The psychology of evil

How to think about the worst in your friends, your enemies, and yourself

Magdalene at a Mirror, by Georges de La Tour. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Magdalene_at_a_Mirror

As a coach and therapist, I’ve worked with clients who have both committed and been the victims of some serious wrongs (from physical and emotional abuse, to cheating and deception, to professional and financial malfeasance). This has given me a close-up view of how people deal, or fail to deal, with the worst in themselves and those around them.

And I have seen some things.

I have tried, in quiet desperation, to catch and reverse the barely-perceptible spread of evil within a soul, only to realize I was already too late.

I have reckoned with my own culpability for missing early warning signs I was too afraid to see, partly because they reminded me of things I’d noticed in myself.

Then again, I have also been privileged to witness some spectacular redemption arcs.

What follows is my attempt to document what these experiences have taught me about the psychology of evil, and about what it takes to really fight for the good.

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When we encounter evil behavior, it can seem to us bewildering and incomprehensible: as a form of senseless, wonton destruction. This apparent senselessness makes evil hard to comprehend. If we could manage to inhabit the other side’s point of view, either seeing it as correct or as understandably mistaken, perhaps their actions would become more intelligible to us, and we would shed some of our moral outrage.

This more clinical, empathetic perspective may seem more mature, more enlightened, but most of us have the sense that something important is lost when we adopt it—some important insight that is needed to understand and combat evil.

My friend Gregory Salmieri, in a talk on “The Nature of Evil” (from which I’ll quote at length later, since it has helped put words to my own understanding), speaks of the “dual nature of evil” which makes it “appear as both alien and familiar”: “it possesses something akin to human motivation and is yet alien from it. That is what is both so perplexing and so monstrous about it.”

We need a way to make evil comprehensible to us without trivializing it. To do this, we first need to relate it to experiences and motivations we can readily understand, while taking care to differentiate these more routine cases from the truly evil ones.

A natural starting point is to consider what happens in more familiar instances of destructive behavior.

Destructive vs. Constructive Responses to Threat

We’ve all met someone who let their anger and hurt overtake significant portions of their lives: the embittered exes—or disgruntled employees or disaffected community members—who spend their time and energy rehashing their grievances rather than moving on. Perhaps we’ve even been such a person ourselves, even if only for a stretch.

What’s wrong in these cases isn’t that the person is angry, or even hostile or aggressive. Some acts of hostile or aggressive behavior are appropriate and healthy—like standing up to a bully, or filing charges against an abuser. In these examples, you encounter a threat to something or someone you value, and you respond in a manner aimed at protecting or restoring that value.

In such cases, you act to destroy the threat, but as part of an overall constructive pattern of value pursuit. This presupposes you are a person focused on building yourself a life and finding solutions to your problems, including any threats that need neutralizing or injustices that need redressing in that context.

Even then, fashioning an appropriately measured response to threat or injustice is no small feat. For an admirable example of a good person’s struggle to thread that needle, I recommend reading and listening to everything Patrick McKenzie (better known as “patio11”) has written and said about his experience running VaccinateCA: the project he and some tech friends spun up on Discord in January 2021 to solve the COVID-19 vaccine distribution crisis that California’s government was dismally (and, in Patrick’s view, more-or-less deliberately) failing to solve. When I sat down with him last week to discuss that experience, I could not help but notice his still-lingering shock and horror at what he witnessed behind the scenes of the government’s botched vaccine distribution effort: not the simple incompetence he might have expected, but the self-righteous incompetence of many people in positions of authority who were so fixated on their “equity” agenda, particularly in the wake of George Floyd’s death and the January 6th insurrection, that they systematically prioritized it over saving lives. Still, rather than vent his grievances on social media or elsewhere, Patrick responded by doing what he does best: rallying his fellow tech builders to solve the problem in front of them, with “getting shots in arms” as their constant North Star. And though the evils he encountered clearly continue to haunt him to this day, he also clearly has not let them overtake the rest of his life and mind.

