Evil is a moral category. From a psychological point of view, “evil” deeds have five main reasons: ignorance, greed, fear, obsessive desires and indifference, says psychologist Pavel Somov. Let’s analyze them in more detail.
1. Ignorance
The cause of ignorance can be a variety of psychological and social factors, problems in education or its lack. People can be misled by cultural attitudes that infect with racism, chauvinism, and nationalism.
Ignorance can be the result of gaps in education (“the earth is flat” and similar ideas), a lack of life experience, or an inability to understand someone else’s psychology. However, ignorance is not evil.
2. Greed
Greed can be seen as an intertwining of love (for money) and fear (not getting it). Competitiveness can also be added here: the desire to get more than others. This is not evil, but simply an unsuccessful attempt to feel one’s own value, to raise self-esteem. This is the insatiable hunger of the narcissist, who constantly needs external approval. Behind narcissism is a feeling of inner emptiness, the absence of a whole image of oneself and attempts to assert oneself through the approval of others.
Greed can also be interpreted as love directed in the wrong direction — «obsession», the transfer of libido energy to material objects. The love of money is safer than the love of people, because money does not leave us.
3. Fear
Fear often pushes us to terrible deeds, because «the best defense is an attack.» When we are afraid, we often decide to deliver a «preemptive strike» — and we try to hit harder, more painfully: suddenly a weak blow will not be enough. Hence, excessive self-defense and aggression. But this is not evil, but only out of control fear.
4. Obsessive desires and addictions
We often develop very unsightly addictions. But they are not evil either. It’s all about the «pleasure center» of our brain: it is responsible for what will seem pleasant and desirable to us. If his “settings” go astray, addiction, painful addictions arise.
5. Indifference
Lack of empathy, heartlessness, insensitivity, manipulation of people, uncontrolled violence — all this scares us and makes us constantly on our guard so as not to become a victim.
The roots of indifference are in the lack or absence of activity of mirror neurons in the brain (it is on them that our ability to empathize and empathize depends). Those in whom these neurons function incorrectly from birth behave differently, which is quite natural (their empathy function is simply turned off or weakened).
Moreover, any of us can easily experience a decrease in empathy — for this it is enough to get very hungry (hunger turns many of us into irritable boors). We can temporarily or permanently lose the ability to empathize due to lack of sleep, stress, or brain disease. But this is not evil, but one of the aspects of the human psyche.
Why do we engage in moralizing and not psychological analysis? Perhaps because it gives us the opportunity to feel superior to those we judge. Moralizing is nothing more than labeling. It’s easy to call someone evil — it’s much harder to start thinking, to go beyond primitive labels, to constantly ask the question «why», to take into account the context.
Perhaps, analyzing the behavior of others, we will see something similar in ourselves and will no longer be able to look down on them with a sense of moral superiority.