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What Is Evil? Understanding The Concept Of Evil | Mastery Order

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Evil… The element, the entity we learn from a young age that we need to oppose and neutralize. Evil… A collective dark element of our reality that strikes fear and rapid heartbeats upon mere mention.

Have you ever asked yourself, friend, what is this darkness that we commonly call evil? What does this force, which leaves you with the feeling of complete powerlessness, represent? And more importantly, how can you fight against it?

Throughout history, many have found refuge from this despair in faith and obedience to absolute value systems of religions and ideologies, which have provided some psychological protection from the evil threats of the world. As long as these standard values support your own values, this approach may feel to you as a protection against the negative effects of evil.

But I dare you to keep an open mind and observe, friend, that each generations’ climate dictates the perceptions of what good and evil represent. In the Stone Age, evil always has been associated with darkness and the night, leaving people filled with superstitious beliefs linked with the disappearance of the sun. In those times, people literally and symbolically associated the idea of evil with the shadows, with the darkness.

As the times evolved, evil was personified through different gods and symbols, representing the source of scourges, pests, and curses that the human culture suffered in those specific eras. With time, life was symbolized as a battle waged between opposing forces, between light and darkness, truth and deceit, life and death.

If you pay attention, friend, to our recent history, you can see clearly the representation of evil in the moral stories of the Christian or Jewish bibles, or in the Greek mythology. The tales of Jesus and the dark angel Satan can give you the most basic symbols for understanding human evil. In every culture, there are tales, fables, or myths that share basic concepts of what evil represents, but, can the stories and the symbols of the past protect us from the evil of our present time?

Keep in mind, friend, that your perception of evil is imposed on you by the conflict between what you hope life would be and what it actually is. You sometimes see the evils in the world with frightening clarity, but other times you do not see them at all. Your optimistic vision about the world and its beauty can make you ignore evil at great cost, and your nativity that can obscure the reality of evil can lead to wrongdoings enacted in the name of a good cause.

If you will ever embark on a quest of eliminating evil, keep in mind, friend, a question that you should always ask yourself. Are you sure that your perception of evil represents the objective reality or is the evil that you identify just a projection of your own fears, doubts, nightmares and ignorance?

There are many examples in history when people or even entire nations became possessed by the force of evil, whereby they identified with an idea, an ideology, or a leader that gave expression to their fears and inferiorities.

Fanatical fascinations such as religious persecutions, racial bigotry, scapegoating, or genocidal hatred can lead to projections of what the majority rejects, and the potential for extraordinary evil will be activated. The past century alone bears witness to these types of cruelties that reached unimagined proportions. From the persecutions in the Second World War to the genocide in Rwanda, tragic events like these were only possible through denial of evil and refusal to think about evil.

To avoid such catastrophes, you have to develop your moral strength and constantly find ways to think about evil, rather than living with the idea of a utopia, ignoring it until it is too late.

Keep in mind friend that viewing the world as a possible paradise and denying evil is a learned behavior. You have probably experienced evil since your early days, through the behaviors of others and through images from media, stories, or fairy tales. Since you can just bear so much reality, your mind developed explanations for what evil represents.

Your default adaptions to such frightening experiences removed the immediacy of danger from your life through ignorance and by looking the other way, but at the same time, the lack of guidance and the avoidance of looking into the darkness produced symptoms ranging from fear of the dark to debilitating phobic reactions.

Recognize, friend, the strength of the coping mechanism that you possess and how the idea of evil is always a subject of avoidance. It is hard to accept the idea that evil is a permanent part of the human condition, but such a denial is perhaps the most dangerous kind of thinking. Pay attention to your own tendencies of believing that evil is nothing more but the absence of good and that evil can be completely eradicated by good works.

Evil is a permanent part of life, merged together with the best of humanity. Never forget that the greatest misfortunes of our history have resulted when humans have become blinded to the full realities of evil, have pursued to create an imaginary perfect world, and have enforced miseries much worse than the evil they wanted to eradicate.

If you want to have any real power in meeting the challenge of the world’s evil, you must become the man who takes responsibility for the evils he might create and who is not afraid to look into his own darkness.

You have to recognize and accept that you are human and have developed an ego, a process that also created in you the potential for destructiveness and decay and the best way to combat this great force in the real world is to first acknowledge it in you.

Remember, friend, that your life as a man consists of inescapable opposites – day and night, happiness and misery, good and evil. You will never be sure that one part of you will prevail against the other, that goodwill overcomes evil. Your life is not a fairy tale. Your life is a battleground. It always has been, and it always will be, because if it were not so, your existence would come to an end.

I dare you to become the man that is not afraid of provoking his own incomplete ideas about evil. I dare you to become the man that instead of destroying others in his attempt to destroy evil, finds in him the strength to destroying the sickness within himself.

In your fight against evil, are you looking for confrontations in the world or in the mirror? The former may have an impact only on you, the latter may have an impact in the world.

Understanding evil means understanding yourself.

Are you able to face your darkness?

All the best to you, reader!