Evil-

Examine the lives of the best
and most fruitful people and peoples and ask yourselves:

whether a tree that is supposed to grow to a proud height
can dispense with bad weather and storms;
whether misfortune and external resistance, some
kinds of hatred, jealousy, stubbornness, mistrust, hardness,
avarice, and violence
do not belong among the favorable conditions

without which any great growth
even of virtue is scarcely
possible.

The poison of which weaker natures perish
strengthens the strong

–nor do they call it poison.

–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 1, Section 19 by Friedrich Nietzsche

The discussion of the evening was gambling and mathematics.  Sure gambling, the various types of games offered nowadays at a casino — involve mathematics, the science of probability.  Even so, the sights, the sounds, the tactile, engineered environment of a large room filled with machines, and tables are ascendant overriding and overruling “gaming” as an abstract, mathematical activity.  Gambling is wagering, risking your loss, — on the possibility that the loss of others will accrue to you, a winner.  Gambling is seductive, something forbidden, because it involves loss and destruction.  There are winners and losers.  One can hardly help but to envision oneself standing on the winning side of that line…

Gambling is traditionally regarded as a vice.

What is evil?

Relabeling changes nothing, and there are many types of evil.

Can I outrun evil or perhaps hide?

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The whole earth is our hospital
Endowed by the ruined millionaire,
Wherein, if we do well, we shall
Die of the absolute paternal care
That will not leave us, but prevents us everywhere.

-excerpt The Four Quartets, East Coker, stanza IV, by T. S. Eliot