EVIL.
This week we saw it again. A street somewhere in Europe, in the light from the street lamps. A man sits on top of another human being, in the middle of the road, with his arm raised, and someone stands filming, because someone always does now. The image needs no explanation. The body understands it before thought arrives.
If you allow yourself to remain still - stretch the moment, before you react, hold it as long as you can - right after something terrible has happened, you will be able to read an entire civilisation's condition in it.
It is the moment when the explanations come. Dripping. Pre-formulated, long before anyone reached the point of feeling anything.
The upbringing. The system. The circumstances. The diagnosis. We have words for everything that lies around the act. We just no longer have a word for the act itself. Or rather - we have it, but it must not be used. It sounds medieval. One wrinkles one's nose at it in educated circles, as if the word itself were the problem.
The word is Evil.
The Ancients knew something about it that we have set aside in our so-called enlightened age. They knew that evil has no being of its own - that it cannot create, only distort, cannot build, only hollow out. Augustine, whom some of you may have heard of, called it an absence, a hole in creation. But the Ancients also knew that it is not passive like darkness.
Darkness does nothing. It is simply there, where light does not reach. It is not so with Evil. Evil extinguishes light. There dwells a will in it, and the will gives it direction, and the direction means it can organise itself, recruit intelligence, build structures and bear systems. That is why it is experienced as a real Force, even though in its essence it is a parasite.
It lives off the Good, as the Lie lives off Truth. One cannot lie without first knowing the truth. One cannot distort something that was not whole. Evil is dependent on everything it wants to destroy.
That is its secret.
And its weakness.
Why does it exist at all, you might ask. Many do.
It exists because we are free. A human being who can choose the Good can choose against it, and a love that cannot say no is not love but mechanics. Freedom is the price of being Human and not machine - and Evil is the price of Freedom.
It is not a flaw in the work of creation.
It is the shadow of the greatest thing in it.
So what does it want?
It wants first and foremost to be called something else. Mark this, for it is its oldest trait - it NEVER comes in through the door under its own name. It comes as necessity. As justice. As protection, as progress, as security and yes, in some places even as compassion and empathy.
Evil's first conquest is ALWAYS language, for it knows what we have forgotten - that what cannot be named cannot be fought.
This is where the Western human being once did something no other civilisation has done.
Listen carefully here, if you are from the West.
We confronted it. Not by pointing it out in the neighbour, in the foreign tribe, in the others - all cultures have done that, and that is evil's preferred hiding place. No. We moved the front line into ourselves.
That was what the cross meant!
The innocent one, who revealed the flock's ancient mechanism, peace bought with a sacrifice. And from that recognition grew everything we today call self-evident. Revenge was set aside and given to the Law. Guilt became personal and ceased to be collective. And the line between good and evil was drawn where it actually runs - not between peoples, not between classes, but through every single human heart, as Solzhenitsyn saw it from the camp, where he had met both sides of it in himself.
That was the confrontation.
The high-trust society was not built because human beings became good. It was built because evil was named and placed under surveillance - in law, in institutions, and first and last in the individual Human being's own breast.
And then we stopped.
Stop. Breathe. Think. Feel. What I am writing.
And then we stopped.
We decided we had outgrown it. Evil became illness, became structure, became social inheritance, became everything that can be treated and granted funding, and administered and explained. We kept the word for films and for the past. But it disappeared from Reality.
And meanwhile it did not stand still. It did not disappear because we stopped believing in it. On the contrary. It got working peace.
For a human being who does not believe in Evil does not recognise it when it stands before them. And a society that must not name it cannot protect anyone against it - neither its own nor the strangers who fled from it precisely.
There is a price for the individual. As well as its society. For pretending it is not there.
The first thing Evil takes is the Word for it.
❤️🔥🪽
Should I continue into it.
Do you want to hear more?
This is the first part of something longer. And I will gladly write it. Not because it makes me popular. But because it must be said.
