I am fascinated by evil. My years spent studying the psychology of individual behaviour was eclipsed by a subtle paradox: Why do people do evil deeds? I am now attempting to formulate why, how, when and what it means for us. This is the domain of us as humanists, attempting to bracket ourselves within naturalism; It is important as we have removed the chains of supernatural explanations; We have removed the hope of balanced scales in an afterlife with angels and scales and Pearly gates. We therefore have to look at those we dub evil, whilst holding refrain from reflection – for indeed, they are human like us. A broken mirror reflects despite its breakage. As much as we coat them in the brush of “monster”, the tabula rasa of a human being resides. They are not “monsters”, they are humans. We might not like them (we might rightly loathe them), but we need to engage with the essence of what warps the human frame into the crooked posture of monstrosity.

I have yet to distinguish what I find more fascinating: That people do good or that people do evil. Rodrigo’s beautiful post describes his (and my own) awe at the inherent good that resides within people. I am an optimist about our species, though that often does not come across in my work. I have yet to be disappointed with the ordinary person refusing help in accidents, collisions, muggings, and other unfortunate events that might befall us within the blink of a passing eye. A reaching hand is grasped because it is from another human. The fingers find others and there is a fit, the completion of the human puzzle.

But my optimism is not shrouded in naïveté. And it is for this reason I am heavily focused on evil. I believe that nearly everyone wants to help others; I believe nearly everyone understands respect, tolerance, freedom and wants it for others (especially loved ones); and this occurs everywhere beneath the politics and religions. What then turns some of us “evil”? And what does it mean for us?

These will be a series of ongoing posts and many answers will not be reached or even dealt with now.

What is evil? Is evil the 150+ children a day raped in South Africa? Is it the torture, raping and killing of children all over the world? Is it the systematic dehumanising that occurs to women, in religious countries? Is it the millions suffering under the “Dear Leader” in North Korea? I’m sure one could sit for days conjuring these lists like genies out of lamps. I want to funnel out the large scale into a singular key-hole vision on which to focus.

I define evil as the deliberate removal of the human within another human (known in psychology as dehumanisation); it is the forceful pain, torture and abject abhorrent treatment of another living creature (I want to restrict it to other humans in these articles, though I do not feel any less for the cruelty toward other animals).

I define it also as a useful linguistic device, as Professor Adam Morton writes in On Evil

We call acts or people evil when they are so bad that we cannot fit them within our normal moral and explanatory means. To call what Hitler or Pol Pot did ‘wrong’ seems to understate its nature to the point of error … [O]ur horror drives us to a special terminology.

The extent and purpose of his book is to show how dangerous this linguistic gymnastic we all perform can be: We tend to think that these “monsters” are so far from normal human sensibility, they must be something we can never know. Evil might be seen as something of an empty vessel, in which the dubious nature of incomprehension is seeded. Basically, we say evil when we think “I could never do that!”

Why is it dangerous? Because we tend to think of ourselves as not capable of such acts, of such horror, of such… Evil. But there is extensive literature within psychopathology which destroyed that view for me, several years ago. Whilst writing a paper on the Truth & Reconciliation Commission (TRC), I witnessed videos of the ordinary policeman confessing untold horrors to the victims’ families.

I distinctly remember one black police officer.

Already there is something loose and clanking in the works: A black person working for the “wit mense” (Afrikaans, pronounced vit mensa) was tantamount to treason for the oppressed black communities. As a police informant, one was exempt from all the dangers that lay like paths of daggers beneath the feet of all non-white races. But one was also the target of scorn from one’s own people. Thus, this officer seated on an old plastic chair; thus his cemented face and distant eyes; thus the sunlight behind him sending dust clinging to the tissue clutched in the quivering hands of the mothers before him. His small voice began describing each and every assassination he helped commit, each target one of the women’s sons. His sad, downcast eyes were raised and held with great strength, as he sought some humanity in the eyes of the mothers. Speaking in Xhosa, he described each and every death, to each individual mother. Even as I write this, I am struggling – so vivid was the video and the emotions.

The mothers allowed the tears to flow, mimicking the morbid words. Each a tiny dagger aimed at her once-dead heart. That part of her that was once alive was killed by this man, and yet he would revive it one last time – only to describe how he killed the son. All the sons were anti-apartheid activists, some from the same village as himself. All the mothers were incredibly brave, taking every word and transforming them into a tear, which left never to return to rage inside them. Only one mother stood up, tore her clothes and stormed out crying. After the end of all his tales, he sat back and said: “All I ask is that you accept me as making many mistakes. I do not ask forgiveness from you. That I must ask from God. That I must gain from myself. I am very sorry. I am very sorry.”

Before you let the tears flow, the most beautiful moment occurs later. After many minutes, one mother rose, took his hand and said: “You are one of our children. We can not hate you. Those times were dark.” Another rose and took his other hand and said “My son is gone. You are not. You are our son.” The others joined them and each began hugging him and promised “We must all do what we can now that the darkness is passed. Now, we must go forward together into the bright future.”

These are the brave people of my country. These are the people who looked at evil, sitting before them. Each looked and heard the evil done unto their son and witnessed their hearts quiver with bitterness; Yet they felt, like an alchemist transmutation, their leaden hearts change to gold.

Was this man “evil”? Perhaps, under the circumstances he performed an evil deed. Before the cries of “Nuremberg replies” ring out, I still consider what he did wrong. I still believe many ordinary, loving people, we brought to evil acts because of the oppressive regime that clutched this beautiful land. The sunlight only rose to send fingers further through this country, with no abject repayment in sight. Only forgiveness and what that means to other humans. The TRC and such interactions were at the very essence humanist: They sought the engagement of one human to another, or perhaps many. They sought their forgiveness, their understanding (in many cases, they did it to avoid prosecution and therefore that defeats my argument. But I hope, dear reader, you will allow me to focus on those who did it for the sake of seeking forgiveness). What happened here was the identification with one human to another; one human realising this could have been my son, my daughter, my husband, my brother. Thus, the human was restored in every one and the crooked frame of monstrosity shattered, and the ambling human walked upright.

I am minimising to a great extent in an attempt to seek the beautiful moment that is possible (the most difficult and often never claimed one), past the horror, past the evil. I am attempting to make the case that evil is a dangerous and alienated paradihm, in cases where perhaps more good could arise from looking past the monster, which is only a shadow, and into the being that casts it. I have done this in my own life, with particular instances, and become better for it. What I am interested in seeking now is whether this holds, whether this is true. I do not know, but I want to. I believe it to be. Though we are not angels and evil is too often so vile that no heart is big enough to transmute our abhorrence into forgiveness.

I do not know. But I hope this stirs something. I believe too strongly in my species for it not to be so.

I will continue in my next article dealing with how ordinary people become evil and what we should be aware of in ourselves.