One of the things that is hard to comprehend about evil is how absurdly complex it is. For a person who thinks about things simply, it’s hard to imagine the level of complexity involved in evil. I often see people post theories that are implausible because the evil they claim to be attacking is much too simple.
It’s hard to explain this, but in essence, if somebody has an evil intention, it almost always expresses itself in some stupidly complex way. You can observe this in evil you have experienced personally. Why did the person who did evil do it? There was always some reason, often a set of reasons. The reasons often didn’t make sense. Often, the more evil the activity was, the more complex and convoluted the reasons were, sometimes to the point of being incomprehensible.
You may think about things in a straightforward manner, and thus expect that there is some straightforward reason that evil is done. Movies and stories are made this way, which might reinforce that idea—the evil villain wants power and money, so they come up with a plan to destroy the hero! I’ve never met evil that was that simple or thought in that straightforward a manner.
A more realistic example would sound something like this: a person goes through life failing constantly. One day they see a cat on the street and recall that somebody once told them that cats are evil, so that’s why they are failing—cats. So they decide that they have to get rid of that cat. But they can’t, because it belongs to their neighbor. So they have to now go around saying bad things about cats, and campaigning for making cats illegal. Except nobody wants cats to be illegal, so they just have to advocate for laws that make it harder to operate a cat shelter. But they have to make it sound like they want to improve the safety of car shelters, because otherwise somebody will stop them. And they have been operating like this for decades, so they know exactly how to talk about it so that people will accept their message. Plus they have learned that if they can just get people outraged about cat shelter safety, they can get what they want.
Think I’m exaggerating? I’m vastly understating it. The example that I gave is drastically simpler than what is happening with most evil people that I’ve come to know well enough to deeply understand their mental processes.
Now, I want to be clear—I’m not saying “evil is something you can never understand.” What I’m saying is that when people present some theory of evil that sounds waaaaayyyy toooo simple, and which presents no actual hard evidence, be skeptical. Similarly, if somebody’s theory of how the world works is way too complex and relies on illogical data or is simply missing true observations, be skeptical too!
The truth of things is simple. Some people do intend harm to others! That’s the simplicity. And somewhere underneath all of their complexity, there are simple reasons for why they are acting the way they are. But how they go about it and all the detailed reasons they have and how all of their mental processes work—man, don’t worry about trying to figure that out, either for a person or for a group or for a nation. It’s almost never worth it.
Max Kanat-Alexander 