I’m not much interested in the problem of evil as generally understood: why does a good God allow evil to exist. It’s clear to me that evil comes from people, not from God.
What interests me is how people choose to become evil. Because it seems clear that evil is a choice, nearly always. People don’t become evil without a deliberate decision and without working at it.
My pattern from understanding this is the murderers in In Cold Blood. Richard Hickock seems to have been a straight-up psychopath, at least in Capote’s telling; but Perry Smith was not. He’s the guy who got the sympathy of the jail warden and for whom the jailer’s wife made pies.
There’s a bit where Hickock and Smith are getting to know each other and Smith brags about killing a guy. It seems likely that he made this up—that Smith was making himself out to be more badass than he was. And there’s the thing. He’s working at being evil. He’s setting himself up as more evil than he is—and then he has to work to live up to his own, self-created, bad reputation.
Or again, take Dr. Horrible trying to get into the Evil League of Evil. He has to show that he’s bad enough to get in, and through diligent effort succeeds in making himself so.
Or take the South in the Civil War—an entire region building a society on an obvious evil and, the more the wrong is pointed out, the more they double down. Or Germany before Hitler. Examples abound.
This is all of special relevance right now because of our politics of the moment. We have all the leaders of a political party choosing what seems on its face to be obviously wrong. Ten years ago—okay, say twenty years ago—the idea that essentially all the leaders of a party would respond to an attack on our country by trying to take down those defending us would have seemed like wild hyperbole, to me anyway. Yet here we are. How did we get here? How did they get to a place where this seems okay?
Answer: They chose it. Bit by bit. Again and again. They worked at it.
But why? If you had laid the proposition in front of them twenty years ago that they should aid a foreign power this way, they would have rejected it out of hand. So what happened in between?
And the answer to that is: small steps. When Russia wants to compromise someone, we are told, they don’t start with the big betrayal. They start with some small, almost innocuous request. Just show us this memo. Not classified, just internal. No reason we shouldn’t see it. Then that initial request—that tiny betrayal—becomes the wedge. You did that small thing, do this bigger thing. Carrot and stick both: if anyone found out you did that small thing, your career would be over even though it was small. So do this bigger thing. It’s still not so big. No reason not to.
Mafia bosses, we are told, work the same way. Be part of the family. Do this small favor. Now the next. And the next.
And this theme—the small betrayal which is the lynchpin to the loss of the soul—is a classic throughout literature. Take the Greek plays—Agamemnon choosing to step on the fine cloth and all his noble purpose comes crashing down. Small selfishness in The Lord of the Flies turns into larger injustice, and finally murder. “The safest road to hell is the gradual one - the gentle slope, soft underfoot, without sudden turnings, without milestones, without signposts” (CS Lewis).
Because evil takes practice. It comes so naturally that we have to actively choose against it—yet it is so unnatural that we reject it if we look at it full in the face. We have to work up to it.
And one of the ways we choose is by choosing our tribe—the people who are like us, and we want to be like, and who influence us and our way of thinking.
(To be continued.)