If Evil Isn’t Real, What Do You Call the People Who Enjoy Hurting Others?
Some people do terrible things, and I’m not sure “bad childhood” fully explains it.
Many people claim not to believe in evil. They say everything can be traced back to trauma, a bad childhood, mental illness, poor choices, or broken systems. Maybe. I get the logic. But I'm still not sure that explains everything.
What do you call someone who walks into a classroom and guns down innocent kids or flies a plane into a building full of people? What about the ones who design viruses in labs, drop bombs on cities, or drive their car through a parade? What about the ones who abuse, manipulate, steal, and destroy just because they can?
Is that trauma? Or is there something deeper or something darker?
I don't believe in some devil living under the Earth pulling strings and whispering into people's ears. I have no idea if there's some invisible battle between good and evil playing out on some cosmic chessboard, and I certainly don't buy the idea that God is watching everything, handing out free will while somehow controlling the outcome. That whole setup sounds like a fantasy designed to make us feel like chaos has a purpose.
But there are people out there who don't belong in a civilized society. People who, no matter what environment they were raised in, will harm others, not out of survival, but out of a twisted sense of control or pleasure or just plain indifference to human life. Maybe they're sociopaths. Perhaps they're just broken. Or maybe they like it.
I remember watching animals in the wild. My son thinks I'm a little nuts for watching so many nature videos, but there's something honest about the animal kingdom. Most animals follow a daily routine. Eat, sleep, mate, defecate, and try not to get eaten. That's it. Survival. We're not that different. We just hide our instincts behind suits, laws, politics, and polite conversation.
But we still have predators. And the truth is, not every predator is easy to spot. Some wear ties and sit in boardrooms. Some wear robes and stand in pulpits. Some run for office again and again. Some build careers around control and domination and treat people like pawns on a board. And just like in the wild, you either recognize the threat or get devoured by it.
I've seen good people suffer and die young. I've seen kind, generous people taken advantage of by cold-hearted manipulators. I've seen cycles of abuse continue while the abuser walks away unscathed. Was that karma? Was that some divine plan? No. It was just life. And sometimes life puts you face-to-face with someone who doesn't care whether you live or die.
Some people are just cruel. Some people love power a little too much. Some people will never change.
I'm still figuring this out. But here's where I am...for now. I'm not sure if evil exists in a spiritual or religious sense. But I know some people do terrible things, and calling it trauma doesn't always cut it for me. Some people are just dangerous. And we need to stop pretending they're not.
For those like me who don't necessarily believe in "evil," what do we call those who continue to hurt others without remorse?
Let me know what you think.
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A man who lives at 1600 PA avenue and his sycophants love the hate and hurt from this President. That is what you call someone who gets off hurting others: we call him Mr. President.
"I'm not sure if evil exists in a spiritual or religious sense. But I know some people do terrible things, and calling it trauma doesn't always cut it for me. Some people are just dangerous. And we need to stop pretending they're not."
What might be the most vexatious factor in assessing the nature of evil is that the assessment is usually framed in either the spiritual or behavioral context, when for my purposes the existence of evil is most readily observed through the lens of ethics, which according to American Heritage Dictionary's primary definition is simply 'a set of principles of right conduct.'
At the risk of kicking up a rhetorical hornet's nest of discussion of what is or is not ethical, or right conduct, my earliest adult lessons in everyday ethics came from those remaining adults in the work force by the late 1970s, who had been of adult age during the prior world war, an era when apparently service for its own sake was regarded as a near-universal mandate.
These old-timers, a far more iconoclastic and even rebellious lot than I would have expected, in their expressed views on the exercises of power that they had been given precious little opportunity to oppose throughout their lifetimes, seemed to sum up the making of choices between right and wrong conduct on a deeply personal level, with two factors as I recall being the anchorages of such a code of conduct:
One was the idea that 'we're all in this together', but in a tone suggesting that power had made it thus and that no one person was in a position to topple power off its pedestal, and so we might jus'well make it as tolerable as we can...
