Very insightful article Gena. I appreciate you writing it.
In my teens, I remember seeing the faces of slum-criminals riding motorcyles through the streets of Caracas. There are numerous slums in the city, and it is difficult to avoid contact with these criminals no matter where one is. Their faces were joyfully nihilistic, and showed they had aged in that state, for years. It was the face of the type of person that feels joy in senseless destroying, killing, raping, and that has adopted it as a way of life. I don't compare them with animals, because animals are incapable of living for the purpose of destruction. Even other nihilists like the Columbine Shooters were a leage below them. For these thugs shooting up a school was just Tuesday. When they robbed someone, they shot them, even if they posed no threat, just to get "prestige" from their fellow criminals. They made a living from such crimes, and they enjoyed it. To the point they spent their days planing their next atrocity, for fun, with their criminal friends. Their motto was: "we don't fear death, because we are already dead". It was the most consistent expression of human evil I ever saw.
Fortunately, I've not come across such an individual in more developed countries. But it taught me a lesson that relates to your article: the type of evil that is at end of the "dash" we can let into our souls, if we don't ever correct it, will result in this type of slum-thug joyful nihilism.
Have you ever encountered such an individual in your clinical practice? Is it possible to revert such a deep psychological degeneration, or is there are "point of no return", from which correction is no longer possible?
Wow, Marcos- thank you for sharing that, and articulating it so vividly! Sounds like a harrowing but importantly edifying experience about how low humans can go; I suspect it’s a source of perspective that those of us growing up in developed countries could really use.
I haven’t worked with anyone that wontonly criminal in my practice, so I can’t directly speak to the kinds of “redemption arcs” that might be possible for such people, but I suspect there’s actually a lot of variability in how bad any given “slum-criminal” is and what range of trajectories is possible (e.g., think of the biographies of people like Malcolm X, Maajid Nawaz, etc).
I'm glad you appreciate it. I'm not familiar with Malcom X and Maajid Nawaz, but I'll add them to my list of biographies to read.
If you're curious, I know a few interesting subcultures consistently centered around evil that you may be interested in, from a psychology-of-evil perspective.
One are the Venezuelan prisons and Pranes. An unknown fact about Venezuelan prisons, is that inmates are not the prisoners, but the prison wardens. The prisoners are armed, and the prison guards are not. The inmates organize parties, invite women, run drug stores, commit crimes like extortion, and have their own "judicial" system inside of the prison, dictated by the criminal prison leader, the Pran. The Pran is the meanest, most violent and most evil criminal of the entire penitentiary. Pranes are often young men with a story of violence from a very early age, like the thugs I described above. They raise above the criminal ranks when taken to jail. The morality in such prisons is completely inverted. The meanest and most violent criminals are the most respected ones, the most peaceful and pacific ones are used as slaves. The Pran decides what the "law" is inside of the prison, and forces them to pay a "tax" called La Causa. Conflicts are solved by means of dagger fights, being shot in different parts of one's body, or death by execution. The Pran acts like a dictator, inside of the prison itself. Here is a documentary on YouTube about one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60jGRGXOXbU
The other one are the "Holy Thugs" from Venezuela's slums. There is a widespread religion in South America called Santerismo, which is a mixture of African Voodoo and Catholicism. It consists on praying and making ritualistic animal sacrificies to statues of saints, in exchange for the saint's "miracles" or "holy favours". It's similar to paganism. However, in the last two decades a new type of saints emerged, particularly popular in slums called the "Holy Thugs". These are saints embodied as statues of thugs with guns, knives and cigarrettes, to whom the criminals, or their families, pray for protection. This exposes a subculture morally degenerated to the point that venerating a positive deity like Jesus or Virgin Mary is "too good" for them to feel comfortable doing it, so they prefer to pray in the name of the more familiar Holy Thugs instead. There is VICE documentary on YouTube about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsJtiAVKIDc
Much of this framework seems aimed at people whose default failure mode is evasion of responsibility. How would you adapt it for people whose default failure mode is excessive self-blame and over-responsibilization rather than evasion?
Actually I conceptualize excessive self-blame and "over-responsibilization" (though I don't think I've ever used this term :) ) as defaults that similarly get maintained and compounded through evasion or corrected through honest value pursuit.
