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Re:What sort of entrepreneur are you anyway? by michaelochurch on Friday May 06, 2011 @12:11PM (#2521353)
Good vs. evil is a completely different debate from the practical balancing of concerns an entrepreneur faces on a day-to-day basis. The OP mixes these two radically different orders of decision making. Good and evil are not just about misprioritization of values, and most entrepreneurs are good people balancing decisions of a more practical nature, such as when to hire and when not, that don't really have moral "right answers".

Bad people have no problem with good values. Irreconcilable opposites are made from the same handful of values representing goodness.

As for evil vs. values, evil generally comes in two forms: fanatical and selfish evil, which may both exist in one person. Invariably, both exist in evil movements: Hitler being an example of fanatical evil and Eichmann being an example of selfish evil. OP's statement is only true (sometimes) of the latter. Fanatical evil is characterized by the insistence on one value, which may be good (economic equality, as in communism) or bad ("racial purity", as in Nazism) at its root but is, in either case, given such an absurdly high priority over other values (humanism, reason) as to have catastrophic results.

Selfish evil, on the other hand, is characterized by narcissism, psychopathy, and a complete lack of values, but also a willingness to adopt the appearance of whatever values are in fashion. A selfishly evil person cares only about self-advancement.

The fanatical kind is what we associate with villians like Hitler and bin Laden, and it's really destructive when such people get into power. In business, it's far more common to encounter the selfish kind of evil: the office psychopath. This is because, although they're less damaging to the world, office psychopaths are just a lot more common. You can think of selfishly evil people like tornadoes, which can cause a lot of harm on a local scale but rarely globally, and fanatical evil people like hurricanes, which have a broader effect.

On the small scale, selfish evil is more dangerous because these people are more common and, unlike the fanatically evil who usually end up institutionalized, there are a lot of them in high positions of power and it is impossible to spot them unless one directly sees them doing bad things, because they act like anyone else. On the large scale, fanatical evil is more dangerous to the world because it's better at PR. It can dress itself up as "virtue" and prey on weak minds.

Re:What sort of entrepreneur are you anyway? by anamax on Friday May 06, 2011 @05:17PM (#2522517)
> by the insistence on one value, which may be good (economic equality, as in communism)

If nothing else, experience with said insistence suggests that economic equality may not be good.

But, even if we ignore that experience, is there reason to believe that economic equality is a good thing. Is it even an "all other things being equal" good thing?