by John Cryan

Despite living in a nodally-perceived world, we humans do, subconsciously at least, occasionally truck in very primitive forms of continua. The most familiar are scales based on our hands: binaries or dualities (two hands) like bad or good; five-star rating scales, made ubiquitous by the internet (one hand’s worth of fingers); and one-to-ten scales, like the equally universal pain chart in every doctor’s office (all the fingers – duh!). It cannot escape notice that all of these are not true continua, just nodally segmented ones, or in the case of binaries, only their opposite ends. We just can’t live without nodes.

The good or bad choice duality is particularly common in human interactions. It comes in many forms, such as ‘like it or hate it?’ etc. The interesting thing about it is that the choice question is never posed as ‘good or evil?’ Everyone seems to know that’d be a big insult, unless you were talking about Halloween costumes.

Evil occupies a special category of ultra-badness. It is so bad it seems not to have an opposite counterpart, at least not in the temporal realm. Evil is mostly the province of the spirit world. There, in one popular understanding of it, Manicheanism, it is paired with not just the good, but the Divine, in a never-ending struggle of titanic forces.

Here on Earth, before that same all-pervading internet cheapened the term by allowing anyone and everyone to sling it without cost, evil was generally reserved for the absolute worst of the worst. Hitler was evil incarnate. When the scope of his crimes was gradually revealed, Stalin was added to this select inverse pantheon, but it didn’t stick quite as tightly to him, and still doesn’t. Part of the reason is his country wasn’t utterly defeated and its deep shames and horrors suddenly exposed to a shocked world. Putin is busy rectifying that now.

Evil suffers from the same blinkered nodal bias that afflicts everything we do. We name the leaders, and they surely deserve it, but forget the minions. We stick the epithet on the effects, but fail to study and name the causes. We still, to this day, do not know exactly how or why a place of deep culture and civilization birthed the Nazi insanity and all its atrocities, and left it to others to end them in the worst of all wars. We have a lot of the parts, but no whole explanation. In frustration over the deep mystery and emptiness at the heart of evil, Hannah Arendt crowned it with the lasting, paradoxical term: ‘banal.’ In the temporal realm, evil is not a titanic force. It suffuses everything, and can literally pop out of nothing. Boethius and Aquinas also arrived at absence as cause. This is what makes it so frightening.

If we live in a chaonic world, what exactly is evil?

Probably the number one reason most scientists won’t touch chaons is that they seem evil. Chaons, after all, are what we’re made of. And they kill us. The whole Universe is made of chaons. Does that mean we’re all evil? Is everything in Creation evil? How could God do such a thing?

The supreme irony (another way of saying paradox) here is that only a god could create such a place.

If it just existed, forever, why would it be built this way?

So theodicy is the necessary cost of creating a universe of paradoxes. Of opposing forces. Perhaps Mani got it right. Good vs. Evil. Therefore, the only excuse for theodicy is a really great Heaven.

But perhaps there’s more to this dilemma than meets the eye. If one takes a mock-continuous, ‘curly’ lens (remember, spirals and helices, and mirrors) to this problem, answers begin to emerge.

The first and most important is that evil is a human invention. And it attaches primarily, perhaps only, to human acts.

Nature is neither all good nor evil. It just is. And in its existence, it is constantly changing. Evolving.

And declining. Nature is chaonically imperfect. That imperfection opens a window onto badness.

Nature is also necessary. We wouldn’t be here without it. In logical terms, Nature is a necessary predicate to humanity. Humanity in all our glorious, and not so much, imperfection.

One can create a continuum of good and bad for aspects of Nature. As kids, we learned there were ‘good’ dinosaurs like Brontosaurus, supposedly peaceful plant eaters, and ‘bad’ ones like T. rex, which could tear those poor Brontosauruses to pieces. But could they, really? It seemed more likely to this kid one reason Brontosauruses got so big is that then they could kick those T. rexes’ asses, literally. And then stomp on their heads.

What we’ve learned since the ’60s after digging up a lot more dinosaurs is much more nuanced. Among the complexities are that Brontosauruses lived mostly in the water, which held up their vast bulks (they and their ilk were the largest ‘land-dwelling’ creatures that ever existed on Earth), and thereby also kept the T. rexes away. And also that it is likely T. rex and all its relatives preyed on far smaller dinosaurs, attacking by stealth and speed and quickly snapping their necks before devouring them. That’s why evolution allowed their front legs to atrophy to mere claws.