E.g., ruminating on your perceived failures or mistakes can function as a defensive substitute for the active problem-solving and experimentation you might do instead; telling yourself "I'm a defective person" / "I'm responsible for everything bad that happens" is its own kind of low-agency narrative that again justifies inaction / passivity; etc. I do think this is less often the mode that leads to outright evil, but it does often devolve into externalizing sooner or later ("the world is too cruel to us defective people" / "how come they don't have to carry all this burdensome responsibility and I do", etc), so I don't think the two are actually that far apart in practice.
That said, I definitely have a much easier time working with internalizing-prone people than externalizing-prone ones on average, since they do tend to be more honest and willing to make changes, all else being equal. :)
I came here to ask this same question, the one Sam asked. I have a follow-up to the question, too.
For most of my adult life, especially since my thirties, my default has strongly been "I'm responsible for everything bad that happens to me." This default, as you probably know, is encouraged by many/most of the spiritual and self-improvement programs out there, like Landmark Forum. The language of those programs is common in my social scene, which has a lot of relatively empowered and self-aware people in it.
A problem I've had in recent years is that I've had (imho) contact with genuine evil that I have needed to resist. But while most of my close friends and my therapist - i.e., the people I expect to support and course-correct me - have been supportive in my resistance, others have read my behavior as self-centered or destructive. That includes the main forces I have had to resist, which effectively have adopted the language of "you're responsible for everything" when trying to demoralize me.
I also see this same thing happening on a broader political level, e.g. on both sides of the ICE stuff/ and the 2020 riots too.
I have zero desire to abandon my own agency, sense of responsibility, capacity to rebuild my life, or future potential. But I've really struggled with this - where is the line between understanding genuine victimhood and being effective in getting justice, vs. blaming others in a toxic way when you should be moving on? I don't expect you to have a perfect answer to this question but I'm wondering if you have more thoughts beyond what you articulated in the post, none of which (with all due respect) feels like stuff I haven't already thought about.
Hi Lydia, thanks for sharing all that. I don’t know how different my advice will be from what I’ve already said in the piece, since anything more specific would require more context than you can reasonably give here, but: it sounds to me like maybe you already know the answer (namely: these people are gaslighting you and it doesn’t serve you to engage with their narrative - or them? - any further). If so, then maybe the key is to be consistently honest with yourself about that, and to move on accordingly.
The main problem, to me, is trying to understand when someone who’s obviously gaslighting you might also be right about something. I don’t see how you can have a reasonable expectation of self-determination without some coherent strategy for discerning that, but it’s also very hard.
I hear you, but why would the strategy here be any different than the sound epistemics you’d use to assess any other claim about yourself (e.g., thinking about whether there’s any actual independent evidence for it, what evidence there is against it, what an objective bystander would conclude, what the practical upshot would be if it were true vs false, etc)?
And then if you’ve done this rational, honest assessment once and drawn your own considered conclusion, then you can - and NEED TO - quickly disengage from any subsequent doubts or ruminations that pop into your head, since these are just the internalized versions of your gaslighting trolls (and the less you feed them with your attention, the better!).
Also an additional perspective from my husband Matt, who predictably picked up on this theme in your questions (because it’s something he’s always on about): you are *responsible* for everything, but that doesn’t mean you’re *culpable* for everything. In other words: it’s your life, and you can and need to take responsibility for solving the problems in your life, even if you’re not the one who caused them. (This is somewhat analogous to Marsha Linehan’s “acceptance/change” dialectic in DBT.) Not sure how applicable this is to your specific situation, but for all I know it’s as likely to be applicable as anything I said, so going ahead and sharing it!
First, excellent article, Gena. I cannot imagine how many hours this must have took. Your work here has certainly paid off, in my eyes.
I have a stress test question regarding your view of evil.
After giving the worker's destructive response example, you say the following: "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."
It seems you hold that evil, in whatever form, must have this deeply self-deceptive vice that is evasion itself, at root. Not only does it seem that evil itself must have evasion at root, it seems that for evil to be evil, and perhaps not just 'bad,' the evasion vice has to be consistently utilized to the point of metastasizing over a long period of time. Thus, the person is not motivated 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."
