Confusion

There is a curious twist in the mind of some liberals. I spoke with a private school history teacher today. He said that the liberal should be able to notice that, surprisingly, Soviet government was actually conservative. Because it was totalitarian, you see, enforcing government control of speech, thought, and so forth. It is truly incredible how tenaciously the human mind can embrace a manifest contradiction.

The mind does this when it turns in horror from the mirror, when it can't bear to look at itself. The deep tendency toward totalitarianism of people on the left is merely grotesquely exaggerated by Soviet government, rather than opposed by it. Right before this teacher's face are hoards of conservatives fighting the growth of government and the movement toward totalitarian control and espousing a return to limited government as stipulated by the U.S. Constitution. Yet, he cannot see.

This evening I was also told, yet again, that Americans conservatives wish to institute a kind of theocracy. What tangled webs we weave when we practice to deceive ourselves.

A Possible Theodicy

By "theodicy" I mean a theory intended to reconcile the fact that there is evil with the existence of God, the argument from evil being one of the most powerful arguments against the existence of God.

Consider this theodicy:

P1: It is psychologically impossible for any logically possible living being to understand the value of any possible world and feel appropriate gratitude for the existence of that world unless that world is tainted by severe and pervasive evil.

It would follow from this that if [P2] the best possible world entails the possibility for living beings to understand the value of that world and to feel appropriate gratitude for it, then [C:] the best possible world must be tainted by severe and pervasive evil.

As I have suggested in previous posts, the aforementioned understanding and gratitude is the point of meditation and prayer, and gratitude is a cardinal virtue. But, possibly, this gratitude cannot be achieved by any logically possible living being unless that living being must cope with severe and pervasive evil. In other words, no one, not even God, could design a living being which would have the psychological capacity to achieve it in a world of little or no evil.

Whether or not the premises (P1 and P2) of this theodicy are true, the argument appears to be valid. Are the premises true?