Evil doesn't exist
Table of contents
I hear it way too often.
“It was an act of pure evil.” “He’s evil.” “We must stop the evil.”
Evil this, evil that, evil, evil, evil.
I can understand it in children’s books. Stories are often kept simple on purpose. There are heroes and villains, light and darkness, good and evil. Fine. That has its place.
But I hear it from politicians. From journalists. From adults in serious conversations. That is what disappoints me. This brute oversimplification comes from people who are supposed to help us understand the world, not reduce it into a fairy tale.
Naming something evil is a full stop. It does not advance the conversation. It labels without reasoning. It condemns without explanation. It is an absolute term. It takes all the underlying layers and compresses them into one emotionally satisfying word.
You either agree with it or you don’t. And because it is so absolute, it invites further division. Once something is called evil, trying to understand it can start to sound like defending it.
That is one of the costs of the word. And a high price, in my opinion. It makes explanation suspicious.
If evil does not exist, then what does?
Anger. Greed. Trauma. Mental illness. Fear. Despair. Ego. Ignorance. Ideology. Social pressure. And of course, incompetence.
These things can be defined. They can be studied. They can be reduced. Sometimes, maybe, they can even be prevented.
“Evil” turns all of that into mist.
Explanation is not excuse
Causality does not erase responsibility. I am not saying horrific acts do not exist. I am not saying people should not be held morally responsible. I am not saying everything is relative and no act can be condemned.
Some acts are cruel, immoral, sadistic, destructive, unforgivable even. We need words for that.
But “evil” is often not used as a word for understanding. It is used as a word for stopping understanding.
Maybe it is my own interpretation that drives me to feel so strongly about this. Maybe others hear it differently. But when I hear “evil” used in a serious context, especially by someone trying to persuade a crowd, it makes me uneasy.
It feels like emotional language pretending to be moral clarity.
Adjective vs Noun
There is a difference between saying “this was an evil act” and “it was an act of pure evil.” They overlap, of course, but there is a meaningful distinction.
As an adjective, “evil” can at least be confined to the act itself. “This evil act” means the act was morally horrific. I still do not love the word, but it is more contained. It condemns the behaviour without necessarily turning it into a mystery.
“An act of pure evil” does something else. The word “pure” makes it absolute. It suggests the act was not only cruel or immoral, but somehow an expression of evil itself. It turns the action into a symbol. It removes ambiguity, complexity, context, and explanation.
Calling something “an evil act” may still leave room to ask why it happened. Calling it “an act of pure evil” often implies there is nothing more to understand.
And as a noun, it becomes even more abstract.
“The evil.” “Evil must be defeated.” “Russians are evil.”
Now it starts to sound like a force, an essence, something almost cosmic. It suggests that the problem is not behaviour, incentives, history, psychology, systems, or circumstances, but some dark substance living inside a person or a group.
Once people are not confused, damaged, afraid, indoctrinated, desperate, greedy, stupid, or cruel, but simply evil, then what is left to do with them?
You do not try to understand evil. You fight to destroy it.
And that is the other cost of the word. It can justify further cruelty.
Arendt and the word itself
Hannah Arendt comes to mind. Her phrase “the banality of evil” has stuck with me for a while. It is often used to describe how horrific things can be done not by monsters, but by ordinary people, inside systems, following orders, avoiding thought, doing their jobs, delegating responsibility.
It points at something important: evil does not always look dramatic. It can be bureaucratic, obedient, and boring.
But when I say “evil doesn’t exist,” I am talking about something slightly different.
Arendt was trying to understand how people become participants in horrific acts. I am thinking about what happens when we use the word “evil” itself.
How it pushes us away from causes and toward emotional certainty. How it turns people into symbols. How it can be used to divide, mobilise, and manipulate.
The word is powerful because it is vague. Everyone can agree that evil is bad, without agreeing on what caused the harm, who benefits from the label, or what should actually be done.
Those things are a lot harder to agree on.
But we should not be lazy.
The evil is in the vagueness
Calling something evil does not make us more moral. It only makes us less precise.
And if we are less precise, we are less capable of preventing the next cruelty, the next failure.
All this is to say: words have value.
If we are to understand each other, we need language that reveals rather than hides. If we can name something, explain it, and define it, we have a chance of finding a common language.
The evil is in the vagueness.