“If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?”
– Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago 1918-1956
What is evil, and what separates it from bad behavior? In my mind, the two are not different points on the same scale.
Bad relates to choices and outcomes. Bad luck, bad decisions, etc. that can all range from mild to disastrous. While I can make a decision that causes harm to another, as long as there was no intent to cause harm, the decision was not an evil one, just a bad one. Getting into an auto accident due to momentary distraction (spilling coffee on yourself – the decision to drink hot coffee while driving being the bad decision), for example.
Bad decisions are not only inevitable, they are a necessary part of life. It is through bad choices and their outcomes that we learn what works and what doesn’t, and choose better alternatives. Bad choices (should) drive the evolution of better choices.
It is in this regard that the difference between ignorant and stupid is made clear. Ignorance is simply the lack of knowledge of a subject, and is correctable through experience or training. When you make a bad decision because you did not know any better, you are ignorant (at least until you learn the lesson of your experience). Stupidity, however, is the failure to learn from experience, despite repeated instances of the event. Repeating the same action over and over, and expecting different results, is the classic definition of stupidity.
Evil decisions, though, are driven by intent. When the intent behind an action is to harm or subjugate others for your own gain or pleasure, then the intent is evil, as is the person behind the action. And again, depending on the scope, this can range from lesser evils such as gaslighting that can exist in unhealthy relationships, to massive evils behind the decisions and actions of Stalin, Mao and Hitler that lead to the death of millions.
In this regard, objects and events cannot be evil. Guns are not evil any more than hammers or rocks – it is all in what you do with them. Likewise, earthquakes or hurricanes are not evil. Even though thousands may die, there is no intent behind them. However if the actions of others lead to deaths in these events (for example by not repairing levies in order to pad your pockets or by situating nuclear power plants on fault lines in order to lower cost and increase profits), then the people behind those actions have demonstrated evil intent, to the degree that they were conscious of the risks and took them anyway. There are degrees of evil – evil through selfishness, and evil through deliberate intent.
It is one degree of evil to situate the power plant in a high-risk area knowing that it could cause large-scale death and harm, but you took that risk, hoping that the event would not occur, and you would get your reward in the interim. It is another (and much greater) degree of evil to situate the plant on the fault line because you are deliberately hoping for or acting to cause an event that can cause mass casualties.
In the end, evil starts with the individual. The individual with the unconscious mind is the fertile ground from which evil acts and an evil nature can spring, as they do not understand their own motivations. Religious and political ideology (or dogmatic ideology of any kind that restricts free thought) are the seeds that are planted in that fertile ground that can lead to widespread evil acts (ranging from BLM riots to the Rwandan genocide). Finally, it is evil governments and institutions who fertilize and then reap the harvest for their benefit from the seeds that they have planted in the susceptible minds of individuals.