My husband and I recently watched the PBS Frontline documentary entitled “Secrets, Politics and Torture.” The documentary was about one of the darkest part of American history in my lifetime. It was about the use of torture in the “war on terror”, what was at that time blandly called, “enhanced interrogation techniques.”
The documentary explored both sides of the issue. It discussed the value, such as it might have been, and the disaster of using torture to glean usable, actionable information from our enemies in order stop future attacks.
As I sat watching the program, my thoughts turned to many things, some political which I will attempt to avoid discussing now, to the general idea of doing harm and how all of us, whether we want to admit it or not, have the capacity to engage in evil.
Harm comes in many forms.
Evil is defined as wickedness, sin, wrong doing and even profound immorality. Evil acts are full of depravity.
Purposely harming others is corrupt. It is malevolent.
Evil does not have to be a grand gesture. You don’t have to fly commercial airplanes into skyscrapers to be evil. Evil can come to us in small every day ways. We act with evil when we fail to be tolerate of one another. We engage in the act of harming another when we yell at our spouse or our children. Our actions can be considered abusive when we cut someone off in traffic. We are all capable of acting in punishing ways.
This is a terrifying thought but it is unrealistic, perhaps even ignorant, to believe otherwise. And the thing about evil is that it only begets more evil. Evil grows by the maltreatment of others, no matter the form it comes in.
The good news is that we are capable of self control. We have the ability to make loving choices and when we fail, we have the capacity to apologize, to make it better, to fix our mistakes.
In order to overcome the evil inside us, we must first recognize it. We must face the darkness of our own faults. We must peek into the abyss and accept that it is there, deep inside us and then make a daily conscious decision to act otherwise, to rise above it, to be better.
If each of us did this, we could all make the world a safer, more trusting place. We could make the world a place of love instead of a place of uncertainty. We could make the world a tolerable place, full of acceptance instead of fear and loathing.
Sarcoidosis Soldier 
Dear SS, Very insightful.
Bill
You will not be punished for your anger, you will be punished by your anger.
Buddha
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Hey Bill! As usual….love the quote!
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This post requires a lot of time to think about. Evil is such a potent word. I think people are inherently good, except for psychopaths, and that evil is learned from others. The reason I say except psychopaths is because they can feel no empathy or remorse, and therefore don’t have the ability understand why doing bad things is wrong.
This is not to say that the rest of us don’t do bad things. Of course we do. It’s all part of the human experience and how we learn. I wholeheartedly agree with the post when you say each of us has faults that we need to be aware of and “make a daily conscious decision to … rise above it, to be better.”
Look at small children, even babies and toddlers. I don’t think anyone can say they are evil. If a small child hits another one because they took their toy, they aren’t doing it because they are evil. I think we all have the “survival of the fittest” instinct that we need to overcome and replace with empathy. If we are taught that hitting is wrong and to empathize with others, we can nurture our goodness. Here’s a video that demonstrates this point https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fyCG7cx4xO8.
As we grow we learn by mimicking the behavior of others. I think these children arguing are mimicking what they’ve seen around them. The one girl has already learned to be empathetic. The other one still needs to learn, I think, but I don’t think she is evil.
If, however, people are taught to hate and that violence is ok, then they lose their ability to empathize with others. I would hope that everyone at some point could forget the bad things they’ve learned from those around them and think for themselves, think about what we have in common and how we should pull together and learn from diverse perspectives to have a better life, not shun those who are different, or even worse harm those who are different.
The thing that upsets me the most is those who do harm in the name of religion. No religion teaches that harming others is ok. All religions teach about love and forgiveness. Those that twist it to rationalize their actions are the scariest people around because they refuse to consider that they are the ones who have become evil, not those they seek to disparage and harm.
I don’t believe that the ends justifies the means. There are many times we are faced with decisions where we have to weigh the good against the bad and make a choice, such choice not being clear because there is no choice that is all good or all bad. I would hope that at such times everyone does what will make this world, as you say, “a safer, more trusting place . . . a place of love instead of a place of uncertainty . . . a tolerable place, full of acceptance instead of fear and loathing.
Thanks for this thought-provoking post and allowing me to share my thoughts about it.
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Thank Betty for sharing your thoughts on this blog post. You’re right evil is a potent word. I chose it on purpose. I would also like to believe that people are basically good but given the current state of the world, I sometimes struggle with maintaining this idea. Perhaps I am just feeling a little dark lately.
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I get it. It’s really hard to see what’s going on in the world and the way people treat each other without the word evil coming to mind. There’s lots of evil doings in the world. I guess there always have been, but it seems worse lately. It does make one feel dark.
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