Evil

Rastinews — Evil rarely presents itself as evil. It becomes ordinary, gains legitimacy, and disguises itself as "good" until it turns invisible.

We would rather not deal with evil. We would rather not be evil, either. Even the evil rarely call themselves that. People wrap their actions in a justification, a necessity, sometimes even a claim to virtue. The Nazis did not see themselves as agents of a satanic evil. They cast what they did as order, as purification, as historical duty. This is one of evil's most chilling traits: it rarely presents itself as evil.

And yet evil attracts. Perhaps it attracts for that very reason. The more a person believes evil lies safely outside himself, the more it draws his interest. Convinced the perpetrator is always someone else, he watches evil from a safe distance. The daily news brings its many faces almost every day: wars, murders, femicides, dead child laborers, abuse, destruction, persecution. We follow these stories not only with horror but with a certain attentiveness and curiosity. The news delivers not just catastrophe, but the pull of evil itself.

What reassures us is our ability to spot evil in others. When we locate it outside ourselves — in the other, the criminal, the murderer, the dictator — we can act as though no darkness lives in us at all. We tell ourselves our moral integrity remains intact. But the human soul is not so simple. Every person carries both good and evil within. A "good person" is not someone free of evil; it is someone who can face the destructiveness inside himself, recognize it, and carry it without turning it into action. Goodness is not the absence of evil. It is the product of a conscious, ethical relationship with it.

That is why evil cannot be treated merely as a moral aberration or a pathological exception. The German philosopher Rüdiger Safranski, in Das Böse oder Das Drama der Freiheit (Evil, or the Drama of Freedom, 2011), defines evil as the price we pay for freedom. Because man is a free being, he can choose not only good but evil too. Evil is the dark possibility contained in human freedom. Konrad Lorenz, in Das sogenannte Böse (On Aggression, 2007, 25th edition), argues that aggression in animals serves survival, self-protection and the continuation of the species — and that "evil," in this sense, belongs to humans alone. Where animal aggression is tied to a natural function, human evil can take on a dimension that is symbolic, conscious, organized, and at times fused with pleasure.

Hannah Arendt draws attention to precisely this point in Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil (2011). Adolf Eichmann, whose trial she covered, appears not as a satanic monster but as an utterly ordinary man. He behaves like a bureaucrat who never seriously considers whether what he did was evil, believing only that he was carrying out his duty. Arendt's unsettling conclusion: evil does not always spring from some demonic depth. It often springs from thoughtlessness, obedience, habit, and ordinariness. Evil, then, is not an exceptional aberration — it is a terrifyingly everyday possibility.

Arendt kept asking, "What is evil?" — and this is exactly what she points to: evil can be normal and ordinary enough to shock us. Watching Eichmann's trial, she focused on how he behaved as a bureaucrat following orders, enforcing a system, simply a part of the machine. Eichmann treated what he did not as a moral question but as a technical task. Responsibility for the act dissolves this way, and evil becomes just another job to complete. This is not unique to totalitarian regimes. As long as a person refuses to own the responsibility for his actions, evil can be perceived as routine work.

Konrad Lorenz touches a similar point from an entirely different angle. Some behavior that strikes us as utterly merciless, he argues, is not "evil" at all — it is a natural act aimed at an animal's survival. A lion killing a gazelle calf is not morally evil, because the animal world has no category called "evil." It has only survival.

Philosophical debate sometimes treats evil as a lack or deficiency of good. In this view, evil is simply the absence of good, and evil people are those who have strayed from the right path. Other approaches read evil as a perceptual error: violence committed in the name of some higher ideal can be seen not as "evil" but as an instrument of a greater good. This is how, throughout history, many people have justified violence committed in the name of values they held sacred. Acts carried out for the state, the nation, the flag, or religion register to those who commit them not as evil but as sacrifice. In Turkey, mafia figures presenting themselves as men "working for the homeland," or violent perpetrators later remembered as "national heroes," are products of this same mechanism.

