An Xray Of the Human Heart*
Where Does Evil Come From?
In Chapter two of his book Blue like Jazz, Miller talks about evil and his first ideas about it when he was a kid and a young adult. While he talked about a genocide in the Congo with one of his friends, he started to think more deeply about sin and evil, and he said, “[a]ctually,’ I told him reluctantly, ‘I have always agreed with the idea that we have a sin nature. I don’t think it looks exactly like the fundamentalists say it does, cause I know so many people who do great things, but I do buy the idea that we are flawed, that there is something in us that is broken. I think it is easier to do bad things than good things. And there is something in that basic fact, some little clue to the meaning of the universe”(17).
This summarizes what he talks about in the following conversation, about how kids need to be taught to be good, and how everyone could be capable of doing bad things. I agree with him in his idea of evil. Humans are naturally evil creatures, even if they don’t like to think about themselves that way.As king David states in psalm 51, verse 5,”[s]urely I was sinful at birth, sinful from the time my mother conceived me.” This does not mean that humans are not capable of doing good things, this just means that the bad in humans comes more easily.
It can be hard to decide where evil comes from. I think it could be explained as a cycle. Evil came originally from outside of the world, from Satan, but after the fall of Adam and Eve, evil is now part of human nature. Because of this sin nature, society and the different cultures around the world, created by humans, have evil in them. So, you could say that a little kid is a sinner because of human nature, but he or she is going to be taught by his/her parents what’s right and wrong. However, he or she is going to develop a different perspective about right and wrong, depending on the environment or culture that he or she grows up in. In a way, you could argue that humans learn to be bad from their culture of society, but the truth is that the evil nature is always inside us.
When I was 4 years old, I started kindergarten. It was a bad experience from the beginning. I didn’t know how mean other girls could be, and since I was quiet and didn’t like to play the games they played, I ended up being bullied. It was very shocking for me, coming from a loving family, to have other kids being mean to me without reason, and having the teachers ignoring my situation. After those bad experiences, my parents decided it was best for me to be homeschooled, so I spend all day with my siblings. We would get along most of the time, but that changed as we grew older.
I still remember the first time that I hurt my brother physically. He was making fun of me for liking some random boy. He was ten years old, and very short and skinny. As he talked, I just wanted him to stop, and something inside me, that I can’t explain, made me jump on top of him and I started to choke him. The most scary thing is that I didn’t feel bad after, I even got mad at my parents when they grounded me for hurting my brother. After that, everything went downhill. I hurt him on many different occasions, even though I claimed to love him and care for him. I can’t understand why, and I would blame it on him. And, now that the evil inside me had been exposed, it was easier to see the evil in others. You start noticing bad things that others do, but somehow that makes you feel better with yourself, because you think that they are more evil than you.
Growing up in Mexico, I would hear stories, in the news or from others, about how evil the world was. Most of the people that talk about these stories like to think that they would never do something like that, and blame it all in the government or God. I remember one time, one of my mom’s friends lost her son on a gang fight. When my mom went to comfort her, the woman just kept asking, “where was God when my son was being killed?” My mom didn’t have an answer to this question, of course, but this made her realize that it doesn’t matter if what the boy was doing was wrong, his mother would still think that what happened to him was not his fault.
I think that people are just scared of realizing that is us, humans, who spread the evil in world, and that we can’t fixed it, because it is inside us. Alice Sebold explained this in her book The Lovely Bones, saying that “[m]urderers are not monsters, they’re men. And that’s the most frightening thing about them.” People don’t want to think that they could kill or hurt someone, but that’s just how it is. Humans are evil creatures, because of their evil nature.