My question stems from an issue I take with your view. I think it's right to say that evasion is at the root of evil. But it does not seem that you place the consistent *destruction of one's values* as a coequal criterion for evil, or as *another* criterion for evil, with evasion as potentially absent.
Here is where my example comes in.
I am thinking of someone who lives his life as a stoic. According to the stoic philosopher Epictetus, one practice he advocated was to imagine that when kissing goodnight one's loved one--child, significant other, dear friend--to recall that they could be dead the next morning, and thus, to practice detachment so as not to become destroyed if they are actually gone the next morning. The idea, in principle, is that if you don't get attached to your values, then nothing can truly hurt you.
I hold this mode of being to be fundamentally evil, as, if taken consistently, it will lead to the erasure of the values in the stoic practitioner's life (not necessarily the physical destruction of his values, but the loss of them). However, I do not think that the stoic practitioner is necessarily evading. I think there can be cases where one becomes a stoic through an ignorance of knowledge. The evil, thus, stems not in the cause, in the way the stoic became a stoic (evasion versus ignorance). Instead, I think it stems from what I think is a coequal criterion of evil: the consistent damage and eventual destruction of the practitioner's values.
My question: do you think the stoic in my example is evil, for the constant damage he is inflicting upon himself and his values, leading to both's eventual (non-physical) destruction? And, in general, do you think the consistent destruction of one's values is a sufficient criterion for evil--even when borne not from evasion, but ignorance?
(Note: I am cognizant of the idea that when the stoic practices his philosophy and experiences inevitable conflict with this values, e.g., emotional unresponsiveness to a son or daughter the stoic claims to love, that that conflict would impel one to search for a proper mode of living. However, absent that better mode of being, coupled with the stoic wanting to double down on what he perceives as genuine goodness, I think such cases may still amount to ignorances of knowledge, and I in fact assume as such until presented with evidence to the contrary.)
Very insightful article Gena. I appreciate you writing it.
In my teens, I remember seeing the faces of slum-criminals riding motorcyles through the streets of Caracas. There are numerous slums in the city, and it is difficult to avoid contact with these criminals no matter where one is. Their faces were joyfully nihilistic, and showed they had aged in that state, for years. It was the face of the type of person that feels joy in senseless destroying, killing, raping, and that has adopted it as a way of life. I don't compare them with animals, because animals are incapable of living for the purpose of destruction. Even other nihilists like the Columbine Shooters were a leage below them. For these thugs shooting up a school was just Tuesday. When they robbed someone, they shot them, even if they posed no threat, just to get "prestige" from their fellow criminals. They made a living from such crimes, and they enjoyed it. To the point they spent their days planing their next atrocity, for fun, with their criminal friends. Their motto was: "we don't fear death, because we are already dead". It was the most consistent expression of human evil I ever saw.
Fortunately, I've not come across such an individual in more developed countries. But it taught me a lesson that relates to your article: the type of evil that is at end of the "dash" we can let into our souls, if we don't ever correct it, will result in this type of slum-thug joyful nihilism.
Have you ever encountered such an individual in your clinical practice? Is it possible to revert such a deep psychological degeneration, or is there are "point of no return", from which correction is no longer possible?
Wow, Marcos- thank you for sharing that, and articulating it so vividly! Sounds like a harrowing but importantly edifying experience about how low humans can go; I suspect it’s a source of perspective that those of us growing up in developed countries could really use.
I haven’t worked with anyone that wontonly criminal in my practice, so I can’t directly speak to the kinds of “redemption arcs” that might be possible for such people, but I suspect there’s actually a lot of variability in how bad any given “slum-criminal” is and what range of trajectories is possible (e.g., think of the biographies of people like Malcolm X, Maajid Nawaz, etc).
I'm glad you appreciate it. I'm not familiar with Malcom X and Maajid Nawaz, but I'll add them to my list of biographies to read.
If you're curious, I know a few interesting subcultures consistently centered around evil that you may be interested in, from a psychology-of-evil perspective.