This does not mean he brushed the many ills he observed under the rug—indeed, he has devoted significant time and energy in recent years to making sure his story gets told. But nor does it mean letting his preoccupation with those ills eclipse his other writing, advising, and investing projects, nor letting himself indulge in bitterness without reflecting on constructive solutions in the same breath.

This constructive way of dealing with injustice is an achievement; it is not any of our default response to feeling angry and hurt. By default, we over- or under-react, we lose perspective, we lash out blindly or throw ourselves under the bus. All of us have at some point kept stewing in anger or ruminating on someone’s mistreatment of us past the point where it served our life in any way. All of us have, in other words, gotten caught up in destructive spirals of anger and hurt, letting our emotional reactions come untethered from whatever actual values were at stake. Calibrating our responses to grievance so that they serve our values is, like all forms of constructive self-direction, something we need to do and to learn to do. And it can be particularly hard to marshal such constructive long-term thinking when our fight-or-flight system is activated.

The choice to double down

Of course, getting carried away with hurt and anger is not inherently evil, as any clinical psychologist would rightly tell you. To account for actual evil, we need to challenge an idea that’s too common among psychologists: the view that basically everyone “means well” and is doing their best, however misguidedly (as exemplified by the Internal Family Systems [IFS] mantra that there are “no bad parts”). On this view, all behavior is understood as an attempt to fulfill some legitimate need, given whatever (often inadequate) resources one has on hand. For instance, those who commit violent crimes are viewed as trying to establish the sense of safety or control they lacked in their traumatic childhood environment.¹

While it is in some sense true that all behavior is motivated by “unmet needs,” the conventional psychologist’s view neglects to distinguish between two fundamentally different ways of dealing with those needs: honestly dealing with them, and merely pretending to ourselves that we are dealing with them.

The key decision that either puts the destructively spiraling person on a trajectory toward evil or restores them to their senses is: what do they do at the first glimmer of awareness that they might be destructively spiraling? Do they look toward this awareness, examine it honestly, work to understand where and how it originated, ask themselves what evidence they might be selectively ignoring or over-interpreting, and then deliberately reorient toward living their life and pursuing their values (including whatever redress of grievances is warranted)? Or do they look away, actively fabricating a defensive narrative that allows them to continue in their stewing while telling themselves they are fighting for the good?

This is a decision we make not once, not twice, but in nearly every waking hour: do we marshal our energy and resources toward the honest pursuit of real values that sustain and enhance our life? Or do we expend those resources instead on the pretense at that pursuit, aimed at covering up our discomfort at failing to pursue it for real?

The pursuit of values is a sustained project that requires active effort, and everyone slips into passive autopilot sometimes. This is especially easy to do in the face of strong emotions like anger, hurt, or fear. But sooner or later we get some kind of signal from the world—candid feedback from our therapist, or a friend losing patience with us, or a missed deadline on a valued project because we had been too busy fuming and scheming against our perceived enemy—and we face a choice: either reckon honestly with the signal and adjust our approach accordingly, or come up with a rationalization (e.g., “he made me miss that deadline by stressing me out so much”) to justify our continued stewing.

The fact that getting carried away and losing perspective is the default, does not excuse the willful indulgence of that default. Rather it puts a responsibility on us to figure out how to do better. Every time we actively take up that responsibility, we feed and strengthen our better angels, and learn from whatever honest mistakes we make along the way. Every time we actively resist and evade that responsibility, we let a dash of evil into our souls.

Most of us have engaged in at least some of this active resistance and evasion at least some of the time. I know I have. And the most important advice I’m going to give in this post is that you run a scan for any issues or contexts in which you might be doing it too. Because the more you conceal this vice from yourself, the bigger a part of you it becomes.

To illustrate, imagine two ways an employee might deal with lacking the support and even basic respect she needs from her supervisor.

In the first case, she might first stand up to the supervisor directly and express what she needs from him (e.g., “I need more guidance than I’m getting” and “it doesn’t work for me when you hang up the call while I’m still speaking”). She might also solicit the supervisor’s feedback on where she can improve and how she might elicit support more effectively. Then if that doesn’t lead to her desired changes, she might speak with HR and discretely request a transfer to another department, or look for another job, or simply get the support she needs elsewhere so she can continue to learn and grow in this job while minimizing unpleasant interactions with the supervisor.

