Speak Know Evil

“Virtue is the human capacity or skill guided by reason and insight, which in relation to the human being holds the mean between the too-much and the too-little.”
— Aristotle


Talking about evil is not a popular topic. Personifying evil with the names of Lucifer and Ahriman, as we did in last month’s blog, is even less popular. I get it. Some words we are more comfortable using are shadow, immoral, atrocity, depraved, corrupt, and so on. Evil is just four letters and when we use it, people generally know what we’re talking about. People do not, however, generally know why evil exists or why we succumb to it. Let’s explore that a bit from a psychological perspective.

Way back in 1971, psychologist and Stanford professor, Philip Zimbardo, conducted an infamous experiment, The Stanford Prison Experiment. Normal people, students, were divided into two groups; one group was designated as jailors and the other as prisoners. The circumstances after just a few days became so dire that the experiment had to be stopped before its completion. In his 2007 book, The Lucifer Effect: Understanding How Good People Turn Evil, Zimbardo talks about the atrocities committed by normal people, U. S. soldiers, at Abu Ghraib, a U.S. military prison in Iraq. In a TED talk on the psychology of evil, Zimbardo says, “So, the Lucifer Effect, although it focuses on the negatives – the negatives that people can become, not the negatives that people are – leads me to a psychological definition. Evil is the exercise of power. And that’s the key: it’s about power. To intentionally harm people psychologically, to hurt people physically, to destroy people mortally, or ideas, and to commit crimes against humanity. If you Google “evil”, a word that should surely have withered by now, you come up with 163 million hits in a third of a second” (2007).

Zimbardo wants us to understand evil and what he believes to be its causes so that we can work to prevent it from happening. A question: do unseen causes lie below those Zimbardo has discovered? In his quote above he says evil is the exercise of power. Every power has a source…

Let’s see what Dr. Steiner has to say:

How in the course of evolution has evil become possible?

A satisfactory answer to this question can be obtained only by studying the elementary moral instruction that was given already in ancient times… The pupils of the Mysteries were shown that human nature can bring about destruction and harm in two directions and that human beings are in a position to develop free will only because of this possibility of erring in two directions. Furthermore, they were shown that life can take a favorable course only when these two lines of deviation are considered to be like the two sides of a balance: as one side goes up the other side goes down, and true balance is achieved only when the crossbeam is horizontal. In this way the pupils were shown that right conduct of a human being cannot at all be described by saying this is correct and that is incorrect. Right conduct is achieved only through the fact that human beings are placed at every moment in the position of being pulled either to the one side or to the other—and must then themselves establish the balance.

Consider the virtue of fortitude or courage. On the one hand, human nature may swing toward recklessness, that is, toward unrestrained activity in the world with full exertion of all one’s forces. That is on the one side; on the other side there is cowardice… and the pupils in the Mysteries were shown that if one swings toward recklessness, one loses oneself and becomes crushed by the wheels of life. If one errs in this direction, one is torn apart; on the other hand, if one errs toward the side of cowardice, one becomes hardened in oneself and thus torn away from other things and beings (and) becomes a self-enclosed being whose actions cannot be brought into harmony with the whole. This was demonstrated for the pupils with regard to all human actions.

These are the two possibilities: Either we become lost to the world—the world seizes and overpowers us—as is the case with recklessness; or the world becomes lost to us because we harden ourselves in our egoism, as is the case with cowardice. Accordingly, the pupils in the Mysteries were told that there is no unique and fixed goodness for which one can strive; on the contrary, goodness arises solely because the human being, like a pendulum, can always swing to one side or the other, and must find the possibility of balance, the central mean, through individual inner force.

You have here everything you need in order to comprehend free will and the significance of reason and wisdom in human conduct…

Excerpt from: The Spiritual Foundation of Morality. By: Rudolf Steiner. Lecture III, May 10, 1912

In a subsequent book, The Time Paradox, Zimbardo indicates that he is “interested especially in temporal biases in which learned cognitive categories are not ‘balanced’ according to situations, contexts and demands, but one or another are utilized excessively or underutilized.’”

Angels and Devils, Maurits C. Escher 1960

Much remains to be said about evil. We hinted above that evil’s purpose in the world is to make human beings free. We have to have a choice between good and evil in order to choose, and the struggle to choose the good over the evil has to be real in order to be realized. Surely the horrific events we can read about every day in the news deserve our deepest effort to understand. Electing to think about this at all is relevant to the future of humanity.

So, yeah, evil is not fun to speak about, but we need to speak about it to know it. Pretending evil doesn’t exist isn’t helpful to anyone, including ourselves. At the very least, we can learn to see ourselves and each other as searching for balance in all that we think, feel, and do, right?