And the other was most often summed up in the phrase 'the next guy' in terms of how we might all achieve something tolerable out of the experience: don't leave a mess for the next guy, don't create extra work for the next guy, don't make it so the next guy can't do his job, etc, etc.
Evil is, for my purposes, manifest in that person who has decided he or she couldn't care less about the next guy. Such results to ensue can be anything from pure un-thorough laziness in cleaning up a bit of broken glass, to shooting up a schoolhouse and breaking even more glass in the bargain.
Parents with any sense of obligation to a larger society their children must learn to coexist with, have to take it upon themselves to try and teach a small child that there is something terribly, terribly wrong with (for instance) leaving a tap on, or a tricycle in the middle of a driveway, while not in the process frightening or even traumatizing an innocent child by insinuating that they themselves had done something evil, or even that they are simply evil for having done such a thing.
Not every parent gets that one quite right. Even with the most innocent of intentions, parents or other caregivers can indeed leave imprints on the young with their reactions to things having gone wrong, which can stick in a young person's memory long past when anyone older can even recall any such thing having occurred. What may appear to an adult, beset with the many and various distractions and obligations of adulthood, as an incident where a child had got into trouble but seems to have 'learned their lesson', can and often does become for the child an intensely formative experience that they go on and live with from then on.
How many times must a child be told they had done something 'bad' (an enormous, terrifying and entirely mysterious concept to a small child), or even that they themselves had BEEN bad, before they start to believe it?
And, in some instances, having been told it, and come to believe it, no longer care?
If right and wrong conduct are framed in terms throughout childhood as actions and even attitudes which define all by themselves who the child is as a person ('gonna find out who's naughty or nice...'), then the record shows that quite a number of people grow up thinking they are just bad, that everybody thinks they are bad, that this is because everyone is bad anyway and just getting away with it on the basis of any number of advantages they might have, that they will never be anything but bad, and that they might actually only get away with being bad over a lifetime by becoming even more skilled at being bad, at the cost of not taking any thought at all as to what might happen to... the next guy.
Hannah Arendt gave us a mighty and deeply instructive clue on the true nature of evil: that there is not necessarily anything on the surface of a person committed to doing evil, which might readily identify them in advance as such. In the case of her study of the trial of Adolf Eichmann, her astonishing revelation was that the evil in this man was of little more substance or origin than his unflinching capacity to... do his job, and take little to no thought as to what the doing of it might bring to others. He was, after all, just doing what he had been assigned to do.
Maybe I am a little over-sensitive to this explanation of the presence of evil in everyday life, but any time I hear anyone rationalize an outcome which had brought even the most innocuous degree of harm to The Next Guy by saying, 'I was just doing my job' (or the infinite varieties of such Pontius-Pilate moral hand-washing one encounters on a continual basis), I am on full alert, knowing from long prior experience that there is evil afoot, leaving me only to decide whether I will aid and abet it, call it what it is regardless of the risks to myself, allow it to stand with no effort on my part to counteract it, or simply move along. I have, I am sorry to report, opted for each of these countermeasures at different times in my life, when calling evil evil is the only moral or ethical option every time that I can be at peace with afterward.
As for whether or not people themselves are evil, I leave that for God to decide. And yes, I do believe in one. No, I do not comprehend most of what God does all day. No, God does not consult or answer to me on the business of running all creation. But I do know that to call actions evil is one kind of judgment, and to call persons evil quite another. As much as possible, I try to stick with the former and avoid the latter outright: broken glass on a floor might be the result of the evil of negligence, but to judge the one who left it there as an evil person by definition, even when it is obvious that it was left there intentionally to hurt The Next Guy, will probably only set even more evil actions in motion, and what would I have gained in the process?
Not intentionally or negligently creating trouble or harm or extra labor for The Next Guy has actually served me quite well over a lifetime. But to judge on my own terms whether there is evil inherent in how such a simple ethos seems to be so horribly absent from so many settings in today's world, I will leave that one to God as well.
I have lived under a fairly simple code of conduct for longer than I can remember. Some have even called it The Bikers' Code: don't fuck with me, and I won't fuck with you.
Highly recommended.