In the second case, she might say nothing to the supervisor but meanwhile spend much of her workday venting to coworkers about her rude, incompetent boss, perhaps continuing to vent to her partner and friends when she gets home. Whenever she misses a deadline or makes a mistake, she blames it on her rude and unhelpful supervisor, leading the supervisor to disrespect her even more. Other employees also start to tire of her constant venting, which leads her to feel (correctly) that her coworkers have now cooled to her and are no longer meeting her needs for camaraderie and collaboration. Sooner or later she gets fired or quits in a huff, despite not having another job lined up (since she spent all of her time raging against the boss rather than thinking about what she wants out of her career). With all the time she now has to stew in anger and resentment, she starts to spread vicious rumors about her former colleagues online, and pours her savings into a nuisance lawsuit against the company. Instead of asking herself why she now feels even less valued and supported than when she started this crusade, and how her own externalizing of responsibility for those needs might have contributed, she doubles down on her victim narrative, finding new enemies—like “the sexist political regime” or “my soulless friends”—to blame for her continued misery. Soon her resentment spreads to anyone who seems happy in their work or relationships, despite her efforts to reassure herself that they are just “gaming the system.” Eventually she gets recruited by a fringe activist group dedicated to “dismantling late-stage capitalism” by vandalizing office buildings, and next thing she knows she is throwing broken glass through windows and hoping it will hit someone.

Evil is what lies at the extreme end of this descent. The further we descend, the harder it gets to own up to it and change course, given the accumulation of lies and self-inflicted harms we have to reckon with. At the end of the road is a life entirely consumed, not by the pursuit of real, life-giving values, but by the tearing down of anything or anyone who might remind us that we have opted out of that pursuit. Protecting whatever lies we have erected to avoid facing this fact about ourselves becomes our greatest need, above whatever legitimate needs might have motivated our anger (or perhaps our fear, which we promptly disguised to ourselves as anger) at the start.

Evil is thus the metastisis of a common vice with which we are all familiar: the vice of self-deception. All of us have succumbed to it at least on occasion or in moments; evil is the result of doubling down on our self-deceptions and letting their harms compound, until they overtake everything (or nearly everything) that is better about our personality.

Quoting Greg’s talk again:

Think about a tumor. A tumor is a collection of a person’s cells that are multiplying out of control in a way that might kill the organism. What does it mean to say they’re multiplying out of control? It means that they’re malignant, that they’re a threat to the organism’s life. It means that the metabolic processes going on in these cells are no longer aimed (as most metabolic processes going on in most cells are) at supporting the life of the organism. Cell mitosis is good for organisms, but only, to paraphrase Aristotle, at the right time and in the right way. There are certain conditions under which it’s good, and there is a system within the organism that directs its various processes, such that they happen at some times and not at other times. But there are some diseases that amount to the turning off of that regulatory system in some part of the organism. That’s what cancer is: the thing that’s meant to regulate cell division is just not there, and so the cell division no longer happens in a way that is in any sense aimed at benefiting the organism.

In a human being, the thing that directs our other systems—that integrates our many activities into a self-sustaining life for us is reason. And when reason’s not running the show, your other systems are no longer directed at life, at happiness, at anything positive. Reason is what would so direct them, and it’s absent; the master is gone. Emotions work for us (and are only even trying to work for us) to satisfy our needs, in a context where they’re directed by reason. Absent that, they’re like the cancer cells: out of control, not serving us, not aimed in any way at serving us. That’s when fear and hatred come to rule the day; and that’s true of immorality generally, not just evil (which I take to mean severe and full immorality or irrationality).”

The psychological defaults I often speak about are what happens in the absence of rational self-direction. And the point that Greg is making here is that in this default state, our felt needs do not actually serve us. They can be self-destructive fixations, which become increasingly self-destructive if we act on them uncritically, evading the evidence that they’re destructive to our values.