One are the Venezuelan prisons and Pranes. An unknown fact about Venezuelan prisons, is that inmates are not the prisoners, but the prison wardens. The prisoners are armed, and the prison guards are not. The inmates organize parties, invite women, run drug stores, commit crimes like extortion, and have their own "judicial" system inside of the prison, dictated by the criminal prison leader, the Pran. The Pran is the meanest, most violent and most evil criminal of the entire penitentiary. Pranes are often young men with a story of violence from a very early age, like the thugs I described above. They raise above the criminal ranks when taken to jail. The morality in such prisons is completely inverted. The meanest and most violent criminals are the most respected ones, the most peaceful and pacific ones are used as slaves. The Pran decides what the "law" is inside of the prison, and forces them to pay a "tax" called La Causa. Conflicts are solved by means of dagger fights, being shot in different parts of one's body, or death by execution. The Pran acts like a dictator, inside of the prison itself. Here is a documentary on YouTube about one of them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=60jGRGXOXbU
The other one are the "Holy Thugs" from Venezuela's slums. There is a widespread religion in South America called Santerismo, which is a mixture of African Voodoo and Catholicism. It consists on praying and making ritualistic animal sacrificies to statues of saints, in exchange for the saint's "miracles" or "holy favours". It's similar to paganism. However, in the last two decades a new type of saints emerged, particularly popular in slums called the "Holy Thugs". These are saints embodied as statues of thugs with guns, knives and cigarrettes, to whom the criminals, or their families, pray for protection. This exposes a subculture morally degenerated to the point that venerating a positive deity like Jesus or Virgin Mary is "too good" for them to feel comfortable doing it, so they prefer to pray in the name of the more familiar Holy Thugs instead. There is VICE documentary on YouTube about them: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=lsJtiAVKIDc
Hi Gena,
Thanks for a great read. I do have one question.
Much of this framework seems aimed at people whose default failure mode is evasion of responsibility. How would you adapt it for people whose default failure mode is excessive self-blame and over-responsibilization rather than evasion?
Thanks, Sam!
Actually I conceptualize excessive self-blame and "over-responsibilization" (though I don't think I've ever used this term :) ) as defaults that similarly get maintained and compounded through evasion or corrected through honest value pursuit.
E.g., ruminating on your perceived failures or mistakes can function as a defensive substitute for the active problem-solving and experimentation you might do instead; telling yourself "I'm a defective person" / "I'm responsible for everything bad that happens" is its own kind of low-agency narrative that again justifies inaction / passivity; etc. I do think this is less often the mode that leads to outright evil, but it does often devolve into externalizing sooner or later ("the world is too cruel to us defective people" / "how come they don't have to carry all this burdensome responsibility and I do", etc), so I don't think the two are actually that far apart in practice.
That said, I definitely have a much easier time working with internalizing-prone people than externalizing-prone ones on average, since they do tend to be more honest and willing to make changes, all else being equal. :)
I came here to ask this same question, the one Sam asked. I have a follow-up to the question, too.
For most of my adult life, especially since my thirties, my default has strongly been "I'm responsible for everything bad that happens to me." This default, as you probably know, is encouraged by many/most of the spiritual and self-improvement programs out there, like Landmark Forum. The language of those programs is common in my social scene, which has a lot of relatively empowered and self-aware people in it.
A problem I've had in recent years is that I've had (imho) contact with genuine evil that I have needed to resist. But while most of my close friends and my therapist - i.e., the people I expect to support and course-correct me - have been supportive in my resistance, others have read my behavior as self-centered or destructive. That includes the main forces I have had to resist, which effectively have adopted the language of "you're responsible for everything" when trying to demoralize me.
I also see this same thing happening on a broader political level, e.g. on both sides of the ICE stuff/ and the 2020 riots too.
I have zero desire to abandon my own agency, sense of responsibility, capacity to rebuild my life, or future potential. But I've really struggled with this - where is the line between understanding genuine victimhood and being effective in getting justice, vs. blaming others in a toxic way when you should be moving on? I don't expect you to have a perfect answer to this question but I'm wondering if you have more thoughts beyond what you articulated in the post, none of which (with all due respect) feels like stuff I haven't already thought about.
