Let’s Retire the Word Evil
Not a lot of words are more damaging and less useful than the word “evil.” It doesn’t hold up to modern methods of explaining human behavior; it’s often applied to the same people we label “mentally ill” and it causes fear and paranoia in place of empathy or understanding. Yet many people still use this concept to order their entire universe. Why?
Evil is an idea that goes all the way to our origin stories. Maybe at a certain point we needed it. Evil represented bad things not to get tangled up with: manipulation, deception, violence, greed. But it was used for more than that. The story of Adam and Eve implicated women in transactions between good and evil. Millennia later, George Bush used the word evil to describe Iran, Iraq and North Korea. It became quite a handy word when it came to causing blanket xenophobia toward other cultures and cloying suspicion of women.
When you start thinking about human psychology, the word evil becomes even more frustrating. Can evil exist in the human brain? If so, where does it live? Is it there at birth, or is it introduced the moment someone, say, invites Satan to be their lord? Those questions are silly, because the answer is obviously no. Every day, we’re finding psychological models that help us understand behaviors that used to confound us, behaviors that used to be attributed to the devil’s influence. What sits behind this reality is the fact that we don’t choose our brains – we’re just born with them. If you truly do believe in God, how can you blame people for the behaviors caused by a mind that God supposedly gave them?
What is evil? The more we start understanding our own minds and societal structures, the more we are wiping away evil’s footprint and replacing it with understanding. When you call something evil today, you’re choosing to push it away, to create fear and suspicion, to close the door to actual critical thought and the sympathy that might come out of it.
Evil doesn’t exist – and once you stop using it as an explanation you can breathe a sigh of relief for living in a world that requires a little less useless paranoia. But then you have a more interesting job: trying to understand things with an open mind.