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The Worst: Do Evil People Exist?

Writer's picture: Leo BerensonLeo Berenson

We live in polarising times. If you’re like me, then I imagine you’ve grown tired of hearing that over and over again — yet it remains the truth. Demagogues across the globe promote toxic politics and undermine democratic institutions, social media algorithms curate online interactions to be as vitriolic and malicious as possible, and political debates that could be stimulating discussions of policy have instead become mass media spectacles and vapid competitions over sound bites rather than genuine efforts to persuade. 


I have no doubt you’ve heard this all before. It bears repeating, however, because of what I believe its ultimate effect is: many on both sides of the aisle now believe that the opposition is, to put it plainly, evil. This evil opposition is built on a personal moral rot so pervasive that it makes them unworthy of consideration as anything other than an obstacle needed to be overcome by any means necessary. To try to compromise is dangerous, to try to persuade is foolish, and to beat them merely through institutional means is increasingly unacceptable. 


This idea is seeping into political discourse from the fringes, with those on both the extreme left and right arguing that the opposition is rotten to its very core both personally and ideologically. That is not to say that both sides are equally to blame, however. Demagogues and their supporters around the world tend to skew right wing, and while there are definitely many on the far left who believe this “evil opposition” idea, those on the right who believe in it tend to wield far more institutional power and use it accordingly. So while this remains a festering issue on both sides, the share of responsibility for its growth is not equal.


All of this brings me to my main point, the question that headlines this article: are there evil people? Are there some people on either side that are so totally rotten to their core that they should be discounted entirely? My answer is an unequivocal no. Not a single person, no matter how far you go down either side of the political spectrum, is evil at their core. People’s actions can be evil, sure, and ideologies can most certainly be evil, but people themselves are not. 


How can I say this with such certainty? Because evil is an absolute, and people are not absolute in any respect. The idea of a 100 per cent evil person is something that can only exist in the world of fiction, because in the real world nobody is 100 per cent anything. No matter how distant someone may seem from you ethically, politically, or by any other metric, they, like you, are the product of an uncountable number of conflicting forces and ideas and systems that shaped and moulded them into what they are today. At the risk of sounding a little cheesy, we are all walking contradictions, or, as Plato said, we are all charioteers led by two opposing horses, each vying for control. 


Martin Luther King, Jr. also knew of this idea of Plato’s, and in a collection of his sermons entitled A Gift of Love wrote that this idea demonstrates that there is a bit of good in the worst of us just as there is a bit of evil in the best of us. King, tying it into his very empathetic Christian worldview, argued that this means we should love our enemies just as Jesus instructed. I’m no Christian, but that sounds like pretty sound advice to me. 


If some among us are absolutely evil and are incapable of change, then why not do everything in our power to destroy those people utterly, no matter the violence or time or the world we’d leave behind? But if people are not absolutely evil and instead are conflicted and complicated products of their environment, then it is our moral duty to approach them with the compassion we’d hope someone would approach us with. A world in which we give up our notions of a purely evil opposition is a world that I believe has infinite promise. I believe a world in which we don’t is doomed. 

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1 Comment


secwilli
Nov 14, 2024

We Stan hopeful and loving speech that is looking for compassion and empathy

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