or political change. The image conveys that influencing everyone individually may not always be necessary for wider diffusion.

The essay closes this historical section by recalling pharmakon. Knowledge can help or harm; print carried slander as well as scripture. Nevertheless, the authors argue that breaking a monopoly of knowledge can weaken unquestioning submission. This is a reason to value accessible understanding, not a guarantee that readers, educated people, or knowledgeable institutions will act justly.

Why United Wisdom Was Created

The authors now state the project’s intention directly. United Wisdom was created in part for this quiet work: adding knowledge and the capacity to think to a shared environment, rather than merely defeating an opposing side.

The project places religions, philosophical schools, myths, and science in conversation while seeking to preserve differences. A worldview that appears uniquely possible can then be recognized as one perspective among several. The authors connect that aim with Gramsci’s examination of common sense and Kant’s appeal to independent understanding.

The archive says someone who sees Ma’at, ṛta, Asha, Dao, and logos addressing a shared question will no longer become an unthinking instrument. That is an aspiration, not a demonstrated protective effect. Encountering comparisons does not guarantee independent judgment, and treating the traditions as interchangeable would undermine the stated aim.

The essay locates an institutional vulnerability wherever people are required to accept a single picture of the world and oppose those who see differently. United Wisdom’s proposed contribution is to widen what can be seen without demanding allegiance to a political camp. The authors call this their version of the printing press: a way to make order more perceptive, rather than a weapon against order itself.

They promise no quick victories. The history they invoke unfolds across centuries. Their closing image is of one fewer passive instrument and one more thinking participant whenever a person begins to judge independently. The claim that this necessarily makes order more just remains the project’s hope, not a measured result of the project or a settled law of history.

A Central Quotation

“Stupidity is a more dangerous enemy of the good than malice. One can protest against evil, expose it, and, if necessary, stop it by force. … Against stupidity we are defenseless.”

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, After Ten Years, dated 1943 and associated with prison letters in the supplied archive, through “on the wing.” This renders the inherited quotation; the composition chronology and wording were not newly checked.

Connections Across Traditions

The following comparisons retain the source’s seven connections. They identify a shared question without demonstrating identical doctrines or independently discovered scientific laws.

Ma’at, ṛta, and Asha: accounts connecting cosmic order and right conduct, opposed in different ways to isfet, anṛta, and Druj. The source notes a linguistic relationship between asha and ṛta; that relationship does not make all three concepts the same.
Wuwei and Leviathan: contrasting responses to the question of order—non-forcing in the authors’ Daoist reading, and sovereign authority in Hobbes. Their political and metaphysical premises differ substantially.
Heraclitus and the Daodejing: interdependent opposites and the role of distinction or conflict. The comparison does not equate conceptual contrast with the moral necessity of violence.
Augustine, Leibniz, and Arendt: privation, limitation, and banality placed together. Arendt’s political judgment about evil is not simply the same thesis as a theological account of substance.
Hegel’s cunning of reason and Leibniz’s harmony: different philosophical attempts to relate suffering, passion, or evil to a larger whole. Neither comparison supplies permission to justify harm inflicted on others.
Good thoughts, words, and deeds, alongside independent judgment: the authors compare Zoroastrian ethics with their reading of Arendt. Thought matters in both comparisons, but thinking does not make a person immune to cruelty or error.
Kant, Gramsci, and print: independent understanding, changing common sense, and widened access to texts. These can interact without proving one exclusively peaceful or inevitably successful mechanism of historical change.

