Questions And Proposed Insights Into Evil

The existence and ascendency of totalitarian evil is irrefutable in America and around the world now. However the problem of evil is not a political issue, despite the obvious evils of the Trump Administration, or a phenomenon of right-wing extremists, or even the rapacious capitalistic system.

Asking philosophical questions, formerly the purview of the few has become urgent and imperative. Questions such as: If life is inherently good, why does evil exist? What makes people do evil things? Can evil be understood and dispelled, or is it beyond our capacity as human beings to do so? Is the world getting darker and more evil, or better and more good?

These are perhaps the most pressing questions of our time, though the left has ceded the field of inquiry to the vicious ideologies of the extremist, religious right. That’s a main reason why evil is running rampant in America and around the world.

Few people think about evil, other than to be titillated by horror movies and crime shows. But it’s essential to be clear about one’s core premises. I submit that evil is man-made, and because it is man-made, it’s within our capacity to understand and dispel it. And I propose that evil is a cumulative byproduct of consciousness as we know it.

Though there is no separate deity, there is immanence, a nameless inviolability that permeates the Earth and the Cosmos, except man.

Evil is not a right-left issue, as the legacy left at the Guardian believes. They insist the solutions are political, though political evil emanates from social darkness, deadness and apathy.

Techno-optimists ignore or whitewash the planetary climate and extinction crisis with stale ideals and ridiculous fantasies about how technology can save humankind from plundering the planet, if only the left, hubristically representing “the 99%,” were to assume power.

The truth is that across and irrespective of the political spectrum, humans have been psychologically and spiritually regressing in inverse proportion to man’s scientific and technological progress.

Of course to die-hard materialists, given pride of place in such forums as the Guardian’s risible new “Breakthrough” series, the spiritual dimension doesn’t matter. They insist that the problem is “we are caught between the capitalist techno-hucksterism of Musk and the Malthusian technophobia of Greenpeace and friends,” but that merely creates a false choice and sets up two straw men. And that’s not the audacity of vision, but the scarcity of perception and imagination.

Martin Luther King’s eloquent statement, “The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends toward justice” has turned out to be wishful thinking. “Resistance,” the slogan of shallow minds, is not enough; it doesn’t begin to address the enormity of the human polycrisis, much less evil’s roots within human consciousness as a whole.

As Simone Weil said, “Evil, when we are in its power, is not felt as evil but as a necessity, or even a duty.” But what does it mean to be “in its power” if we deny that its power even exists?

It’s very easy to place the locus of evil in individuals in power, especially those with immense political and economic authority, and believe that if we can only get rid of them and attain power ourselves we will be victorious over the forces of darkness that underlie the rapaciousness and injustices of the world.

But though the legacy left clings to the primacy of human reason and the hollowness of materialism/consumerism as the means and measure of human advancement, the Enlightenment ideals are dead and gone.

Of course, the left doesn’t supernaturalise evil, as right-wing Christians do, but the vast majority of people on the left continue to believe, against evidence and reason, that there is no such thing as a collective movement of darkness possessing intentionality.

Across the political spectrum, people believe that evil originates in the individual, and those who do evil things must either be acting out of darkness intentionally and so should be punished and caged in barbaric ways, or that they are merely victims of mental illness in a sick society, and so should be pitied and cosseted.

Both worldviews are deeply mistaken. Evil does not originate in the individual, but flows through the extremely disordered self.

Evil is not the opposite of good; there is no relationship between good and evil. Nor is evil pure chaos; it is contradiction and chaos with a purpose -- the complete destruction of the human spirit and spiritual potential. Evil is under no single person or group’s control, but is the metaphysical reality in human consciousness pulling the strings of conduits with extreme power and wealth such as Trump, Musk and Putin.

Political opposition is necessary, but it’s woefully insufficient at times like these. Man’s evil, emanating like the darkest recesses of the web from the darkest recesses of human consciousness, has its own perverse order and goals. Because it is man-made however, people with clarity and strength can stand against and dispel it.

There have been many times in human history when there is too much darkness and evil and too little goodness and strength to beat back the tide of evil in a given people. The difference now is that darkness and evil have been globalised and become normalised. That means human flourishing and flowering, which cannot be materially measured, are threatened as never before in human history.

Like it or not, we live in a global society now. Distinct peoples no longer exist, and therefore the threat from man’s evil is to humanity itself.

Evil is the death wish in human consciousness, the summation of ego and greed, as well as the vast content of unfaced hurt and grudges giving rise to collective hatred and nihilism, which have been accumulating in human consciousness for tens of thousands of years. As long as there’s been human consciousness there has been evil, but it has never been as all-consuming as this, despite the slaughters of tens of thousands and extermination of entire peoples in the past.

Evil does not exist in nature, except as man projects it onto nature. Truly, life is good. Man has become darkness however, and our ancient consciousness, based on the increasingly sophisticated technological manipulation of nature without insight and wisdom, has reached its logical end.

Anyone can become a conduit for collective darkness, and millions of people, irrespective of where they fall on the political spectrum, have. But facing the darkness within oneself, however extensive, one turns around and begins moving in the right direction.

So how does one protect oneself from becoming overwhelmed by collective darkness and evil?

By understanding that we all have darkness within us, and that evil, which is collective darkness with intentionality, hooks into our flaws and weaknesses.

By having humility and continuously learning about ourselves through diligent, skeptical self-knowing.

By seeing that non-accumulative learning turns the tables on cumulative darkness.

And by realising that the journey of one person growing into a human being is a microcosm of the journey of humankind growing into an intelligent species, in harmony with the Earth and the cosmos.

Radical change, which has nothing to do with two-dimensional thinking of right vs. left or technophiles vs. technophobes, is urgently required. That is the true audacity.

- Martin LeFevre

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