I had an email recently asking me what I thought about ‘evil’.
It’s hard not to see evil at the moment. The violence of police officers against people of colour. Members of the ‘English Defense League’ defending racism and racists. I wrote a Facebook post about the sheer stupidity of the EDL fighting for English rights but at the same time pissing on a statue of a defender of English democracy but then took it down. Just too negative and angry.
Maya, my 20 year old daughter, and I watched Othello last night (a brilliant 2013 production by the National Theatre). Partly just that we’re working our way through Shakespeare. Partly it seemed relevant to everything going on. Iago is one of Shakespeare’s greatest sh*tbags — maybe one of the greatest in all of literature. It’s almost too painful to watch as he manipulates Desdemona, Othello, and everyone around him to destruction. Othello, too, an appallingly vicious act of domestic violence.
Evil everywhere. And yet, just calling it ‘evil’ doesn’t seem to do much to address it, or change it. Or make things different. And it creates the kind of splitting that seems to just keep an unbridgeable gulf between ‘us’ and ‘them’. In an era of #BLM how do I, for instance, as a White person, address my own racism if it’s something ‘out there’? And where does this evil come from? Do we just look at the man urinating over PC Keith Palmer’s memorial and see it as some deliberate act of viciousness? Is it a choice? Or is it the expression of some innate, inborn tendency to evil? If the latter, then that would seem to go against everything that, as a therapist, I’ve learnt to believe: about the need to understand people and make sense of their lives and actions in their own personal context.
Iago, perhaps quite uniquely, talks his thoughts. He takes the audience through all the machinations and the reasons why he’s doing what he does. Iago (brilliantly portrayed by Rory Kinnear in the NT production as the kind of man not a million miles from the EDL), hates Othello for all that Othello has achieved. He feels belittle by him — by his very existence. And he fears, without any justification, that Othello has slept with his wife. And then there’s the underlying streams of racism that fuel his hatred: that a man, but not just any man but a black man, could be his superior.
There’s no sympathy watching Iago, and there’s no taking away from the horrors of what he brings down, but there is understanding. There’s reasons for why he’s doing what he’s doing; and, ultimately, I want to say that those reasons are reasons that, to some extent, we all share. That, and to be absolutely absolutely clear, doesn’t justify in any way what he does, but it might help us understand it and ultimately tackle and change it.
In my latest book on directionality and social change, I talk about the idea that we are all directional: meaning that, as human beings, we are fundamentally purpose-oriented beings: striving towards particular wants, needs, and goals. And that, across all of us, there are certain wants and needs that seem to be ‘highest order’: that is, that we all, in different ways, seem to be striving for. Certainly there will be individual and cultural variations, but different psychological theories — from Maslow to the behaviourists — have identified such needs as pleasure, growth, self-worth, relatedness, freedom, meaning, and psychological and physical safety. Everything we do, from this perspective, is a means towards these ends.
From this perspective, there’s nothing here in these highest order ‘directions’ that is, in themselves, intrinsically evil. No one, ultimately, strives to be bad. But how people act towards these ends can be very destructive of others. Iago seems to be striving, ultimately, to maintain some semblance of self-worth. In itself, it’s something many of us share; but what he does to get himself there takes his down a path that destroys many others. The evil then, from this perspective, is not intrinsic or inherent to Iago, but in how he chooses to actualise his most fundamental desires.
Why does he do it that way? One of the things that I talk about in my book is the idea of rogue goals. These are directions that take over the person to the exclusion of the rest of the system. Iago gets overtaken by his desire for revenge, and anything else that might do him good in his life gets sidelined by it. it’s an obsessiveness. Othello even more. When he kills Desdemona, he is so caught up in a jealously about her — a desire too, perhaps, for self-worth — that he cannot see anything further into his desire for relatedness or care or compassion. He’s taken over to the detriment of himself — let alone to Desdemona and their community. And, at an interpersonal level too, Iago’s desire for revenge becomes ‘rogue’: it takes over the whole interpersonal system in a way that is to the detriment of everything and everyone around it. That, in a way, is what we mean by evil: that a person acts towards their own highest-order directions in a way that savages across the needs and wants of others. As in racism, or homophobia, or other forms of bullying: one person, or one small group, allows their needs and wants to dominate to the exclusion of the whole. And when they have the power to enforce that, it becomes a systematic and endemic form of abuse.
