On the one hand, there's Jesus's injunction to turn the other cheek. To love your enemy.
On the other hand, there's the Prisoner's Dilemma. And its empirically demonstrable solution: always cooperate with the other fellow until he does the dirty on you, then smack him back and keep on doing so until the moment he repents and returns to cooperation; at that moment, you do likewise and continue cooperating (until such times as he defects, then you return to counterstrike mode).
Play the game a million times, and the optimal strategy turns out to be cooperate-cooperate, defect-defect, every time. Tit-for-tat, in other words. Continuing to cooperate, turning the other cheek while the other guy is smiting you repeatedly in the face, is a strategy for suckers. It only encourages wrong-doing (example: Obama and Merkel's response to Putin's invasion of Crimea in 2014).
The Prisoner's Dilemma model works well enough, but has two problems. The first is identifying what constitutes a defection. A colleague criticising your work at a meeting, or neighbours who habitually let their dog crap on your lawn – can either be classed as a transgression? The second problem is determining an appropriate and proportional response to what you judge to be a transgression. Start a vendetta against your colleague or neighbour?
In multinational diplomacy, judging where to draw the line as to the other party's egregious behaviour and choosing a proportional response is crucial. The quote, widely attributed to philosopher Edmund Burke, "the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good men to do nothing", applies to individuals as much as to collectives such as nations or treaty partners. Not sending the correct signals when red lines are crossed marks you out as a soft touch.
Let's return to Jesus. Does He mean loving your enemy literally, even as your enemy is herding you into a gas chamber?
How should we deal metaphysically with a murderous tyrant across the border, whose behaviour threaten your country, your family and you? Pray for his speedy death? Pray for him to fall victim to a brain haemorrhage in his sleep? Or surround the tyrant with compassionate thoughts aimed at persuading him to see the error of his way? Both, I feel, are doomed to failure, even if millions aim such intentions at him nightly.
What does work then? Letting go, metaphysically at least, and let the material world deal with its material problem in the material way? Maybe the metaphysical works at the personal level. One's ability to will one's own fate works to a certain, limited, extent, but projecting it on a larger scale, to will the eradication of, say, malaria, or evil people, probably doesn't. Why not?
We seek the truth underlying reality. We seek it scientifically, in the material realm, we seek it esoterically in the metaphysical realm. The process of discovering the truth is an eternal process. We are not destined to find out now, in this space and time, in this life. A world devoid of evil, because people willed it thus, is beyond our grasp.
I wrote on Day 14 of Lent this year about entropy as a physical explanation of chaos, the opposite of emergent complexity. Things breaking down, people dying – entropy. Making things, people being born – emergence. Blessed are the builders, cursed are the killers. But there's always tit for tat and the Prisoner's Dilemma. Do not kill, but if someone starts killing you people, your family, you are obliged to hit back physically at the source of that evil, and keep doing so until it backs away and gives in.
Where metaphysics breaks down against the rocks of reality.
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