The Real Nature of Evil...

I have spent most of my career listening to people and their stories, and I have met more than my share of folks who have done horrific things.  Things like selling drugs, torturing relatives, killing people.  You might not like to hear this, but none of those people were Monsters.  A couple of them were emotionally damaged and wanted revenge, some were on drugs, a few were temporarily out of their minds, and many were so focused on their own problems they had a hard time appreciating how what they did hurt others.  None of them acted primarily out of some "scary movie" kind of sadistic pleasure in causing others pain.

OK, there are a few people in this world we called sociopaths, or psychopaths, or antisocial personalities.  These people are said to mostly lack empathy - they don't have any way to appreciate how others feel and so behave entirely with their self-interest in mind.  Strangely they don't really seem Movie Monster Evil either, usually, because they aren't enjoying hurting others.  They cant really get true satisfaction out of hurting others anymore than they can get satisfaction out of caring for others.  They seem charismatic, and compelling at first, and then later  you sense how hollow and empty they are inside.  It seems more sad than scary.  I think these people are warped, but not really evil (though they can do some bad things).

If anything is really evil, I think it is when we ignore some kind of hurt or wrong caused to others; when we choose to avoid the painful truth in exchange for easy ignorance and by doing so deny our own culpability in the wrongdoing.  This is the Holocaust in it's most extreme form - and not just the few twisted sicko's behind the torture and killing of millions of jews, but even more the frightened silence and practiced ignorance of the greater population of Germans who "couldn't" bare to admit the truth to themselves and in doing so helped perpetrate a genocide.  History is full of nauseating examples:  people who pretended not to see the degradations of slavery, or child labor, or colonialism.  Those who deny the harms caused by racism or poverty or war.  

It is not that I believe we need to spend all of our time apologizing for crimes we didn't commit, or making up for the sins of our fathers.  There is no erasing the impact of generations of slavery and to think that you could even try is patronizing.  But in not acknowledging an ugly truth, refusing to see a crime or mistreatment because it may cause you to feel bad in some way is Evil, and it begets future acts of "not seeing" that go on to harm those already injured.  

You may think this whole diatribe doesn't have much to do with you, and though I wish that were true, it sadly isn't.  Every one of us struggles to avoid looking at, acknowledging the pain in others that would scare or hurt us the most.  It is not that I expect you to avoid hurting others all the time - that is impractical if not impossible.  I love you and want you to take good care of yourselves, even sometimes at the expense of someone else.  But I hope you have the strength of character to see your actions and the actions of others for what they are, and honestly acknowledge painful truths.  

I don't think hurting someone else is really the Evil act: I think real Evil is the willful ignorance of other's pain.