Like a tumor, the spread of such “anti-values” is progressive. There are people who operate in this unhinged, dishonest way in one area of their life or under certain stressors or conditions, while still retaining their rationality and value-orientation in other contexts. For instance, Elon Musk is a stark example of someone who exemplifies principled, reality-oriented thinking in the realm of hardware innovation, but has no compunctions about bending the truth to slight his political enemies or broadcasting widely debunked conspiracy theories to his millions of followers on social media.

The fact is we all have the capacity to lie to ourselves and paper over our own missteps, and we will sometimes opt for this tempting alternative to the harder work of thinking and building in reality. Depending on our circumstances and the cultural climate, it may not take much for our self-deceptions to get out of hand and lead to serious, even devastating consequences. The more ambitiously we live our lives, the more influence and capital we are likely to wield, and thus the more damage our self-deceptions can do. The solution is neither to truncate our ambition nor double down on our B.S., but precisely the opposite: it is to raise our moral ambitiousness, starting with the courageous practice of self-honesty.

How to recognize—and reverse—the descent into evil

As we have seen, evil is often downstream of misprocessing one’s own response to (real or imagined) wrongdoing in a way that untethers one’s anger and resentment from real values. The result is often that one gradually turns into the very thing one hates or fears.

Some symptoms that you or someone else may be caught in this descent include:

• A preoccupation with negatives absent any constructive solutions or credible paths to resolution. Quoting Greg’s talk again:

That is what the immoral kind of motivation by fear is: the dislodging of an aversive motivation away from the values that would justify it and the reasoning that supports those values. It becomes untethered emotionalism; you find that you just fear and hate things. And maybe you have something to say, some story to tell, about why you fear and hate them; but that story is not really what’s motivating you.

• Finding that you get energy or excitement primarily from seeing your “enemies” get punished or knocked down a peg, rather than from the positive advancement of whatever values you think they are threatening. Quoting Greg again:

There are people like this—people who are motivated by negative things. And maybe this happens in people who aren’t altogether awful; maybe even in people who are pretty good. But in some issue you notice that they get excited by someone’s downfall. Maybe they get really excited when they hear something bad about Trump or about Biden, or get to put a dig in at one of them. Now, I think Trump and Biden are very bad people; and Trump, in particular, I think of as essentially morally like [the main villain of Atlas Shrugged]. Nevertheless, we all know people who get really fired up by putting the screws into Trump: ‘Now I can really hate on him,’ that kind of attitude. Maybe it’s you that’s like that. And maybe, at the same time, you don’t get excited by things that are actually good in this same realm. That should make you suspicious. Maybe in general, or in some particular realm of life, your fears, your anger, your frustrations have come unmoored from the positives. When you ask yourself, why do I hate or fear this thing or this person, does the answer you give yourself really account for the intensity of the emotion? Or is there some residual, some extra left over, unexplained and unjustified by the ways in which they are actually bad? Where is that extra coming from? Maybe you should de-prioritize that thing a little bit, until the amount in which you’re acting on it is commensurate with the reasons you have for acting. Maybe you should think about the positives. If I’m so upset at this thing or this person and my reason is that it threatens this other thing, all right. But am I doing the things to promote that other thing? Or do I only get interested in this when I can tear down the thing that’s a threat? For example, if I tell myself that I’m really for free speech, and that’s why I hate so-and-so who’s against free speech, or a threat to it in some way, then besides doing something against so-and-so, am I doing anything for free speech? If I’m not doing anything for free speech, and not motivated by anything in this realm other than when it’s against this other person, then maybe what’s driving me isn’t a love of free speech, or not all the way down, and maybe I should do more to promote my values.

