In reflecting on the nature of evil, I find two different kinds of lens particularly helpful. First, to view evil through concepts of mental disorder, as commonly used in Anglophone European psychiatry. Second, as viewed through a traditional account of harmful thought patterns in Christianity, colloquially known as ’The seven deadly sins’. I am a therapist who works with violence perpetrators in prisons and secure hospitals, so I have spent many hours talking to people who are sometimes described as ‘evil’. What I want to explore here is how the concept of the seven deadly sins (here abbreviated as The Seven) might fit with contemporary psychiatric ideas about evil.
My starting premise is that evil is not a ‘thing’ or an external force in the world, but a psychosocial problem that begins with an individual state of mind. This is a state of mind which every single person can be in, just as every person has the capacity to be in fruitful and beneficent states of mind. I think it is also noteworthy that evil is a performative word in the sense that those who use it are making a powerful statement for a social audience. When people use this word, they are not only saying something about the state of mind of the perpetrator and their intentions, they are also making a kind of totalising comment about the perpetrator as a whole, and where the perpetrator stands in relationship to the communities they come from.
This totalising aspect is reflected in the assumption and attitude that humans who once do evil are now and forever perpetually in that state of mind: ‘once evil, always evil’ seems to be the message, as though a human could not be ‘somewhat’ evil or only ‘evil’ at a certain time. In terms of relationships with communities of other humans, the use of the word ‘evil’ often denotes someone who is now excluded from those communities by reason of their choices and actions. Humans who do horrible things to others are often described as ‘inhuman’, and then attract news media titles involving the word ‘beast’, and this kind of language conveys a sense that this offender has now lost their status as a human being and is also deprived of ordinary social rights or duties.
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