A simple form of evil.. A childlike state

Something very ordinary happened the other day. The kind of thing that, seen from outside, has no side worth thinking about, that will get lost inside the day. I saw how one person treated another. They said a sentence. Then they fell silent. A tiny change came over the face of the person across from them. Maybe nobody noticed. I did not notice at first either. Then, when I got home, that facial expression stuck in my mind.

Sometimes a person carries away with them not what they lived through but a tiny detail inside what they lived through. A tone of voice, a look, a silence that lasted longer than it needed to. Everyone who was there at that moment goes on with their life, but when you get home, something comes with you. You do not know exactly why. It just keeps turning in a corner of your mind.

That evening I thought about this too. Why does one person hurt another person?

For some reason this question always feels like a very big question to me. Because the moment we ask "why does a person do evil?" we want to split people in two. Good people and bad people. As if some people have a dark side inside and some do not. As if, if we could recognize the bad ones by something, if we could keep away from them, the matter would be solved.

But life is not like that.

I see this better as I get older. I have come across some good sides of people I thought were bad. I have seen that people I thought were very good can be cruel to someone else. I have seen that a person can be very tender to one person and very cruel to another. Even that sometimes the same person can do both on the same day.

This is a little disturbing.

Because it breaks the story a person tells about themselves.

Saying I am a good person is very easy. Especially toward ourselves. Because we evaluate ourselves through our intentions. "I actually did not want to do anything bad." "That was not my intention." "I was going through a very hard period too." "I was hurt too."

All of these may be true.

But I think a person's intention and the effect they leave on another person are not always the same thing.

Thinking about this frightens me a little. Because a person seeing themselves as a good person can sometimes be the biggest obstacle to questioning themselves. Someone who believes they are bad can reckon with themselves. But someone who firmly believes they are good starts explaining everything they do.

Then my childhood comes to mind.

I understand this more easily when I watch children do wrong. One child takes another child's toy. The other cries. The first child often does not grasp the moral weight of what they did in the way we understand it. They want it and they take it. They are not hurt, because the one in pain is not themselves.

Then we grow up.

Other things take the place of toys.

Someone's love. Someone's time. Someone's labor. Someone's reputation. Someone's opportunity. Someone's trust in themselves.

And as we grow, to take something from someone else's hands we no longer need to reach out our hand. Sometimes a sentence is enough. Sometimes keeping silent. Sometimes deliberately not seeing. Sometimes knowing someone's weak side and touching exactly there.

Here I begin to think about the evil inside people.

Is there really an evil inside a person?

Or are there some things inside a person that can turn into evil?

I think the two are not the same.

There is envy inside a person. But envying alone is not evil. Sometimes a person wants something someone else has. This is very human. There is anger inside us. But getting angry is not evil either. We are afraid, we want to protect ourselves, we want to prevail, we want to be accepted, sometimes we want to be better than someone else.

All of these are inside a person.

Maybe the point is not their existence.

The point is what we do with them.

What do I do when I envy?

Whom do I punish when I am angry?

When I am afraid, am I protecting myself, or am I harming the person across from me?

When someone being more successful than me bothers me, do I belittle their success?

How do I carry that small unease that forms in me toward someone I think is more beautiful, smarter, more loved, freer than me?

A person can hide these small movements inside themselves very well.

Not only from others.

From themselves too.

Maybe this is the most interesting side of evil. A person can often do something bad without seeing themselves as a bad person.

The more I think about this, the more I want to read Adorno again. Because what disturbs me in him is exactly this. He does not want to look for evil only in the character of some people. He brings into the matter the order people live in, obedience, authority, habits and the ways of giving up thinking.

This feels much more real to me.

Because sometimes a person does harm not because they are bad, but because they did not think.

Sometimes only because everyone does it that way.

Sometimes because they are fulfilling the role given to them.

Sometimes because they say "this is my duty."

Sometimes because they have stopped seeing the person across from them really as a person.

When you think about it, evil becomes a bit more terrifying. Because it stops being something only bad people can do.

It makes it ordinary.

Maybe a person's real danger is not being angry enough to do evil. It is being able to live without thinking at all about what they did.

They break someone.

Then they go home.

They eat.

They watch television.

They sleep.

The next day they go to work.

And life goes on.

The person across from them, though, maybe cannot sleep that night.

When I think about this, the invisible effects in a person's life make me think a lot. We are at the center of our own life. So we measure the consequences of what we do from ourselves. "I said this and then went on with my life." But we do not know how much space we take up in the life of the person across from us.

Maybe we say a sentence in five seconds.

The person across carries it for five years.

I wonder how a person would behave if they knew this.

Maybe they would be more careful.