• A tendency to view yourself as a victim lacking in agency. From Greg again:

  If you really are a victim of something, it’s important to know it, acknowledge it, and not to sanction your victimization…. But people sometimes fall into the mode of thinking of themselves as essentially victims, as if their victimhood is something deep and important about them. And they navigate life on the premise that everything is someone else’s fault and nothing is their own—everything is “the patriarchy,” or “white privilege,” or “the liberal media,” and so on. Some of these things are real and some of them are imaginary; but I’m talking about the kind of person who adopts the mentality that whatever is wrong with their life, someone else is to blame for it, someone else is victimizing them. And because they think this way, they’re not doing anything to change it. They’re miserable, and they can tell you why everyone else is at fault and not them. Maybe they’re interested in politics and all they can tell you is about what’s wrong with politics, and how there’s no chance for improvement, and everything’s just bad. And it’s because of some other group, and if only those guys were out of the way… But there’s no positive alternative being offered. This kind of resentment, victim mindset is, I think, characteristic of passive thinking… of not focusing on your values. And I think everyone experiences this sometimes. Everyone sometimes needs to give themselves a little kick to get out of this mindset, to remind themselves that there are things we can do about our problems, about our victimization, about our values, about our lives.”

The case of ICE

If you’re reading this in late January of 2026, you might be feeling like there’s a giant elephant in the room: how can we talk about “facing evil” without talking about ICE’s ongoing activities in Minneapolis, and particularly the recent killings of Renee Good and Alex Pretti? And, indeed, when an administration and its agents become so fixated on eliminating the alleged threat posed by a perceived enemy (in this case, illegal immigrants and those allegedly aiming to disrupt the process of large-scale deportations) as to dispense with such values as due process and the rule of law, this is a clear sign of the moral metastasis I have described. As my husband Matt recently tweeted, “A minimally decent, extremely obvious initial response for those in power would be to open independent inquiries”—which ICE officials and the entire Trump administration have aggressively resisted, doubling down instead on slandering the dead to excuse their agents’ misdeeds.

This is essentially the same malignant fixation which the BLM rioters displayed in 2020 when they burned down cities under the pretense of protesting racism, and which the MAGA mob displayed in 2021 when it stormed the Capitol on the basis of a conspiratorial delusion. It is what drove the KKK, and the Nazis, and the KGB, and Hamas, and every evil movement in history. No one political party or ideological camp has a monopoly on evil.

And while the leaders of these movements are, in my view, unambiguously evil, there is a great deal more ambiguity to reckon with when considering the many overall decent people who are drawn to aspects of these movements for various reasons and in various degrees—often in reaction to whatever they find legitimately abhorrent in the “enemy” movement.

So what should we do with these observations, now that we have also seen how evil can take root in any of us insofar as we indulge our grievances?

The fundamental antidote to evil, whether you find it in yourself or others, is to reorient toward the values at stake:

A lot of us have that feeling some of the time about something, but if we focus on positive values and we think about why they’re valuable, those things that might count as evil if you consider them in isolation—this was an evil thought, that an evil motive—aren’t the whole picture. They’re not who we are; they’re out of character thoughts and feelings. And they atrophy in us and disappear, to the extent that we double down on what we want that’s good, and on our reasons for wanting it that we know are good reasons, and on our reasons for opposing the bad insofar as it’s a threat to the good. Sometimes you need to work explicitly on improving your psychology, but not necessarily. All of that could happen even without any explicit work on improving yourself.

The same basic approach applies when dealing with some delimited amount of evil in people who also have a lot of good in them:

It doesn’t mean that I’ll ostracize or castigate anyone who I’ve ever seen any of this in. But it is not what I’m in this life for; it’s not what I’m in this relationship for; it’s not what I’m going to promote, praise, or deal with in people. I’ll deal with what I see as good in them. I’ll deal with them around their values, not around their fears of disvalues. And in my own life, I’ll focus on what matters to me—on why it matters to me, on how I can achieve it, including how I can remove or avoid whatever obstacles there may be to my achieving it. I won’t be driven by fury and terror at the bad in the world. I know what evil is; I can avoid it insofar as it’s possible; and there’s a lot of room to make for myself a fantastic life.

