00:00 Evil. Is evil a human construct? Do animals have evil?
00:06 No, I don't think animals do. I think you need to be self-conscious.
00:10 I thought about that in relationship to the stories in Genesis.
00:14 When Adam and Eve wake up, when their eyes are open, they realize that they're mortal, essentially.
00:18 That's when death, in some sense, comes into the world.
00:21 At the same time, they realize they're naked.
00:24 And naked means vulnerable to the world.
00:28 They also learn the distinction between good and evil.
00:32 Why are those two things juxtaposed?
00:35 If I realize that I'm vulnerable, naked, let's say, before the world,
00:39 I need to put on clothing, for example, which is something God arranges at that point
00:43 to protect this vulnerability from the world.
00:45 I also realize that everyone else is vulnerable, just like me.
00:49 If I know what hurts me, I know it.
00:52 In a way, an animal doesn't. I know it.
00:54 Then I know what hurts you.
00:57 As soon as I know that, then I know the difference between good and evil.
01:01 And evil is exactly that.
01:03 It's the exploitation of your vulnerability.
01:06 Animals don't have that.
01:08 They can be destructive and carnivorous, all of that.
01:11 But a lion doesn't hate you if it eats you. It's just hungry.
01:15 So, no, evil is something that's human.
01:18 How do we overcome evil, first in ourselves, that's where you started as a psychologist,
01:23 but also in the world around us?
01:25 Because I think that's one of the other battles that many struggle with.
01:29 Either the belief that there's not really evil, evil is just the absence of good.
01:35 It's a powerful argument in some sense, because evil is in some sense distance from the highest good.
01:42 But I think practically it doesn't matter.
01:45 It doesn't matter which of those explanations you gravitate towards.
01:50 I think you can make a powerful case that evil is the radical absence of good.
01:55 But that doesn't mean that it's not an active force in and of itself in some sense anyways.
02:01 There's a survival benefit to evil because you can hold back your competitor.
02:05 So how do we reduce evil within our communities,
02:10 even when nations are speaking to each other, because we have different values?
02:14 You have to quell it in yourself to begin with, I think.
02:17 I don't see any other solution to that.
02:20 You're actually not even really contending with the problem until you face it internally, I don't think.
02:24 Because you don't have any sense of how deep the problem is.
02:27 And partly what I did when I wrote my first book was imagine myself as an Auschwitz guard.
02:33 And I don't mean I could be an Auschwitz guard, and that was the end of it.
02:38 I meant imagining it, beating someone who was already three quarters dead
02:43 and who'd been separated from his or her family, let's say her family.
02:48 What would I have to be like to do that?
02:50 Well, it's a horrifying thing to envision.
02:54 You know, when I worked at, briefly, I visited maximum security prison in Edmonton
03:00 under the tutelage of this eccentric psychologist who taught me a course on the psychology of creativity.
03:06 And one of the people I met there, him and a compatriot, one of the prisoners,
03:11 took another prisoner and pulverized his leg with a lead pipe because he was a snitch.
03:18 And that really shocked me. How could someone do that? How could it be possible to do that?
03:22 And I thought about that for two weeks, trying to imagine doing that.
03:27 And then I thought, "Oh, I could do that. I see. I could do that. That would be possible."
03:35 Could I enjoy that? Yes. Okay. Do I want to do that? No. I don't want to do that.
03:46 And that scared me. A lot.
03:51 You know, and I was trying to deal with this underlying problem,
03:53 which was the problem of the Auschwitz guard, essentially,
03:56 which is where I think the whole Nazi problem sort of comes to the focus.
03:59 It's like, there were Auschwitz guards and they were individuals and they were like you.
04:04 They were like me. So what does that mean? That's what we're like.
04:08 Well, do we want to be that way? Well, that is the question, isn't it?
04:12 Do we want to be that way? Are we that way? Yes. Some more than others. Yes, definitely.
04:18 You know, there's some people, I don't think they're temperamentally constructed
04:23 so that they could do what Auschwitz guards do,
04:25 but they'd have their own proclivity towards malevolence.
04:28 It might be overprotection, for example. Right?
04:31 And that would be the devouring mother.
04:34 She's so compassionate that her children cannot escape from her grasp.
04:37 And maybe that would be the root of female totalitarianism,
04:40 something relevant to our current political situation.
04:44 The totalitarian impulse of security at all costs.
04:49 So it's a spiritual battle, the battle between good and evil.
04:56 And what that means to me, at least in part,
04:58 is that it's something that is fundamentally an individual issue.
05:03 It's the battle of your soul, pulled between these opposing forces.
05:07 Well, why would you be tempted towards malevolence?
05:10 Because you're angry and bitter at your undeserved suffering
05:13 and the terrible cataclysm of conscious existence,
05:17 and the exacerbation of that by self-consciousness itself,
05:21 and the broken state of the world, and the catastrophe of history.
05:25 Right? Maybe it should all burn.
05:28 And we are tempted to that.
05:30 Is there a role of evil? I mean, there was evil in the Garden of Eden.
05:34 Okay, so let's think about this.
05:37 Here's something that everybody will know about.
05:39 So, you know, the Disney film Beauty and the Beast.
05:42 Well, Beauty isn't attracted to Gaston,
05:45 who's sort of stereotypically masculine, but very bombastic.
05:49 And, you know, hypothetically, he's not a monster,
05:51 because he's in the town, and he has this persona,
05:54 and everyone loves him. He sings a song about how great he is.
05:56 But she doesn't like him. She likes this monster.
06:00 And Beauty's no fool.
06:02 Why does she like that monster?
06:05 Well, he's tameable.
06:07 Why does she want a tameable monster?
06:09 Well, because sometimes the monster part is necessary, right?
06:12 That's resolve. That's the ability to say no.
06:16 Right? And so there's this...
06:17 And the best men I know are terribly dangerous people.
06:22 They have it under control.
06:24 And so maybe good is better if the possibility for evil exists,
06:28 but not the actuality.
06:30 And maybe it's up to us to not allow the actuality to manifest itself,
06:34 even though we need the possibility.
06:36 It needs... It's a reserve that we need to draw on.
06:39 And then there's also...
06:41 We often make arbitrary distinctions between good and evil,
06:44 which is something the philosopher Nietzsche talked a lot about.
06:46 It's like, well, are you so sure that you don't define evil
06:49 merely as what you're afraid of?
06:52 You know? And so there's this aggressive capacity in men,
06:55 and certainly in women as well.
06:56 And it's very easy to say,
06:58 well, we should just quell all male aggression.
07:00 It's like, oh yeah?
07:02 You really think that's the answer, do you?
07:04 So what do you want? A bunch of, like, children?
07:08 You want men.
07:10 Well, men are dangerous. Really dangerous.
07:12 And women are attracted to dangerous men,
07:15 but wise women are attracted to dangerous men who've mastered it.
07:19 And so maybe the world is a better place
07:23 when the possibility of evil exists.
07:26 So, you know, and that's something you can think about for, like, 50 years.
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