Maybe they would not.

Because a person has another strangeness. Sometimes they do it even though they know what they are doing.

This part is harder for me to understand.

Because ignorance can be an explanation up to a point. Not knowing, not noticing, not being able to think... These can explain a person. But what if you do it though you know?

If you know that someone will be broken.

If you know that someone will be ashamed.

If you know that someone will keep trusting you and that you will use that trust.

And you still do it?

Where does evil begin there?

Maybe the evil inside a person appears at the place where we cannot put another's pain before our own desire.

This actually seems too simple to me. Because sometimes a person really cannot put another's pain before their own desire. But what lies under that?

Egoism?

Fear?

Inadequacy?

The wish for power?

Or a person seeing themselves as more important than another?

Maybe a bit of all of them.

There is a strange centrism inside a person. We take our own pain to be the most real pain in the world. We justify our own fear. We inflate our own needs. And what someone else lives through we sometimes see as a detail.

When it happens to me, it is a matter.

When it happens to you, it is life.

Maybe this is a very old form of evil.

Not seeing another's humanity as real as our own.

For this to turn into great evils, hatred is not necessarily needed. Sometimes distance alone is enough.

If you do not see the person across from you, harming them gets easier.

If you do not see their face.

If you do not hear their voice.

If you do not know their fear.

If they turn into a statistic.

A number.

A file.

A rival.

A customer.

An employee.

A stranger.

The moment a person stops being a person, the limit of what can be done to them widens too.

Maybe that is why the first thing against evil is not even compassion.

It is seeing.

Really seeing.

Remembering that the person across from us also has a life as complicated, fragile, fearing, wanting, ashamed, loving and losing as ours.

It is very easy to forget this.

I forget too.

We all forget.

Because our own life is so noisy that leaving room for another's life becomes difficult.

Maybe the evil of the modern person is a bit here.

We know too much but we do not see each other enough.

We have an opinion about everything. About people, about relationships, about success, about being right. But when it comes to understanding why a person behaved that way, our patience runs short.

We pass judgment right away.

Bad.

Selfish.

Ungrateful.

Arrogant.

Troubled.

Yet maybe inside that person there is a war we know nothing about.

This is not excusing the evil that was done. Quite the opposite. I think there is a big difference between understanding people and acquitting them.

I can understand why a person behaved badly.

But this does not mean I have to accept the evil they did.

Maybe this is the hardest side of morality too.

Both understanding and setting a limit.

Both seeing a person's darkness and not romanticizing that darkness.

Both accepting that we too can make mistakes and not brushing everything aside by saying "we are all human."

Because sometimes the sentence "we are all human" is a very beautiful sentence of compassion.

And sometimes a very convenient blanket that covers over evil.

I think I no longer want to divide people into good and bad.

Myself too.

I do not know whether this makes me a better person.

Maybe it does not.

But at least it makes me a little more careful toward myself.

Because now I know that evil is not something I can look for only inside other people.

There is anger inside me too.

There are things I envy too.

There are moments when I want to justify myself too.

There are times when I want to win rather than understand the person across from me too.

There are times when, because I was hurting, I wanted someone else to hurt too.

I do not like accepting these.

But maybe morality is also a person being able to see the things about themselves that they do not like.

Because if we think we consist only of our nice sides, our bad sides manage us more easily.

Maybe, to be good, a person must first give up the need to see themselves as entirely good.

I do not know whether I am a good person.

Sometimes I think I am.

Sometimes not.

But I now think there is a more important question.

Not "Am I a good person?"

How am I treating the person standing in front of me right now?

Because a person's morality shows not in big sentences but in the small relationships they build with the person in front of them.

When nobody is watching.

When nobody is applauding.

When being right is possible.

When you have power.

When the person across from you is defenseless against you.

It is at that moment that what is inside a person becomes a little more visible.

Maybe evil is inside a person.

Maybe the world magnifies it.

Maybe inside a person there is only a capacity that can turn into evil.

I do not know.

The only thing I know is that a person cannot exempt themselves from this question.

If we always look for evil in someone else, we may have made room for it inside ourselves.

Maybe the most honest thing that can be done is to ask ourselves this question every now and then:

Did I make someone's life harder today without noticing?

Did I break someone's heart only to justify my own anger?

Did I use the trust someone had in me for my own comfort?

Did I judge a person while forgetting that they are a person?

And worse...

If I did any of these, what kind of story did I tell to explain it to myself?

I think this last question frightens a person most.

Because inside a person there is not only evil, but also a storyteller strong enough to explain their evil.

Maybe the point is not to silence that story.

It is only to stop and not believe it every now and then.

Because the most dangerous story a person can tell themselves is how good a person they are.