I know you have thoughts about the young man who shot three people in Kenosha, Wisconsin. We all do. And, in a sense, that’s all our culture offers us right now: thoughts. Disparate, unconnected, intemperate thoughts.

But our thoughts often get trapped in a binary prison. We know that killing is wrong, but…and then we concoct some scenario in which killing is necessary. In other words, a choice between two bad things. And so we start to think that sometimes the “good thing” to do is to do that which is otherwise bad.

What do we do then? We usually justify the one, often referring to it as the lesser of two evils. But we rarely stop there. Because we think it is just, then it also must be right.

Think about what the original move is therefore predicated on: the idea that everything is either good or bad. To get out of a question with two wrong answers, we attempt to make one of them right. And this is the explicit intention of concocting the scenario in the first place.

This move distorts both reality and morality.

Offering up two forms of evil doesn’t suddenly make one of them good.

The violent killing of human beings is evil. Always.

This may be hard to square with the idea of self-defense. So, just like everything else, we concoct an arrangement that allows us to justify what we know is wrong.

And the more and more we allow young men to go play soldier, kill people, and claim self-defense, the more our very laws and morality itself become meaningless.

The problem with self-defense

To apply self-defense to this young man’s actions requires a blanket application—saying everyone, everywhere, at anytime can use lethal force to defend themselves. But for that to be true, the victims he shot should also get that same claim. So if they are defending themselves, how can the shooter be acting in self-defense?

Here’s the dirty secret—when we justify violence, all violence becomes just.

So the problem, the real problem, is that the court has long entertained the paradox of applying both this universal self-defense AND the binary. This is how the young man can be acting in self-defense, but the actions of his victims aren’t themselves considered to be acts of self-defense. They want to apply a universal standard but only to the individual on trial. This, then, frees them from having to consider the actual effects of the action on people who themselves deserve the benefit of the doubt.

We must remember that this is a legal and rhetorical move. It isn’t the law itself or how it works. It is simply how some people are applying the law.

And it is setting incredibly dangerous precedents. We can expect more violence. We can also expect more political violence that will be justified politically. And because the court is presently dominated by a political ideology of individualism, we will be further distressed by what we see from these cases in the future.

If there were easy solutions that you could do, I would offer them.

But this expectation is like Thanos snapping his fingers to fix the universe: well-intentioned hubris (without the obvious evil).

There are no singular actions singular people can take to create a common effect. It takes organizing, communicating, and time. Individuals can’t break the problem of individualism.

But the first thing we can do is break free from the way these arguments are so often framed. As singular moments with actions others claim we all would do.

The story isn’t only whether a person feels scared and pulls a trigger, we must pan out and see why he’s there, with a gun, and why he will always feel justified in using it.

It also means dealing with the hard reality that we all can justify evil given the right circumstances. But that doesn’t stop it from being evil. Our moral fabric depends on evil remaining evil.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, when weighing the decision to join in the plot to assassinate Hitler understood throughout the whole, that he was participating in evil. But NOT participating was also evil. The point is that he wasn’t doing “the just thing” and it isn’t in anyway turning evil into good. It is still an act of evil.

He merely hoped that God would be merciful.

Perhaps that is all we have to go on regardless.