MEDITATION ON EVIL
The power of evil is today almost unthinkable to a secular consciousness that no longer grasps moral categories. Because we no longer recognise it, evil roams free. It slips through the grid of our concepts and establishes enterprises: art careers, law firms, and political networks. To promote its own interests, it advances mantras and slogans, isms and phobias, tales of victimisation. There are no contradictions or limits to what evil will do. Whatever it thinks it can use it will use, no matter how shameless. Evil knows nothing but use. Its only end is itself.
The notion of evil, as Paul Ricoeur recognised, retains a demonic dimension. But demonology passed into history with the end of the Renaissance. In its place is psychopathology and what psychologist Andrew Lobaczewski called ponerology. Under conditions of social and intellectual crisis, individuals with “dark tetrad” traits including attention seeking, malignant narcissism, sociopathy and sadism gain power by exploiting the general derangement. Dark tetrad traits themselves gain power. They possess individuals, who infiltrate institutions and redirect their activities to pursue their own goals. Totalitarian movements proliferate. The political violence cult Antifa and the transgender child abuse cult are the clearest contemporary examples. What is at stake here is not merely the collectivisation of dispersed evil persons, but the corporate possession of persons by evil itself.
Hegel writes that evil “already resides” in the gaze which sees evil all around itself. Blinded and driven, the possessed mind projects evil outwards. But evil is never so easy to localise. Human perception is constrained by self-interest and typical moral experience. Most people are selfish, and therefore understand selfishnesses but evil goes beyond selfishness into the inexplicably cruel.
The mysterious nature of evil makes it difficult to identify, and evil efficiently intensifies difficulties. It repeats irrelevant details, inverts victims and perpetrators, reverses cause and effect, distorts and exaggerates. Disentangling the web of deceptions that evil spins around itself demands a degree of involvement that nobody could want. Evil is boring, monotonous, gloomy, exhausting. There is nothing to gain from drawing attention to evil, and anyone doing so become its next target.
Evil’s banality is essentially cynicism. People serve evil for the rewards that it brings, at the price of their capacity for self-reflection. Lines of inquiry close, the mind degrades, and life becomes the meaningless pursuit of power. Eichmann did not identify himself as a monster. Nor did Vyshinsky, the prosecutor in the Moscow Trials. Nor did the London solicitors hired “to financially cripple” the courageous Maltese journalist Daphne Caruna Galizia shortly before she was killed in a car bomb. And what of the artists and thinkers who surrendered their conscience for the sake of comfortable careers? They were simply professionals, pursuing incentives, like others.
Society marches towards evil in lockstep, parading the costumes that the history of evil supplies. The same personalities operate everywhere, using each other to hide their own faces. Or their absence of faces. Analysing the psychology of the murderer Richard Durn, Bernard Stiegler theorized a deficit of primordial narcissism. “When he looked in the mirror he saw only an immense nothing.” In his diary Durn affirmed that he had a need to "do evil at least once in his life, to have the feeling of existing." Today this same profile stares into cyberspace and the void gazes back. What today is called cancel culture is a mass cult of nothingness, attempting to eradicate everything that still provokes doubt.
In a broken society it is easy to invert guilt and innocence. From the vampire theatre of virtual media to the pyramids of corruption that constitute courtrooms, evil is channelled through money and power into juridical crime. Douglass Mackey, Derek Chauvin, Tamara Lich, Julian Assange, Donald Trump. How many others? And how many villains go free? Corrupt politicians and scientists, secret policemen and stalkers… clearly, no defence against evil is supplied by the law.
Today evil is everywhere acclaimed and worshipped. Anyone attempting to fight it is attacked, silenced, burned. There is possibility of this situation reversing. So why not surrender? Because there is nothing else to do. The war against evil can never be won, and can never be lost: it continues forever. The conditions of contemporary society define a state of mass defection but also opportunities for steeling nerves. All authority flows from the war against evil. The warning in the Gospels against “resisting evil” only shifts the battle to a subtler terrain…