So was T. rex bad? Yeah, about as badass as a dinosaur can get. That’s why every kid wants one. But evil? No. Did T. rex commit mass dinosaur murder just for the heck of it? No. Did it let its prey linger in agony? No again. The end was swift, and so was the gobbling up. There were plenty of other dinosaurs around. Did T. rex have some good attributes? Absolutely. Like all other predators, it regulated prey populations, with benefits felt throughout the ecosystems it inhabited. And, from what we have surmised and inferred from ingeniously analyzed fossil evidence, dinosaurs in general were fantastic parents. No small-scale evils of individual neglect and abuse that permeate human literature, with all their large-scale consequences.

Wild Nature in general developed a ‘bad’ rap for being the source of all evil when we humans developed writing, and soon after, relatively fixed (by unvarying dogma), so-called organized, religions. Prior to this, religion was fluid and Nature-centered. Religion mirrored the fluidity of Nature. But after we developed agriculture sufficient to support other human activities not associated with the acquisition of food, we settled down in villages, then towns and cities, grew our numbers, and began detaching from our intimate nomadic connections to Mother Earth. This had some very serious consequences, both for ourselves and our only support system, as we now, ruefully late, realize. Arguably, the biggest one was the development of systemic corruption, and out of that, more kinds of badness than any isolated band of primitive nomadic hunter-gatherers could have ever imagined, or had the time to cook up, starting with warfare.

It was just too easy to steal the other band’s food, or clothes, or tools (later turned more and more into weapons in response to the earliest aggressions). And eventually their men, women and children. It was far less work than producing them for yourself. And your time and energy were the first money.

This mentality eventually escalated to stealing everything, including land and settlements. What couldn’t be stolen was usually trashed. This was the beginning of the ‘Law of the Jungle,’ periods of lawless warfare of varying lengths that persisted before the first laws, usually treaties, were sealed.

Because humans were first prey, then tool-armed predators, we developed an inferiority complex mirrored in our growing disdain of Nature. As we fortified our cities with walls and battlements, we invented new, human-centered myths that ossified into our standing organized religions. These myths were invariably the products of the herding mindset that developed after we figured out we could tame and feed our crops to certain animals, and that this was much better than hunting – much more reliable.

And less risky. There were still big wild animals roaming outside our castle walls. Dangerous animals.

Among them now were armor-plated humans riding some of those animals.

Our religions and our forms of governance largely coalesced around hierarchy. Even the most open forms of self-rule developed and practiced temporary, or revolving hierarchy, at least within leadership.

And leadership battles were strictly ‘survival of the fittest,’ or ‘might makes right’ affairs in most locales. The corruption these early power struggles produced became templates for all that followed: cabals, backstabbing, gaslighting – you name the poison, we humans ginned it up (and yes, real poison)

in record time. Religion led the way, if for no other reason than its leaders, and those of nascent governance, were often one and the same, or closely related, often by blood. In this way, organized religion became hopelessly corrupted.

And in its push to temper, or ‘civilize,’ human passions and behaviors, increasingly city-centered and government-coupled religious power bases began to undermine and denigrate worship of, and respect for, Nature. First, the new, organized, agrarian-based religions systematically replaced, and largely destroyed, the Nature-based ‘pagan’ religions that preceded them, nearly all of which were polytheistic reflections of personified aspects of the living world. Then, often literally building on the ruins they’d created, the new systems demonized wildness and wilderness, and its denizens, while building up a picture of ‘perfectible’ humanity symbolized by untouchable visions of godliness centered on a dazzling ‘polis.’ The upstart religions drew just enough from the old, Classical worlds they replaced to keep alive their animal spirits, passions, and epicurean zest for perfection in form, living, and learning. Even relatively severe sects, including ones that disavowed possessions and attachments, developed lively cultures, rituals, and arts that attracted many adherents and more admirers busy with their occupations.

The whole thing culminated with the rise of a new religion: Scientism. Science had been making fitful progress until it coupled itself with a newly-discovered, seemingly inexhaustible cheap energy source:

fossil fuels. After that, the pace of scientific discovery quickened. As tools begat new tools, the Industrial Revolution was born, and rigidly hierarchical hereditary feudalism, born of the descendants of the original mighty who took rights, land and people, passed into a splintered kingdom of multiple feuding hierarchies which had to navigate a new compromise. The result was nation-states.

