We all easily feel and know evil when we see it, but it’s disgusting and uncomfortable to even define it. For that reason, we tend to not explore it further.
Evil, however, does exist. Even to the most morally relativistic person, they’ll still regard moral absolutes or things that encroach on their self-preservation as evil.
Evil always has a few elements:
- An active decision or plan for a decision, which may be past-tense if it’s habitual.
- Self-interested gain for the decider or desire to destroy another living being.
- If it’s performed, pain for the victim through unjustly violating their boundaries.
Any value which isn’t a virtue can become evil if it’s taken to excess:
- Boldness, taken to excess, becomes foolish audacity (i.e., discretion is the better part of valor).
- Compassion, taken to excess, becomes unhealthy enabling (i.e., paternalism).
- Efficiency, taken to excess, becomes callousness or harshness.
While many people imagine good and evil on a spectrum, evil is more an absence of virtue:
- Selfishness is the absence of compassion or consideration for others.
- Conceit is the absence of humility.
- Impatience is the absence of patience.
- Harshness is the absence of kindness.
However, the absence of virtue does represent itself on a general spectrum by how the sacrifices are motivated:
- Self-sacrificial effort strictly for the interests of others.
- Self-sacrificial effort oriented toward others’ interest, but also serving personal interests.
- Sacrifices that serve personal benefit more than others’ benefit.
- Sacrifices that serve personal benefit, without considering the interests of others whatsoever.
- Self-interested sacrifices that benefit the self more than harming others.
- Self-interested sacrifices that harm others more than providing self-benefit.
- Self-interested actions done out of pleasure that harm others.
- Actions taken out of pleasure that harm others.
Awareness
We understand many of our own needs from birth and must be taught others’, so everyone is born selfish. Selfishness merely requires not thinking about anyone else. This is technically evil, but normative enough that we give plenty of grace for it.
As we grow, continuing to care more about ourselves than others will develop that selfishness into evil. In that sense, everyone is born a little evil and must be trained against it by their parents by demonstrating how our actions can affect others.
Our adaptation toward evil starts very early on. Starting at about 6 months old, we start abusing others’ boundaries. Some people may debate an infant’s understanding, but it’s perfectly clear they don’t care about anyone but themselves.
When we become aware of evil habits, we are more likely to stop them. This isn’t always true, though, since we must have at least some love of others to even consider it. Often, we can use that awareness to hide their evil further.
Many people falsely believe evil decisions are products of stupidity. While evil is often focused on short-term gain, self-interested and inconsiderate decisions come through all possible scopes of understanding and breadth of time, and the most evil people in the world are also the most intelligent.
Decisions
Evil decisions require power to perform it. Otherwise, the only evil a person can commit is within their imagination.
Every single person has the capacity for evil by making a few key immoral decisions, then committing them to habit:
- Ignore when other people say “no”, which requires intentionally not observing them.
- Attack anyone who enforces their rights or questions your privileges.
- Withhold from anyone who needs anything.
- Exercise every privilege as far as you feel like.
- Hide anything that may threaten your power as much as possible, then blame others for anything others discover.
- Insult and degrade anyone you dislike or who threatens your power.
- Scale upwards to make a system that serves your interests more than others, but maintain a kind-looking image of morality to subdue any opposition.
On the other hand, being good requires trained virtue that goes against our impulses:
- Respect others’ boundaries and honor their right to say “no” about their rights.
- Maintain respect for others when they disregard your privileges.
- Give to others when they need things more than you.
- Only exercise your rights.
- Take responsibility for failures and fully own decisions.
- Sacrifice power out of love for others.
- Scale upwards to influence others to serve others themselves, driven by building virtuous habits.
Most religious institutions provoke us to virtue, at least partly.
Motivation
We commit evil through a few possible mental approaches.
Conceit/Arrogance/Pride
Conceit is the desire to be better than others. Unlike almost anything else that could drive evil, it’s strictly competitive.
Conceit never concerns itself over status or power except as a comparison. It’s not about being “rich” or “smart”, but about being “richer than” or “smarter than”.
