The Meaning of EVIL

Looking at the list of people WK and I hate, it brings into mind the concept of evil. From a rough survey of websites listing the most evil people in history, it seems characters like Adolf Hitler, Pol Pot, Joseph Fritzel, Jim Jones, Tomás de Torquemada, Kim Jung Il, etc are all considered evil by the common man. Let’s examine what are the factors that make them evil. Dictators like Hitler, Pol Pot and Kim Jung Il share a common issue- they are considered mass murders because of extermination campaigns against the “undesirables”. Torquemada and Jim Jones are what I call “victims of their own beliefs”. They were one of the worst cases of religious excesses. Personally, would I call these people evil? No, I think they had good intentions of purifying their sphere of control. It is only their methods that are disputable.

This brings in the philosophical questions of “What is evil?” and “Does evil exist?”.
I believe humans are inherently evil- greed plagues us all. Greed creates dreams, dreams form ideals, and ideals are the root of all excesses. E.g. Hitler was greedy for fame and power, from these he created wrote Mein Kampf and thereby creating the Nazi ideology, this Nazi Idealogy powered the Third Reich’s holocaust which killed millions of Jews. Was Hitler evil? To me, I would say no, because he was merely following his dream of a pure Aryan Germany. He was no more evil than Torquemada who wanted to purge his faith of heretics. Unfortunately, it has been proven in history that the best way to purify anything was to kill off the deviants, the same way we exterminate an ant colony by doing our best to kill every single one of them so that chance of repopulation would be reduced to zero.

The intention of idealistic men like Hitler and Torquemada were actually pure in intent. Similarly, the witch hunts in Europe were sparked of by the authors of the Malleus Maleficarum- Heinrich Kramer and Jacob Sprenger. Were they evil? I wouldn’t say so, they were from a period where misogyny prevailed- people were thought that women were the source of evil, the same way how Eve introduced evil to the world. Women inspired feelings of lust in men, therefore they were the root of all evil. Naturally, Kramer and Sprenger fulfilled their role as spiritual leaders of men by advocating the destruction of these evil women. In a sense, they are no more evil than you and I are. When you hate an opposing fraction sufficiently, you will want all of them dead.

When we talk about mass murderers such as Gilles de Rais, Richard Treton Chase, Jeffrey Dahmer, Albert Fish, Andrei Chikatilo, Joachim Kroll, Dennis Rader, Javed Iqbal Mughal and Ted Bundy (taken from http://listverse.com/2007/08/22/top-10-evil-serial-killers/ ) I wouldn’t say they are evil. They all share one thing in common- mental illness. To them, violence and sexual arousal are irreversibly intertwined. Sadism is a mental condition, I wouldn’t call it evil! Some of them engaged in cannibalism, necrophilia, coprohilia, urophilia, pedophilia and masochism. They were sick people, not evil! They had compulsive urges that could not be denied- to date, no one knows for sure what makes people sadistic or masochistic. Evidence strongly points towards an abusive childhood, however, not abused children become mass murderers, there seems to be a missing X-factor.

Thus, I would conclude that evil exists, but not in the way we commonly see it. Saints are exceptions rather than the norm, even then, they are plagued by insecurities, temptations and fears just like normal people are. Are they evil in their own way? Perhaps. We are evil even when we pursue our own dreams at the expense of our spending time with our family members. Who are we to say that they have never hurt anyone? We could say they were greedy to be close to God? They were greedy to achieve their own little spot in Nirvana. Who knows? To me, people are inherently evil; good is used to describe people who are less evil than others. Evil exists to remind us of human imperfection- therefore, the more evil you are, the less perfect you are.