Why No One is Actually Evil.
Updated: Aug 18
"No man chooses evil because it's evil. he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks."
— Mary Wollstonecraft
Nowadays, people tend to think that the people in power are evil. They reduce complex human beings into simple labels and call it judgement. Granted, we shouldn't deny nor downplay the evident malignity of warmongers and genocidal regimes. However, even then, the truth reveals itself as more nuanced and complex than we'd like to believe.
Hear me out.
There seems to be little doubt of the nefarious, even flagitious, nature of many things people do. But, do we ever just pause and ask: "Is this the truth, or an illusion masquerading as one?"
Perhaps we forgot to ask about why some people behave as they do. We have made it the norm to default to the cognitively expedient position of ascribing people's unpalatable actions to their perceived evil facade.
There’s goodness in all people. It's just that, sometimes, that goodness gets buried deep down inside some of us, and so when we look on the surface, we fail to notice it. The renowned Chinese text, Tao Te Ching, gives us an interesting vantage point: Zìjiàn zhěbùmíng — what you are sure you see, you have stopped looking at.
Here's an old allegory to illustrate what I mean:
There was a small encampment of a tribe. One day, a little child from that tribe came to their leader and said "Chief, I have a question for you. I see sometimes that people are good. And the same people who are good, I see sometimes that they are bad. How can this be?" The chief then responds, "Because, you have two wolves in you: a good wolf and a bad wolf. And they both fight."
The boy fell into silence, contemplating. He then said, ‘Chief, which wolf wins?’, to which the chief replied, ‘the one you feed’”
Look no further than the current political paradigm. Everybody's accusing each other of being evil and bad. But the truth surfaces once you poke at that convincing facade: both sides, if you talk to them, actually think that they're trying to do good in the world. Both sides believe they are on the side of good.
You see, no one chooses to be evil. We all have good and bad; light and darkness; altruism and greed; peace and war — all inside of us. The trick here is to understand that all humans, including the people in power, have those wolves inside. It is realising that those very people have simply taken a wrong turn, they got lost in this discombobulating labyrinth we call 'life'.
Our behavior towards others is not just a product of nature, but a product of nurture. Our upbringing, parents, family, friends, neighbors, classmates, colleagues, experiences, feelings, endeavors play as important a role as our genetic disposition — all pouring into how our adult self turns out to be. And some people in society had certain things happen to them along their life journey which caused them to take that one wrong turn. So they got confused and went astray.
And they couldn't find their way out. Life had to go on. So as the years went by, they grew farther and farther away from who it is they truly were, and they forgot about the good wolf inside them. They didn't consciously choose to feed their bad wolf — because nobody deliberately chooses to be evil.
Our mission, is thus, not to add to their pain, but to listen, observe, and show understanding. It is to show them the empathy they may have been denied. It is to lead with example, not with judgement — because, those who judge can never understand; and those who understand can never judge. You see, calling someone evil may tell us where we stand morally in relation to their actions. It tells us remarkably little about how or why they became the person capable of committing them.
The problem with judgement is not, per se, that it is cruel. It is that it closes doors. It gives us the illusion of knowledge while depriving us of deeper knowledge. With judgement, we arrive at a conclusion; through understanding, we witness a world.
Labels can become instruments of intellectual laziness. They replace “Who is this person?” with“What category can I put them in?” They prevent deeper inquiry, replacing investigation with classification; instead of exerting mental effort trying to understand why someone is the way they are or even how they could potentially be persuaded to change their ways, we simply put that person into a neatly kept box in the attic of our social registries. We reduce a complex human life into an entry in our mental ledger. We replace social curiosity with facile relational bookkeeping.
Ultimately, if we wish to have an impact on the world or influence society, perhaps we should stop lecturing and start listening; stop condemning and start connecting; stop judging and start understanding. Because only then, can we begin to see what we have stopped looking at.
Force creates resistance. Empathy builds influence. Understanding fosters trust.
There's a little but powerful story that brings us to the point we began this article with. It's a story I heard Simon Sinek narrate on a podcast.
A movie actor who'd played the role of a villain was once asked: “What did you have to do as an actor to play evil so effectively?”
The actor’s face took on a look of total confusion.
He didn't understand what the host meant. He goes, "What?"
The host says again, "You were so good. What did you have to source yourself from to play evil? You were so scary."
He looks at the host and goes, “I wasn't being evil."
The reason why he was so good at his role is built upon an understanding of the very same truth we’ve been propounding throughout this article.
The actor intuitively understood that no one thinks they're evil. No one wakes up thinking they’re the villain in their story. Everyone thinks they're on the side of good. What they do is that they come up with justifications that make their decisions defensible to themselves. People we perceive as villains do not experience themselves as villains. They have an internal narrative in which their actions make sense.
That doesn't mean that their internal narrative is morally correct.
But if we want to understand them, that internal narrative matters enormously.
So what if we made a conscious choice to remember that people always think they're on the side of good — even if they may be misdirected and misguided in their beliefs?
Leading with curiosity instead of conviction opens to us doors to the hidden realities of those very human beings with whom we disagreed. And if we dare to go through those doors, we come to learn that nothing was truly as it initially seemed.
Everybody thinks they're on the side of good. If we just start with that basic knowledge, I can only imagine how different our interactions would be. We arrive at a point in which we no longer seek to criticize them and label them as evil. That's our judgment on them — not the truth. So instead of judging others, let us reconsider this one and seek to understand where they're sourcing that good from.
This has been Yusuf Kemal.. and I invite you to re-consider.
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