On Evil

Photo by Mikita Karasiou on Unsplash

I need you like God needs the Devil. -Jonah Kagan

I’ve started this piece so many times. Or rather, this and other pieces I thought might need to come first in order for me to clearly share my thoughts on evil. I suspected this series would cause me some suffering. I wasn’t wrong. Yes, I’m the one who said suffering is optional. But remember, I also said it’s important.

Indeed, everyone suffers. If you suffer some as you read this, that’s worth paying attention to.

Now back to evil. Actually first, a reminder: everything I share here is how I've come to understand this idea, or concept, or force in the world. I'm not just making things up, though—I'll lean on some important voices along the way to explain where I've landed. Grappling with what evil is seemed to be something I had to do in service of my own growth—to be able to do the work I do, and serve my mission of contributing to more peace, love, and connection in the world.

I had to be able to see what gets in the way of that mission. Because don’t we all want more peace, love, and connection in the world? How does that question land for you? I’m pretty sure most people, asked directly, would answer (and mean it): “Of course! More peace, love, and connection would make the world better for everyone, and I want that.”

But Evil doesn’t want this. War, hate, division—that’s what Evil feeds on. Evil is the adversary. And it’s so very good at what it does that we rarely recognize its tactics.

I need you like God needs the Devil. I keep turning this lyric over and finding more in it than I expected. On one level, it’s the oldest idea there is: every force needs an opposing force. Without something to push against, there’s no journey, no meaning in choosing wholeness over its alternative. God needs the Devil the way a hero needs a dragon—the dragon isn’t welcome, it’s necessary. Without it, there’s nothing to become.

I don’t really know how Kagan intended the line but that doesn’t matter a whole lot to me. I believe ideas move through us more than they come from us, and this line jumped out at me right when I needed it. (I’d heard it before so many times! It’s a catchy song.)

And so there’s this other way to hear that line: I need you to be the bad one, so I don’t have to be. I need a devil out there so the parts of myself I can’t yet face have somewhere else to live. That’s different than cosmic necessity—that’s projection. And I think Evil is skilled at collapsing these two things together, letting us mistake the ordinary, human relief of blame for the sacred necessity of having something to grow against.

In On Suffering I made this claim: I’ve come to believe that each lifetime is purposeful. And that purpose is to learn, to evolve, to create, to be part of the whole.

Evil will thwart your purpose. To function as a healthy part of the whole, we ourselves need to become whole—which is exactly why evil has to exist in the first place. But it’s winning in those moments that you're divided against yourself.

Evil lies. It whispers, you’re the good guy. As long as we distance ourselves from what’s evil, we get to be right. We get to be good. It feels safe to be right and good.

Evil weaponizes fear. It has no problem using itself as its own proof, reminding you there is evil in the world, but then compelling you to either hide from it or destroy it—cleanse the world of it.

Evil is tricksy, and its greatest trick is convincing you it exists outside of you, and that it can be destroyed—hunted down and eliminated, like a monster with an address. Once humans are convinced they’re right, they can justify any means toward their righteous end.

Evil’s job is to keep you distracted—convinced the source of your suffering is out there, and that survival means armoring up, fortifying the castle walls, keeping armed sentries on duty around the clock. It would have you believe this is how you keep evil at bay.

If the walls are guarding us from ourselves, there’s a deeper problem — one that worries me more than any external threat ever could. Let me share it through the words of a man who earned the right to say it. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn spent years in the Soviet gulag, imprisoned by a regime that had very confidently sorted the world into the righteous and the enemy. And it was there, inside that machinery of condemnation, that he came to the opposite conclusion of the one that had imprisoned him. As he put it, “the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being.” Not between people, but through each human heart. Including his own. Including the hearts of the men who guarded him.

I hadn’t come across this before I started trying to write this piece, so I suspect many of you are meeting it here for the first time too. But I was so grateful to find it because it’s the same conclusion I kept arriving at from a completely different direction — through Jung, through my own daughter, through years of watching mothers (myself included) draw a line and stand very certain on the righteous side of it. I don’t think I’d have trusted this from just anyone. It’s the kind of line that could sound tidy, even glib, coming from someone who hadn’t paid for it. But Solzhenitsyn had. He said it from inside the very machinery that had tried to convince him otherwise — and that’s what makes it impossible to wave away. There is no “righteous side.” There’s only the line, running through you.

Here's the logic: everything Evil needs — the externalizing, the "you're the good guy," the walls and sentries — all of it depends on you never turning a loving gaze on yourself. Looking inward alone isn't enough; you can look inward and still condemn what you find, and that's just Evil's trial moved indoors, same verdict, new defendant. But a loving gaze doesn't condemn — that's what makes it loving. The moment you manage one, you see that same line Solzhenitsyn named, running through your own heart, and you can no longer hold onto "the enemy is out there." Not because you've decided to be lenient with yourself, but because you now see what made you vulnerable to the tactic of division and you can't help but have compassion for yourself. Being seen and still loved softens us. That's the whole loop broken at once — not through a dramatic victory, but simply by refusing to keep feeding it. It's the one move Evil has no answer for, because its entire strategy depends on you never looking at yourself this way.

And this is where Jung's line about condemnation becomes something more than good advice: condemnation does not liberate, it oppresses. Condemnation doesn’t just fail to liberate the person being condemned—it doesn’t liberate the condemner either. Because the moment I locate evil safely in you and pronounce judgment on it, some part of me has to stand guard over that verdict. My own inner defenses—the same ones built to survive the arrows of the world—rise up to protect the division I just created. They defend the oppressor’s position, because now I am the oppressor, and some part of me knows it, even if I never let myself see it. So the walls go up not to keep evil out, but to keep the truth of what I’ve just done from reaching me. I end up doing Evil’s work for it, and calling it vigilance.

This is precisely how Evil works. It doesn’t need to convince the whole world to sin dramatically. It only needs each of us, one at a time, to condemn instead of to understand—and then to defend that condemnation as if our safety depended on it. Every time this happens, the line runs a little deeper through someone’s heart, and Evil doesn’t have to lift a finger.

Jung's assertion that condemnation doesn't liberate was aimed at doctors. A psychologist can only truly help a patient by first accepting the patient as he is—not by casting judgment on the parts that are hardest to look at. I think the same is true of Evil, and of the parts of ourselves that are vulnerable to its lies. We cannot succeed in banishing evil, from the world or from ourselves. We can’t condemn it out of existence any more than a doctor can shame a patient into health. What we can do is understand it—see clearly what makes us susceptible to its whispers, and soften those places, rather than build higher walls around them.

Because the walls were never going to work anyway. You cannot defeat something by dividing against it when the thing itself lives in the very heart doing the dividing.

So I think this is the real invitation, the one underneath all my hedging and all my false starts trying to write this piece, is not to become someone evil can never touch—no one gets to be that—but to become someone who notices, a little sooner each time, when they’ve started believing the lie. Who catches the sentries at their post and asks, gently, what they’re really afraid of. Who remembers that the line runs through every heart, including their own, and chooses—again, and again, for as long as it takes—the path of wholeness.