‘Evil’ is a concept that is strange to me when I am in the “we’re all part of an inexplicable universe” state of mind. But I think I can understand it from at least one perspective: what we think of when we call a person evil.
Isn’t “evil” just a name for extreme aspects of lack of empathy? What is ‘evil’ to most people at its core? I am a little out of the loop with the good and evil framing but what comes to mind are ‘people being terrible’ in a way that put themselves first, that are power-hungry, that are cruel to other people or beings. (I am leaving aside ‘evil’ that just reflects people’s censorious interpretation of things other people shouldn’t do because another human wrote down words according to a deity, I am talking about evil you can feel).
In that case, why isn’t the answer to evil always empathy? This seems obvious, yet somehow the impulse in history is always war or punishment or something of that nature. We fear this kind of lack of empathy, perhaps because it lurks within us. Maybe the real evil is how lack of empathy provokes lack of empathy.
Of course there are those incapable of empathy, but as Robet Sapolsky suggests, as humanity we’re perhaps better off identifying and isolating sociopaths and then using deep empathy with everyone else. To recognise that in almost every case where empathy is possible, anti-social or ‘evil’ behaviour results not from free will, but from being an organism in a system that hasn’t properly nurtured it. As a society, we can look (with empathy) at what leads to this behaviour (and maybe even this thinking) and address it.
I mean, that will probably never happen, but there are interesting ‘microcosm’ experiments with this approach among collectives, people creating containers of empathy and building trust with each other. In a context of collective healing, it’s easier to spot dominance, anti-social behaviour, power-seeking, and to respond with empathy as well as approbation. It’s possible to have norms that allow people to make mistakes and be called in, and this rests, at least in part, in practices of interaction that involve witnessing, processing, slowness, not so much dialogue until the trust and norms are clear and held in the space.
It is not easy to meet what feels evil with empathy, and empathy isn’t enough. Empathy alone does not address the systemic scaffold that leads to evil, that supports massive social inequity that yields power of the kind that can drain empathy away. So I’m not saying, let’s just be understanding. We can put boundaries into play and make sure evil isn’t normalized. We can fight the idea that evil is not evil if it has some utility, if it means jobs or profit or security or control.
I do wonder in myself how I can meet evil more with wonder, like “humans are capable of this. I am a human. Am I capable of this?” And notice where the edges of evil might live in me, so that I can love them out of existence.