When evil gains this kind of normality, it becomes harder to diagnose. Those who commit it see themselves not as guilty but as people making a sacrifice for a sacred cause. Arendt's insight matters again here: evil is very often carried out by ordinary people who resemble us, who live as we do. Religious and cultural narratives, by contrast, usually cast evil as something extraordinary: demons, jinn, witches, giants. In those stories evil differs from normal humans by nature — it is abnormal, and it tempts people into wrongdoing. What Arendt showed is the opposite. Evil arises, most often, not from abnormal beings but from thoroughly normal people.

Psychology and psychiatry have long tended to study savagery and cruelty as categories of illness, attributing evil once again to "the abnormal." Historical reality shows this is not always so. A Nazi officer who sent thousands of Jews to the gas chambers that day could go home that same evening and sing at his child's birthday party. Eichmann, in Arendt's account, was not stupid — he was thoughtless. This is exactly what Arendt stresses: evil's source is often not malice but thoughtlessness. When people stop truly thinking about what they do, conscience disappears with it.

Phrases like "our state knows best" or "our superiors know what they're doing" suspend thought altogether. The individual then never takes responsibility for his own act. People who carry out violence in the name of the state begin to see themselves not as perpetrators and culprits but as heroes doing their duty. Seen from outside, this looks almost like a political schizophrenia. Perhaps the real issue lies exactly here: as long as we treat evil as only other people's problem, we can never truly understand it. Evil is not some foreign force attacking us from outside. It is a possibility running through what it means to be human — through freedom, desire, fear, and denial. The only thing that can truly hold it in check is not believing ourselves wholly "good," but the courage to face the darkness within us honestly.

Is evil always evil?

One of the most significant misconceptions is thinking that people can only be evil. But the human soul is not so one-dimensional. No one is purely evil or purely good. "Evil"

When we look closely at the lives of people we call evil, we find they can behave in ways that would seem perfectly ordinary, even good, in other contexts. Even those who worked in Nazi concentration camps and facilitated the deaths of hundreds of Jews each day were not defined solely by that role. The same people could go home in the evening and celebrate their children's birthdays, sing birthday songs, and give their children presents. They listened to classical music, danced, and played the part of the polite, gentlemanly man toward women.

At first glance this looks like a glaring contradiction. But it actually reveals something important about how the human mind works: evil people rarely see themselves as evil. To keep carrying out their own destruction, a person has to reframe it as goodness, as cleansing, as duty. The Nazis did not feel they were committing a crime as they killed Jews; on the contrary, they believed they were "purifying" society, providing a kind of hygiene. In the perpetrator's mind, evil became an act of cleansing. A powerful mechanism of projection is at work here. A person projects their own aggression, their own dirty or unacceptable impulses, outward. The source of evil is no longer inside; it is in the outside "other". As long as all the evil is dumped onto the other, a person can feel good, even morally superior. This mechanism operates not only at the individual level but at the collective level too. A group projects evil onto another group in order to construct itself as "good", "clean", "innocent". This is why evil rarely appears as an absolute darkness; it appears instead as a moral duality: we are good, they are evil. The moment this distinction is drawn, violence against the other begins to be legitimised. Because what is being done is no longer a crime — it is a cleansing.

We can see a similar emotional mechanism at work today. The same people can feel genuine, heartfelt sorrow for a child suffering somewhere else in the world. Grieving for a child killed in Egypt, for instance, is possible, and it is a human feeling. That is not the problem. The problem is that the same people do not show the same sensitivity toward injustices in their own society. If people who can cry over a child's suffering in one place can applaud a child's death in another, then what is at work is not merely a political contradiction but a psychological mechanism. It is therefore not surprising that people who could applaud the killing of Berkin Elvan, a child, could still grieve for a child in another country. Because the issue here is not children's suffering; the issue is which child is "ours" and which is the "other". Empathy is rarely universal — it becomes an empathy with borders drawn around it.

The real problem is not grieving for a child. The real problem is treating some children's suffering as visible while ignoring that of others. Within the same society, not grieving for children who die in workplace accidents, seeing no moral problem in child labour, yet being able to weep for a child in a distant land — this shows us that people often react not to suffering but to identity. This is why evil is born not only of sadistic pleasure but often of moral blindness. As long as a person can construct their own side as good, it becomes easier to ignore the other's suffering. Perhaps this is the most dangerous form evil takes: people being complicit in evil while feeling good about themselves.