Hi Lydia, thanks for sharing all that. I don’t know how different my advice will be from what I’ve already said in the piece, since anything more specific would require more context than you can reasonably give here, but: it sounds to me like maybe you already know the answer (namely: these people are gaslighting you and it doesn’t serve you to engage with their narrative - or them? - any further). If so, then maybe the key is to be consistently honest with yourself about that, and to move on accordingly.
The main problem, to me, is trying to understand when someone who’s obviously gaslighting you might also be right about something. I don’t see how you can have a reasonable expectation of self-determination without some coherent strategy for discerning that, but it’s also very hard.
I hear you, but why would the strategy here be any different than the sound epistemics you’d use to assess any other claim about yourself (e.g., thinking about whether there’s any actual independent evidence for it, what evidence there is against it, what an objective bystander would conclude, what the practical upshot would be if it were true vs false, etc)?
And then if you’ve done this rational, honest assessment once and drawn your own considered conclusion, then you can - and NEED TO - quickly disengage from any subsequent doubts or ruminations that pop into your head, since these are just the internalized versions of your gaslighting trolls (and the less you feed them with your attention, the better!).
Also an additional perspective from my husband Matt, who predictably picked up on this theme in your questions (because it’s something he’s always on about): you are *responsible* for everything, but that doesn’t mean you’re *culpable* for everything. In other words: it’s your life, and you can and need to take responsibility for solving the problems in your life, even if you’re not the one who caused them. (This is somewhat analogous to Marsha Linehan’s “acceptance/change” dialectic in DBT.) Not sure how applicable this is to your specific situation, but for all I know it’s as likely to be applicable as anything I said, so going ahead and sharing it!
First, excellent article, Gena. I cannot imagine how many hours this must have took. Your work here has certainly paid off, in my eyes.
I have a stress test question regarding your view of evil.
After giving the worker's destructive response example, you say the following: "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."
It seems you hold that evil, in whatever form, must have this deeply self-deceptive vice that is evasion itself, at root. Not only does it seem that evil itself must have evasion at root, it seems that for evil to be evil, and perhaps not just 'bad,' the evasion vice has to be consistently utilized to the point of metastasizing over a long period of time. Thus, the person is not motivated 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."
My question stems from an issue I take with your view. I think it's right to say that evasion is at the root of evil. But it does not seem that you place the consistent *destruction of one's values* as a coequal criterion for evil, or as *another* criterion for evil, with evasion as potentially absent.
Here is where my example comes in.
I am thinking of someone who lives his life as a stoic. According to the stoic philosopher Epictetus, one practice he advocated was to imagine that when kissing goodnight one's loved one--child, significant other, dear friend--to recall that they could be dead the next morning, and thus, to practice detachment so as not to become destroyed if they are actually gone the next morning. The idea, in principle, is that if you don't get attached to your values, then nothing can truly hurt you.
I hold this mode of being to be fundamentally evil, as, if taken consistently, it will lead to the erasure of the values in the stoic practitioner's life (not necessarily the physical destruction of his values, but the loss of them). However, I do not think that the stoic practitioner is necessarily evading. I think there can be cases where one becomes a stoic through an ignorance of knowledge. The evil, thus, stems not in the cause, in the way the stoic became a stoic (evasion versus ignorance). Instead, I think it stems from what I think is a coequal criterion of evil: the consistent damage and eventual destruction of the practitioner's values.
My question: do you think the stoic in my example is evil, for the constant damage he is inflicting upon himself and his values, leading to both's eventual (non-physical) destruction? And, in general, do you think the consistent destruction of one's values is a sufficient criterion for evil--even when borne not from evasion, but ignorance?
(Note: I am cognizant of the idea that when the stoic practices his philosophy and experiences inevitable conflict with this values, e.g., emotional unresponsiveness to a son or daughter the stoic claims to love, that that conflict would impel one to search for a proper mode of living. However, absent that better mode of being, coupled with the stoic wanting to double down on what he perceives as genuine goodness, I think such cases may still amount to ignorances of knowledge, and I in fact assume as such until presented with evidence to the contrary.)
Thank you! What a thoughtful compliment. 🙏🏻