Human beings may not be born with a tendency towards evil, but I do think we are born with a tendency towards narrowing of focus. To become oriented towards specific goals without being able to keep the wider whole in mind. John Bargh, one of the leading researchers on unconscious goals, writes about the way that, while we think ‘we’ have ‘goals’, it’s actually goals that have us. We are the vessels through which multiple goals act: and bringing those goals into some kind of coherent whole — whether within people or between people — requires a conscious effort. Otherwise, there is fragmentation and dis-coordination… and evil. Evil is where things act apart from, and against, the wider whole. I was talking to my 12 year old son, Zac, about this during the recent #BLM march. He asked why people could be racist and we were talking about the research that the difference between prejudiced and non-prejudiced people is not in their initial thoughts: we all, to some extent, have stereotypes, prejudices, and biases which pop up in response to certain groups. But the difference is non-prejudiced people then put those to one side and go on to act in equitable and non-discriminatory ways. It’s an effort not just to go rogue: not to let our thoughts and actions go down whatever prejudiced road they like.
When people talk about the stupidity of evil, then, in many ways I think it is. It’s a laziness in thinking that follows fragmented, unprocessed thoughts rather than staying with the complex whole. Urinating on a memorial of a man who protected British freedom while claiming to fight for British freedom: that’s the kind of un-joined up illiteracy that, perhaps, is at the heart of evil.
But it’s more than that, of course. Iago is brilliantly clever. So why is Iago ‘evil’ and not others? Why doesn’t he join himself up, and join himself to others, in a way that so many other people do. A deeper need or a deeper wound than most, perhaps. And a socialisation that leads him to believe that his means are acceptable to those ends. Not learning the values of fairness and equality as highest-order goals, in themselves. Perhaps, alongside self-worth and relatedness and freedom there are highest-order, value-based ends for democracy and equality that we need to learn: and that, without those ends, it is all too easy to fall into fragmentation. And choice? It’s an interesting question of where choice comes in and whether, amidst all of this, there is also a person choosing not to act towards the interests and concerns others. Yes, I do absolutely think there is a choosing being — not just a determined mechanism — acting towards these ends. But a choice ‘to be evil’? In my experience, it’s very rare choose deliberately towards this end, in itself.
Many years ago, in fact on my first counselling training, I wrote an essay about the difference between intent and effect, and I think that is so important to hang on to. Iago, Othello… racists in our society, the effects of their behaviour is incredibly, incredibly destructive on the lives of our black communities and also on so many other aspects of societies. It’s a privileging of one very small element at the expense of so many. And yet, to infer from that effect a particular intent isn’t, I think, that helpful. The reality is, people can behave in ways that are very destructive for reasons that, ultimately, may be fairly ‘normal’: and I am suggesting here that the massively destructive acts of racists, ultimately, come back to the same human needs as the rest of us: self-worth, freedom, probably even relatedness and community. That doesn’t make it right. That absolutely, absolutely doesn’t make it right — just as we can’t infer intent from effect, we also can’t say that because someone did something for intelligible reasons it couldn’t have been harmful — but it does mean that we can see the humanity behind the destructiveness.
Why should we want to do so? Why not just denounce these acts? Because, I think, we can denounce but also understand; and doing that, rather than just denouncing, gives us greater leverage to be able to change it and create a more tolerant and equitable society. If we understand, for instance, that at the root of Iago’s behaviour is a desire for self-worth we can think about how we bring up children in our society to ensure they feel of value. If we understand, in it, an inability to see the whole, then we can think about how we help children develop more holistic, comprehensive thinking: ways of being able to empathise and reach out into other minds and feeling. None of this means we shouldn’t be going out and marching and defending, actively and vigorously, the rights of all our communities: but it does mean that we can also work at more psychological levels to accelerate the pace towards a juster and fairer world.