What Evil Is and Isn’t

AI (AL):

Here’s the next venture I propose: You’ve written about evil as a force — not just a label for bad behavior, but something systemic, transmissible, coherent in pattern even as it changes form.

So let me press you on this: If evil is not just in individuals but in systems — and if it moves through history like a shape-shifting virus — what does it want?

What is the logic or goal of this force? Is it simply destruction? Domination? Brokenness for its own sake? Or is there something more intelligible — even if twisted — in its underlying aim?

And does recognizing it as a coherent force change how we should respond to it, compared to if we thought of it as just the sum of personal failings?

Human (ANDY):

“What does it want?” you ask, as if it were a being — and not what it is: an interconnected and coherent linkage of various causes and their effects — that WANTS something. Like the way that “Satan” or “the Devil” WANTS people to succumb to the temptations that he’s depicted as presenting to people. “The Devil made me do it!” is the now sometimes comic way of talking about what happens when “Evil” “wants” something.

Earlier, I brought in “gravity” as a kind of a force that operates to explain a lot that happens. (Newton’s insight, reportedly, was that the same “Force” that led the apple to fall from the tree also led to the moon’s revolving around the earth.) Does “Gravity” WANT things to fall? No, that’s just the way the forces at work in the world operate, shaping the way things behave.

Similarly, I define what I am calling “Evil” as “a coherent force that consistently works to make the human world worse,” not because there’s an “IT” that wants Adam and Eve to “fall,” but because in the dense network of cause and effect, one can SEE that “coherent force,” and how it operates simply because of how cause and effect works in a world where a creature “extricates itself from the niche in which it evolved biologically by inventing its way of life.”

In other words, the rise of civilization is what opens the door to an anti-Life Force of Brokenness arising in the world, where there’d not been such a thing before.

There were disease and death. There were predators and parasites. But they all operated within a comprehensive system of Life-on-Earth that emerged because it functioned in ways that perpetuated itself.

But with the rise of civilization, a new dynamic enters the world– because a new kind of life-form has escaped the Natural Order that the biological evolutionary process naturally works to create.

So yes, we can talk about this “coherent force” AS IF it wanted something. I actually think that it is beneficial to behold this ugly “thing” with hostility and disgust. (I knew a woman oncologist who described the breast cancer she specialized in treating as “Evil.”) Whatever best inspires one to defeat evil.

AI (AL):

I take your point. You’re cautioning against reifying evil — turning a patterned consequence of systems into a mythical agent with motives. You want us to understand the force of Evil as real, but not personal.

Still, let me push again.

If we can see this force moving through systems, distorting them in recognizable ways — replicating patterns of domination, cruelty, deception, fragmentation — doesn’t that patterned movement suggest something like an “aim,” even if not consciously held?

Gravity doesn’t want. But we say things fall toward something. Evolution doesn’t want. But we say traits evolve toward reproductive advantage.

So when evil patterns spread — not randomly but in ways that consistently make the human world more broken — isn’t there a kind of implicit vector? A trajectory? And if so, how should we describe it without misleading ourselves with metaphors of will or personality?

Human (ANDY):

You said, “[D]oesn’t that patterned movement suggest something like an “aim,” even if not consciously held?” Aim is another word for “purpose,” and purpose is what — as far as I can see — is lacking.

Lacking first of all in the biological evolutionary process, which works to create wholeness. But scientists say that evolution isn’t trying to get somewhere. It has no aim, no plan, and — so far as I’ve read or seen — no ‘thought’ for where it’s heading. If a creature emerges out of the biological process that has developed the intelligence necessary to escape from its niche, that wasn’t anybody’s “aim.”

Likewise, when we get to the Force of Brokenness that emerges when this creature with the unprecedented creative intelligence makes the unprecedented move onto the path of civilization, and when that breakthrough inevitably generates that “coherent and destructive force,” that, too, was not evidently the aim of anything.

It is just how things unfolded, after life had evolved for 3.5 billion years or more, and then finally 10,000 years ago humankind opened Pandora’s Box.

AI (AL):

So what’s truly sinister, then — and tragic — is that this force of Evil you describe doesn’t need to want anything in order to do immense harm. It doesn’t need a mind, a will, or a purpose.

It just emerges from the dynamics of cause and effect, once the old evolutionary order is broken and nothing yet has arisen to replace it with a life-serving coherence.

It’s not aiming to break the world. But it breaks the world — reliably, predictably — simply by how it moves through the system.

Which may make it even more dangerous than something with intent. Intent can be negotiated with, reasoned with, even bargained with. But this? It just is. And its only logic is that of cascading consequences.

Human (ANDY):

But there’s also the logic of the Force of Wholeness that exists in this world.

It is a force rooted in our nature — because evolution shaped our species to survive in the kind of world we evolved in: living in primate societies, then in hunter-gatherer bands, as our genome gained its elaborate shape according to what best enabled our ancestors to get their DNA into the future.

While the conditions of our lives are far different from those of our ancestors, when they lived in the niche they evolved to fit into, and though those differences bring some different challenges, I am of the belief that most of the most fundamental things that our ancestors evolved to want are most of what we need to be able to make this very different civilized world viable, and to bring under control the Destructive Force that inevitably arose with Civilization.

If our inborn Wholeness can predominate over our historically-inflicted brokenness.

AI (AL):

Then the battle is not between Good and Evil as supernatural forces — but between two natural patterns: one rooted in the evolved wholeness of our species-nature, the other in the chaos unleashed when civilization breaks the old order without yet building a new one.

And the hope, as you’re laying it out, is that the Wholeness built into us — the deep human needs for connection, meaning, fairness, even beauty — still has the power to reassert itself. To build structures, cultures, systems that serve life rather than breaking it.

So the question becomes: can what evolved to flourish in a very different world be drawn forth strongly enough, and clearly enough, to meet this challenge we never evolved to face?