“Evil is ignorance,” Socrates once said.
“No one is evil by nature; one is simply weaker than another.” — Eino Leino.
The Nazis systematically confined Jews and many other groups of people behind barbed-wire fences in camps, where they imagined they could exterminate entire peoples and all those they deemed “subhuman” by gassing them in a supposedly “humane” manner. At the same time, they themselves lived peaceful family lives next to the camp, as the film The Zone of Interest depicts. In bullfighting, an innocent animal is brutally killed by repeatedly stabbing it with spears in front of an audience, while people cheer. In the Faroe Islands, hundreds of dolphins are killed every year as part of a celebration, and their carcasses are left on the shore to rot. These are examples of senseless evil.
I was in Gdańsk at the Museum of the Second World War, which has an extensive exhibition on the terror carried out by the German and Soviet states. It was deeply disturbing to see a wooden railway wagon that had been used to transport Jews to a concentration camp. It was a completely systematic and deliberate attempt to exterminate a group of people. Psychological tests conducted during the Nuremberg trials reportedly found that the Nazi leaders were not suffering from mental illnesses and committed their atrocities fully consciously. The Nazis were therefore not psychopaths. Eichmann, the logistical planner of the Holocaust, whom the Israeli intelligence service Mossad captured in Argentina and brought to Jerusalem to stand trial, stated that he had “always followed Kant’s categorical imperative.” People can therefore be systematically evil while being completely blind to their own evil.
The industrial farming of animals is comparable to the Holocaust in the sense that animals are brutally tortured in factories in a logistical and systematic manner. Until as recently as 150 years ago, slavery, in which a person’s value was completely stripped away and they were turned into a component of a machine and an instrument of economic gain, was widespread. Millions of enslaved people were transported from Africa to the Americas. Everything was calculated business, just as industrial animal farming is. The philosopher Hannah Arendt, after studying the Nazis, spoke of the “banality of evil.” The Holocaust, slavery, and industrial animal farming tell us what happens when other beings are not seen as having value.
Kant’s categorical imperative, which Eichmann invoked, says precisely the opposite of how he acted: “Act in such a way that you always treat others as ends in themselves, never merely as means.” The happiness and valuable lives of others are that end.
Let us return to Socrates’ claim. Buddha thought similarly: ignorance leads to hatred and greed, and together these constitute the “three poisons.” Jesus said as he walked toward the cross: “They do not know what they are doing.” There is great wisdom in these words, even though it seems that human beings can consciously choose evil. Do they really choose it?
The rise of the Nazis was based on propaganda, and the entire German population ultimately fell into a kind of mass psychosis. I can even imagine people believing that Jews had horns. The Nazi leaders and the population as a whole adopted an ideology that made them blind. They even believed they were doing good and building a happy utopia.
The philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti often warned about how blind faith in ideas, religions, and ideologies can lead to atrocities. Fascists see people of different races as enemies, fundamentalists see people of other faiths as enemies, and communists see the rich as enemies. Behind all enemy-based thinking lies the idea of the “other.” There is “us and them.”
In addition to the Nazis, the treatment of animals is a good example of this. Slaughterhouse workers who torture animals have, like the Nazis, almost completely lost their empathy toward animals—the “others”—and no longer see animals as having any value. At its root, this is ignorance: a lack of understanding of the suffering and value of others.
Many people even imagine that animals have no feelings. Anyone who owns a pet or spends time observing nature knows that animals have emotions similar to those of humans, and this is also supported by psychological research. Animals are conscious beings; they think and feel. A good book on the subject is When Elephants Weep by Susan McCarthy.
I would not call slaughterhouse workers psychopaths, however. Rather, like the Nazis, they may have a diminished capacity for empathy and may still treat, for example, their families and friends well. This brings us back to Arendt’s concept of the “banality of evil.”
The oil giant Shell ordered the Nigerian government to kill local environmental activists in the 1990s. The case is known as the “Ogoni Nine.” A great deal of evil happens as a consequence of greed for money. Large and ruthless corporations often destroy the environment and oppress people. The pursuit of money often causes people to forget about the lives and well-being of others.
The Bible says: “The love of money is the root of evil.” And: “It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle than for a rich person to enter the kingdom of heaven.” A greedy person lives under an illusion, imagining that they will become happy once they have a great deal of money. Such Hollywood-style dreams fuel the capitalist system. In the end, after 30 years of hard work at a company, you may receive a Chinese-made wristwatch as a gift.
I am certainly not claiming that all rich people are evil. Many wealthy people do a great deal of good, and Bill Gates, for example, has promised to give away his enormous fortune to help solve the world’s problems. The philosopher James Allen states in his book As a Man Thinketh that both the rich and the poor can be either cursed or blessed.
Communism as an ideology has caused just as much evil as capitalism. We should therefore abandon dichotomous thinking in which society is imagined to be capable of being either communist or capitalist. There are many different kinds of social and economic systems, and many of the models that may prevail in the future have not even been invented yet.