This is the world we live in now. The declining phase of nation-states. It is a very dangerous period.

The systemic corruptions and inequities of our hierarchy-based ‘civilizations’ have multiplied, and now metastasized, into something that we can increasingly see and feel getting ready to produce evil on a scale vastly exceeding Hitler, or Stalin, or any legendary bad guy from the past. We have already gotten a taste of it with Putin’s use of nuclear terror as cover to commit genocide in a neighboring country, and Xi’s ever more deadly buildup of inferior but more numerous weapons in an attempt to intimidate the rest of the world. And these are but sideshows for the horrors promised by our utter failure over the last four decades to quickly eliminate our fossil fuel and industrialized agricultural emissions, rapidly and voluntarily reduce our burgeoning and ever-poorer populations, and remove ourselves as destroyers from most of the biosphere we utterly depend upon, but have ignored, neglected, and largely dismantled. We are about to become the victims of our own cumulative evil.

And we may take virtually everything else that lives on this once-beautiful planet with us.

How do we back out of this trap? By confronting the evil we have become, directly, and collectively defeating it. Banish it back to the level of the chaonic Universe. This is the best we can do.

And we can only do it together. That’s right, every last one of us must join this fight with all our might.

On a chaonic level, there is adversity, and then there’s inadvertency. In other words, oppositions which often can lead to chaos, and the natural chaos itself, often euphemistically called ‘acts of God,’ which manifests as disasters. The first is the everyday nature of the chaonic Universe. We face it every moment of our brief lives. The second are the seemingly sudden, often violent, bad things that happen to some of us, and are now threatening to happen to us all because we have degraded the conditions underlying our existence, and have therefore introduced an evil component into Nature itself.

True evil is neither of these, though it may build itself partially out of them. It is, instead, the culmination of many contributing corrupt factors, in very specific sequences and circumstances, that are unique in each occurrence, yet share a common factor: lack. Specifically, lack of enough good.

So yes, a hallmark of Evil is that it is organized to some degree. That organization is a mirror of what we normally think of when we contemplate Order. What is organized, and therefore compound-composited, is the Potential for Chaos. When that potential is sufficiently built up, it releases Chaos in the form of Kinetic Evil, just as the Chaos of Inadvertency does in the regular workings of nonhuman Nature. That release can be instantaneous or continuous, sometimes for long periods until it is stopped.

Therefore, there is Potential Evil and Kinetic Evil. There is also Evil Energy, the human perversion, or mirror, of the Divine Energy that was given up by God to power the temporal Universe.

What causes humans to become evil, to turn to evil, and to go along with the evil of others? Churchill answered it best: To do nothing. To not take action, fight back, at one’s earliest recognition of evil taking form. Evil is startling because it appears to form out of nothing – activities that often, if not outright banal, start off seeming trivial, sometimes even laughable.

For that reason, we all have to be Watchmen. And yes, some of us also have to watch the Watchmen.

To be human in the chaonic Universe is to live life on watch, like mariners of old at night on a ship tossing in heavy seas. One never knows when Leviathan might rise up and suddenly strike.

We also have to constantly do battle with the corruption caused, aided, and abetted by the caustic and constant actions of the free chaons all around and in us. We must summon the Classical Virtues, and subdue the worst of the Vices. Hedonic release is healthy and fine in moderate doses at reasonable intervals. But there are also many other, more lasting forms of Satisfaction, a higher form of Happiness.

Epicureanism can be carried to extremes. It can become Libertarianism, a form of selfishness that can kill us all even faster than we are already accomplishing in our enervated states of lethargy and torpor. The greatest Happiness lies in helping others, in whatever way possible.

The major world religions need to become relevant again. They should start by getting together to share the visions of God they hold in common. Then they must shed their centuries of misguided and misleading encrustations, and bring into their centers of power all the people they have excluded.

The bad governments of the world must reform and open up to maximize public participation in major decisions and their implementation. At the same time, we must disarm and fully invest peacekeeping in the community of nations. If we do these things, we can start down the path of rolling back Evil.