Of note, orienting toward the values at stake absolutely includes judging and taking seriously the wrong that has been done to those values, including its scale. If you are the offending party, then you should expect to feel a corresponding dose of guilt and shame; if you are the aggrieved party, then it is healthy and appropriate to feel anger or even outrage in proportion to the injustice committed. But rather than stew in those feelings and lose all sense of context or proportion, you need to calibrate your feelings to the facts, and then think about what it would look like to move forward in light of all the facts, including that these wrongs have been done.

All of this is easier if you view morality, not as a code of compliance by which some higher authority legislates your basic worth, but as a guide to building a full and flourishing life. On this latter perspective, you have nothing to lose and everything to gain by diagnosing and correcting any vices that have derailed you from this project ASAP.

What might this look like specifically with respect to currently unfolding political events in Minnesota? The appropriate response will vary widely depending on who you are and what role US politics plays in your life, of course. For instance:

• If it has no short-term impact on your life other than to upset you and make you ruminate, the immediate response might simply be to limit your news intake and get on with your life, perhaps taking extra care to extend kindness and goodwill to friends or colleagues who might be affected (e.g., because they are awaiting green card approval, or they work in politics, or they have loved ones in Minneapolis). Over time, however, you do need to care about these events enough to form your own understanding of what they mean for your country (especially if you are a US citizen), and how you want to be voting or otherwise participating in the civic process in light of these events.

• If you find yourself getting a rise out of the blatant inadequacies and hysterical backtracking of people whose political views you oppose, you might reflect on what could actually be driving those people, and what it might look like for you to succumb to similar forms of groupthink or hysteria, and how to catch and reorient yourself if/when you do.

• If some aspect of the situation connects to your valued projects and interests, you might offer your insights specifically on that aspect (as I am attempting to do in this post, or as my friend Pouya Nikmand has done by sharing his own experiences and perspective as an immigrant from Iran, or as my friend Daniel Golliher has done by providing a highly accessible primer on the nature and function of sanctuary cities).

• If you have publicly voiced support for ICE’s activities or the broader Trump administration in the past but have now grown concerned or disillusioned, you could take inspiration from people like Richard Hanania, who voted for Trump in 2024 and has since modeled an honest and reflective approach to rethinking his position. Even if you’ve gone so far as to stake your social media identity on being a diehard Trump and ICE supporter, you could follow the example of those who, after jumping on the “Alex Pretti was a domestic terrorist” bandwagon, owned up to being wrong after seeing the videos of his killing (like in this, this, and this tweet).

• Regardless, if you choose to make public or private comments, the key is to think about 1) what audience you are addressing, 2) what constructive insight or perspective you are expecting them to gain from your comment, and, most important, 3) what value(s) of yours you intend it to serve.

Build something better

As I have often said, death is the default: by default we do not take action to solve our problems, we do not articulate our own values or mobilize in pursuit of them, we do not see our life as adding up to an integrated whole. It is up to us to take those actions, to conceptualize those values, to engineer that integrated whole. Life calls upon us to actively go beyond the default; evil is what becomes of us when we actively resist the call, doubling down on death and destruction instead.

When we fail to take active responsibility for our life, we tend to feel helpless, which breeds resentment of others—especially those who seem to be doing better than us and to be looking down on us. A passive person is easily hurt and so fixates on, exaggerates, or manufactures grievances. This then creates a felt need to expend energy on destroying perceived threats instead of creating and defending genuine values. This felt need takes the form of an unadmitted motivation that’s possible to all of us, and that we’ve all experienced in moments, but which is fundamentally different from the rational pursuit of values, and which can come to dominate and pervert a soul: the motivation to destroy.

When we see signs of it in our selves, our neighbors, or our nation, we can and need to recognize it for what it is, to isolate and disempower it—and to turn our attention toward building something better.

1. Ironically, psychologists make an exception for any behavior that violates the particular set of norms they currently hold sacred, such as equity and social justice; the people who run afoul of these norms routinely get accused of “moral failure,” “hate,” and so on. As with any false dichotomy (cf. the drill sergeant versus the Zen master), neither the “trivial and familiar” nor the “monstrous and alien” view of evil is fully tenable, so people who accept either side of the dichotomy end up toggling between the two.