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What is Evil?
A personal exploration
‘The doors of hell are locked on the inside’ — C.S. Lewis
For most of my life, I have believed in the liberal conception of evil. It’s a doctrine that sees wrongdoing in an almost scientific way, a cascade of negative causation, the combination of environment, some genetics and traumatic experiences culminating in the creation of an individual who reaches such a level of desensitisation that they are able to carry out truly evil acts.
I believed this until I had my own confrontation with evil. I won’t go into the details of that here out of respect for the private lives of loved ones, but I have people in my life who have endured awful and inhumane actions that have created great, but not insurmountable, obstacles to a basic sense of safety and happiness.
The Root of Evil
Bearing witness to these events made me confront the realities of what we are capable of as human beings and made me question my liberal conception of evil. If trauma and loveless childhoods create such tendencies, then where did it all begin? What was the first event that ushered sadism and cruelty into the world? Did a sabre tooth tiger attack a child’s mother 300,000 years ago, turning his heart cold and inadvertently starting the cascade of…