Arrogance is dangerous because it’s never fully satisfied. If someone wishes to be the best, they’re working against the statistical likelihood that they’re built a certain way. If they accomplish something, the competitive drive will naturally turn to something else, and it will never stop.
Often, this arrogance transitions into the desire to transcend death.
After conceit has taken hold, a person will only view others in one of three lenses:
- They’re a means to their greatness, which is evil by using people to a self-promoting end. Its only cure is love for the person they’re abusing.
- They’re an impediment to their greatness, which will become evil when the person decides to overthrow that greatness. Its only cure is humility.
- They’re irrelevant to their greatness. This can build friendship when there are shared goals, our development means that person will later become one of the other two.
Every human is at least a little arrogant. The clearest sign is when we try to hide reality from others or use our influence to control others.
Revenge
Revenge is the desire for self-imposed equivalent justice.
However, since we have a limited understanding of others’ feelings, especially while we feel wronged, we tend to overstate how bad we feel and understate how bad others feel.
The product of vengeful thinking, therefore, is that we tend to hurt people more than they hurt us: “eye for an eye” becomes “face for an eye”.
One variation of revenge is envy. However, instead of pure vengeance directed at a person’s actions, it’s directed at a person’s status. It’s a passive hatred that broadly focuses toward the groups that formed that status, though most envious people are unaware exactly what their hatred or arrogance stands against.
Mix-and-Match Motives
Evil is a void and not an opposite, so there are many varieties of it, from an endless supply of distorted motivations.
We often combine our evil with varieties of virtue to create powerful, influential ideas. The most potent evils in the world were driven by people following what they interpreted as a trend of goodness. We often justify it as “the greater good”. Curiosity, for example, is a good thing that becomes bad when we’re willing to violate others’ boundaries to understand what we want.
One of the easiest ways we can mix in evil is by morally “balancing” ourselves. We’ll often desire to do good things (and feel good from it), but don’t do anything to reflect our desires. Good intentions only make people good if we make efforts to perform it, and well-intended evil actions are still evil.
Another form of “balancing” is to justify evil because we had previously done a good thing. Those things are disconnected, but we’ve assigned symbolic connections between those things to enforce what we feel like doing. This can be particularly disgusting if we use evil to advance good (e.g., stealing to provide for a family).
Application
Evil is so discomforting to us, so we tend to politicize evil in others and abstracting it to groups we’re not associated with, but don’t like to consider how our decisions or groups may be evil. We also like to behave as if others’ evil were incomprehensible to us, even when we would completely understand if we spent a few seconds considering how someone could have decided in a situation.
Every child is born with the capacity to be evil, so society will always have a problem with evil as long as it keeps having children. The only way to change it is to reconstruct our entire formation from birth. All we can do is either socially engineer justice to curb it or inspire people through faith to change for something beyond themselves.
People are sometimes unaware of their evil, so we must seek to inform them before taking action against them. This doesn’t always work, though, and we must use good rules to keep ourselves safe.
Evil isn’t wise, but intelligence can compensate for it, and some of the most evil people on the planet are so intelligent that they hide it well.
Evil people confronted about their evil often become more clever. It’s not wise to address the nuances of evil unless you’re aware how the information you give may help them become more dangerous if they don’t decide to change for the better.
Fantasizing about performing evil is just as morally damaging to the soul as actually doing it, though it’s completely unenforceable in society.
The competitive drive to be better than others is why many systems can turn evil.
The desire for power, whenever it’s the final purpose above all else, is always evil. Even when it started as a desire for safety or was driven by fear, desiring power becomes evil when it prioritizes things or values over others. The only cure to this is humility toward and love for others.
Everyone is about 20-50 key decisions away from becoming evil. Virtue hurts us in the short-term, so all we’d need to do is submit to our baser desires and disregard others.
If it feels good, we should only do it without question if it also feels good for everyone else, present and future.
We must consider both the principle and consequences of a moral action to dictate whether something was evil. While someone merely following orders in an evil system isn’t as evil, they’re still a participant in something awful.