A drug user or an alcoholic thinks they will find happiness through intoxicants. Someone else seeks it through food. Someone may think they will find it by exercising every day to the point of exhaustion. There are many traps into which people can fall while searching for happiness.
Ultimately, every being has the same wish: to be happy. Every being wants to avoid suffering, to be healthy, and to experience well-being. Happiness could be defined as joy, peace, contentment, and well-being in life. Yet so many people seek happiness in the wrong places, such as money or drugs, because they do not know how to achieve genuine happiness. All of this is a consequence of ignorance.
I therefore argue that human beings are fundamentally good. Every day, people perform heroic acts for the benefit of others. This is described in the excellent book Humankind: A Hopeful History (Rutger Bregman). One story that stayed with me was that of the Polish woman Irena Sendler, who smuggled Jewish children out of the Warsaw Ghetto in a bag at the risk of her own life. Another was how street gangs rescued people in New Orleans during the flooding caused by Hurricane Katrina. People whom we consider “evil” are also capable of great acts of goodness.
A human being is completely good and innocent at birth and as a small child. Even Hitler was. Psychologists have studied how young children have a great capacity for empathy and compassion. In studies in which two children are placed in the same room, with one child being given a teddybear and the other not, the child will usually give the teddybear to the one who does not have one.
I therefore argue that empathy, altruism—that is, selfless help for others—and compassion are characteristics of our species that have enabled us to survive. Our ancestors would not have survived in the small tribal communities of the Stone Age without helping one another. We know that these tribes cared for the sick and shared food with one another. One could say that empathy and compassion are evolutionary superpowers.
In the game theory created by John Nash, it can be observed that cooperation can produce benefits for all parties. This is why it has been an evolutionary advantage and leads to better chances of survival. Our great ape relatives—chimpanzees, gorillas, and bonobos—are known for their very high degree of sociability.
I played the game Bohnanza, or the “bean game,” with some friends. In it, players grow and sell beans, trade with one another, and try to earn as many coins as possible. The core of the game is negotiation and exchange.
I noticed that selflessly helping others in the game, without seeking personal gain, leads the others to trust you, and they will also help you selflessly in return. It was almost straight out of game theory. Cooperation is almost always a win-win situation.
There is a nice story in Islamic tradition in which Muhammad advised Arab princes to carry a stone that had fallen from the sky together to Mecca: they placed it on a carpet, and each prince carried the carpet by one of its corners.
Evil is something that is learned from the environment, not something innate in human beings. Evil is not a metaphysical force within us; rather, people copy harmful behavioral patterns from their environment. It is somewhat like the way a school “gang of bad boys,” who terrorize others and smoke cigarettes in the schoolyard, attracts new members from younger children who admire them.
It was once believed that humans still had primitive “lizard brains” as part of our brains, and that we were at the mercy of primitive, aggressive, and selfish impulses. This has been shown to be pseudoscience. On the contrary, our ancestors were generally not aggressive, and empathy, altruism, and compassion are widespread throughout the animal kingdom.
Evil is therefore not a property of nature, as in the Christian doctrine of original sin. The Bible does not actually use the word “original sin” even once. It says that human beings are made in the image of God and are fallible. The word for sin in Greek and Hebrew means an error or missing the mark: we all make mistakes. The most sensible thing to say is therefore that human beings have the capacity for both good and evil.
Ignorance often creates a distorted self-image, and people try to compensate for poor self-esteem through narcissism. Psychologist Thomas Harris’s book I’m OK – You’re OK describes the idea that a person with healthy self-esteem who is healthy and empathetic thinks that both they and the other person are valuable as human beings. Neither needs to be above or below the other.
Psychologists have proposed the concept of the “dark triad,” which includes narcissism characterized by a need for admiration, cynical and calculating Machiavellianism, and psychopathy characterized by a lack of empathy. This combination can make people frighteningly cold, cruel, and capable of atrocities.
However, these are not innate characteristics; they are learned from the environment. No baby is a psychopath or a narcissist.
I believe that even a very evil person can change. Star Wars: Return of the Jedi ends beautifully when Darth Vader, who has been under the influence of evil and committed terrible acts, turns to the side of good in his final moments and defeats the Sith Lord Palpatine, who is on the verge of gaining control of the entire galaxy. Darth Vader, or Anakin Skywalker, thus saves the entire galaxy.
Evil is therefore something that comes to a person from outside and is a temporary characteristic. For some people, it may remain almost permanently switched on, but even they have the possibility of change.
Although evil is not a metaphysical and permanent characteristic within human beings, it is nevertheless important to recognize evil as evil, rather than simply explaining it away through trauma, lack of understanding, weakness, ignorance, or other such factors. Otherwise, we cannot fight against it or talk about it.
Daniel Elkama