Admitting the ‘evil’ in all of us is the way to become better social and political beings //
For thousands of years, we’ve learned to divide the world – and ourselves – into good and evil. To avoid feeling like we belong to the evil bunch, we’ve also learned to rationalise our negative feelings and emotions, which are only human, and dress them up as reason. Because we deny those feelings, we can’t really address them, and they end up impacting our personal and political lives in a way we don’t entirely control. It’s time to leave behind chains of the past and embrace the ‘evil’ in us as only natural, so that we can effectively control it and actually become better people.
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Hope Comforting Love in Bondage, 1901 Artist: Sidney Harold Meteyard
Laws are artificial rules that regulate how we should behave and organise ourselves in society. All social animals have law codes to regulate their interactions – even if humans are the only ones who learned to write them down. These rules prescribe what is right, and therefore should or could be done, and what is wrong, and therefore should be avoided. But whereas animals seem to largely condition each other to them by punishment and reward, humans need to be given the reasons why to follow the rules that are imposed to them.
Throughout the history of our species, what made us Homo sapiens different from other animals is largely the high level of self-awareness, intelligence and imaginative power we developed. This came hand in hand with a need to make sense of the world, even if we didn’t have the tools and knowledge to fully explain it. Psychology calls rationalisation the process through which we tend to justify or explain something in a seemingly rational or logical manner, when we don’t really know its true explanation – or even when we want to avoid it. From very early on, humans began rationalising the world around them in an attempt to explain it and give meaning to it. This is how a lot of beliefs were created. To explain right and wrong, humans have created the beliefs in “good” and “evil” – and deemed it therefore right to do what’s good and wrong to do what’s evil.
Christianism and the other so-called Abrahamic religions weren’t the first law codes to divide the world into good and evil, but are certainly the ones who left the strongest mark on our modern way of thinking. These religions also went further, and divided not only our actions but also men themselves into good and evil. In many preceeding polytheist religions, Gods often drunk in excess, took part in orgies, raped – after all, man created God in his image. For the later monotheistic religions, which were ascetic and thus denied the earthly pleasures and our more animalistic instincts, God should be one and only good, and we should aspire to follow the example. It is still the dominant way of thinking of our day that people can not only do good and evil, but can also be good and evil.
With the birth of those ascetic religions, sin was no longer a normal inclination, but a corruption of character, a result of giving in to evil tendencies and temptations. Being evil didn’t mean only acting evil, but merely thinking evil. It had much more to do with the uncontrollable thoughts in our heads than with what we decided to do with those thoughts – think about it, all the seven deadly sins are at least in part feelings rather than actions. And sinning left us only two choices – self-inflicted punishment on Earth (penance, or regret, from the Latin paenitentia, which is not by coincidence also the root word for penitentiary and itself derived from paena, the word for punishment) or eternal punishment in Hell. Some of the protestant Christian religions which followed Catholicism went even further and created to varying extents the notion that the good men had been predestined to be so, that the saving grace of God was only applied to those elected to be saved (the irresistible grace), and that sinners were radically corrupted. Sinning was therefore a sign that God had not elected you. Logically, this must have made people scared to death of the mere possibility of being a sinner, and led them to deny any signs of it.
“But we are human animals. We all feel envy, and jealousy, and pride, and all the other human feelings. And it’s OK. If we are going to feel them either way, we need to learn to embrace those feelings as natural. Understand we are not bad people for feeling them – but merely human. Only if we are aware of them can we control those feelings and the actions that result from them. “
These views are of course largely outdated, and even the religions behind them have become more moderate. But the notions they created still influence us, the structure of our thoughts and how we perceive the world around us. With such horrible connotations, it is no surprise that we try to deny the evil within us. In order to not be evil, and to save ourselves from psychological hell, we therefore rationalise thoughts and emotions in our favour. We might say we don’t like someone for a seemingly logical reason, when we actually envy for example how successful or attractive they are – and when we wouldn’t use that same exact reason to punish someone else we don’t envy. We might treat our significant others badly for a seemingly logical reason (not having replied to a text, for example), when we are actually just jealous. And we might also do something that sounds logically good when we actually just want to reward our egos and flatter ourselves (see how our opinions are formed).
Unfortunately, this might also affect our political selves. We might defend an opinion or a political position because we envy those who oppose it or would be harmed by it, or because we want to belong to the group of people who stand for them (for example because this group is rich and powerful, or seemingly good and selfless). And we might never admit those inclinations, not even to ourselves.
But we are human animals. We all feel envy, and jealousy, and pride, and all the other human feelings. And it’s OK. If we are going to feel them either way, we need to learn to embrace those feelings as natural. Understand we are not bad people for feeling them – but merely human. Only if we are aware of them can we control those feelings and the actions that result from them. If we know we’re just jealous, for example, we can tell ourselves that this jealousy might be unjustified, and avoid fighting over a text message. Likewise, if we know we are defending an opinion at least partially out of envy or self-promotion, we can also open ourselves to better ways of reaching the common good we actually believe in (it’s not always easy). Christianity taught us about good and evil, but the Christian tales of exorcism also tell us that we can control our demons when we name them. Knowing the name of our demons means being aware of the evil within us and having control over it. It’s time for us to say those names out loud.
