Originally Posted by
Malkiah
As a moral relativist I reject the notion of "evil" because that implies some kind of objective universal standard, so technically I'd say the root of evil is the imagination because evil doesn't exist.
But that's cheating the question, isn't it?
The root cause of everything repugnant in human society is the failure of humans to act on current information instead of acting on instinct that was developed for a world that no longer exists.
Greed and corruption are the product of a brain that still thinks it's 50,000 BC and we're on the verge of starving all the time so need to desperately hoard every scrap of anything we can get our hands on.
Avarice and cruelty to others are social instincts to "shoot first and ask questions later" when it comes to anything that isn't part of our tribe.
The state of the world has changed vastly more rapidly than evolution can keep up with, so basically humans are not genetically aligned with the world that we live in, we've got all these instincts and ingrained behaviors that are no longer relevant and most people are too benightedly fucking stupid to recognize that and make the choice to alter their thinking and behavior accordingly.
Most humans are just chimps in a zoo with a cognition AI patched in - there's no volition to most people, no real sense of awareness or self, no introspection or intuitive processing about the nature of reality. There's a 100,000 year old instinct to violently hurl your shit at anything shaped like a snake in case it might be a snake, and most modern humans are just doing that except also trying to slap some kind of justification on top of it because their conscious mind wants to have an excuse for their behavior that makes it their choice.
As for mental health and homelessness, well that's easy:
Homelessness exists because it is the gun pointed at the head of the working class. It's the threat that those with money use to say "don't ask for too much, don't expect too much, don't think too hard about what you're worth as a human life or a member of society, because we can turn you into THAT at any time."
Keep a large and robust homeless population around so that they're everywhere and all the working stiffs have to see them all the time and the working stiffs will never get too uppity, in order to prevent themselves from becoming homeless.
It's not an accident or an act of neglect, a teeming mass of homeless miserable people are a necessary component of a capitalist society.
The mental health thing is a combination of all of the above... bad upbringing in a shitty world makes for unstable people. And, there's no selectivity in breeding anymore in humans, certainly not on the basis of healthy genes. We've been systematically breeding ourselves into retardation for hundreds if not thousands of years, so that sort of thing is only going to get worse as time goes on.