Works and References Named in the Archive

Rudolf Clausius (1850) and Ludwig Boltzmann: entropy and the second law; Britannica.
Erwin Schrödinger, What Is Life? (1944): negative entropy; Wikipedia.
Norbert Wiener, Cybernetics (1948): information and entropy; Wikipedia; the image of islands of order through The Marginalian.
Ilya Prigogine and Isabelle Stengers, Order Out of Chaos (1984): nonequilibrium and organization; the 1977 Nobel Prize; Britannica.
Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan (1651): conflict, sovereignty, and the instrument image; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Max Weber, Politics as a Vocation (1919): the state’s claim to legitimate force; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Daodejing, chapter 2: paired distinctions and wuwei; Chinese Text Project.
Heraclitus, DK B53, B67, B80, and B114: conflict, opposites, and logos; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
G. W. F. Hegel: dialectic and Aufhebung through Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy; cunning of reason through Wikipedia.
Augustine, On the Nature of the Good, dated 399 in the archive: privatio boni; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
G. W. Leibniz, Theodicy (1710): privation and the image of shadows; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Plato, Phaedrus, and Jacques Derrida, Plato’s Pharmacy: pharmakon; Wikipedia.
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem (1963) and the letter to Scholem; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Stanley Milgram, obedience studies and Obedience to Authority, given as 1963/1974: the reported 65% condition and agentic state; Wikipedia.
Dietrich Bonhoeffer, After Ten Years, dated 1943 in the source: social thoughtlessness and power; “on the wing.”
Carlo Cipolla, The Basic Laws of Human Stupidity (1976): the source links to the original text.
Ma’at and isfet: Egyptian order and justice; World History Encyclopedia.
Johannes Gutenberg, around 1450, and print expansion: Britannica and Wikipedia.
Martin Luther’s theses (1517) and Bible translation (1522–1534), and printing in Wittenberg: Wikipedia and University of Arizona.
William Tyndale, executed in 1536: the plowboy statement; Wikipedia.
European literacy, including Buringh and Van Zanden (2009): Our World in Data.
Francis Bacon, Meditationes Sacrae (1597): knowledge and power; Wikipedia.
Immanuel Kant, What Is Enlightenment? (1784): Sapere aude; German History Docs.
Diderot and d’Alembert, Encyclopédie (1751–1772): changing how people think; Wikipedia.
Michel Foucault: power/knowledge; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Antonio Gramsci, Prison Notebooks (1929–1935): hegemony and war of position; Wikipedia.
James Scott, Weapons of the Weak (1985): everyday resistance; Wikipedia.
Karl Popper, The Open Society and Its Enemies (1945): discussion and coercion; Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy.
Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom (1999): education and substantive freedom; Wikipedia.
Everett Rogers, Diffusion of Innovations (1962): diffusion curves and critical mass; Wikipedia.
Ṛta and dharma: Vedic order; Britannica.
Asha and Druj, Ahura Mazda and Angra Mainyu: truth, order, and conflict in Zoroastrian traditions; Wikipedia and Britannica.

About the Authors

This essay was written by Andrey Zarinsh (@andrey.zarinsh) and Maria Evilkut (@ilkutki), the authorial partnership behind United Wisdom, a laboratory of shared wisdom where lived experience meets world traditions and the language of science to approach one question through several languages at once.

Andrey Zarinsh & Maria Evilkut · United Wisdom · A laboratory of shared wisdom.

Transliteration note: the duplicated Chinese quotation and the characters for wuwei are represented in Roman letters. Their original script remains in the unchanged Russian master.

References Inherited from the Archive

These links preserve the archive’s reference record; their contents were not newly checked for this translation.

PDF-L001 — original PDF page 2
PDF-L002 — original PDF page 3
PDF-L003 — original PDF page 3
PDF-L004 — original PDF page 4
PDF-L005 — original PDF page 4
PDF-L006 — original PDF page 4
PDF-L007 — original PDF page 4
PDF-L008 — original PDF page 4
PDF-L009 — original PDF page 5
PDF-L010 — original PDF page 5
PDF-L011 — original PDF page 5
PDF-L012 — original PDF page 6
PDF-L013 — original PDF page 6
PDF-L014 — original PDF page 6
PDF-L015 — original PDF page 6
PDF-L016 — original PDF page 7
PDF-L017 — original PDF page 7
PDF-L018 — original PDF page 7
PDF-L019 — original PDF page 8
PDF-L020 — original PDF page 8
PDF-L021 — original PDF page 8
PDF-L022 — original PDF page 8
PDF-L023 — original PDF page 10
PDF-L024 — original PDF page 10
PDF-L025 — original PDF page 10
PDF-L026 — original PDF page 10
PDF-L027 — original PDF page 10
PDF-L028 — original PDF page 10
PDF-L029 — original PDF page 10
PDF-L030 — original PDF page 10
PDF-L031 — original PDF page 10
PDF-L032 — original PDF page 10
PDF-L033 — original PDF page 11
PDF-L034 — original PDF page 11
PDF-L035 — original PDF page 11
PDF-L036 — original PDF page 11
PDF-L037 — original PDF page 11
PDF-L038 — original PDF page 11