It is a widely accepted judgment, though not without dissent, that human beings are by nature self-interested, prone to malice, and inclined toward ill will, even as they possess the capacity to become good by subduing this inherent disposition. Thomas Hobbes famously articulated this view in Leviathan, describing the natural condition of mankind as a bellum omnium contra omnes (a war of all against all) in which life is “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” Yet socialisation, as it is commonly understood, is less a process of moral cultivation than one of taming and suppressing this innate selfishness through the elaborate fabrication of narratives: norms, rules, moral codes, and what the French philosopher Lyotard calls grands recits (grand narratives)—that legitimate social order.
This process, as Sigmund Freud argued in Civilization and Its Discontents, exacts a heavy psychological toll, channelling primal aggressions into sublimated forms while generating perpetual discontent. Over time, this taming mechanism deepens into a practice of othering: the disavowed evil is projected onto a hateful other, rendered less human, less civilised, and more brute and savage. Rene Girard’s theory of scapegoating and the mimetic desire illuminates this dynamic, showing how societies unify themselves by expelling their own violence onto a surrogate victim.
The consequence is a far-reaching moral inversion: this process makes human beings unwittingly believe that selfishness itself is alien to their true nature. In other words, individuals find it difficult to accept, let alone claim it as their own, an attribute that is fundamentally constitutive of the human condition. This is not merely a cognitive failure but an existential evasion. In history, it has been repeatedly observed that the most unsettling perpetrators are those who cannot think from the standpoint of others and thus fail to recognise their own agency in wrongdoing. Neurologists and philosophers like Freud and Sartre diagnose this as deliberate self-deception in which one denies one’s own freedom and responsibility by pretending that one’s actions are dictated by external forces or by an immutable nature.
Moreover, it is unnecessary to debate whether humans can or cannot redeem themselves from the evil actions to which they are inherently disposed. That question, while perennial, misses a puzzling contemporary symptom: why do most humans, especially in this age, when we have explored human nature in considerable detail through evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and psychoanalysis, fail to accept their own inherent evil, and instead perform innocence even as their evil stands exposed?
This paradox recalls Sigmund Freud’s concept of repression: the ego defends itself by pushing unacceptable impulses out of conscious awareness, yet they return in disguised forms. It also resonates with Leon Festinger’s theory of cognitive dissonance. When confronted with evidence of one’s own moral failings, the mind experiences discomfort and seeks to rationalise or deny the unwelcome truth rather than integrate it.
Friedrich Nietzsche, in On the Genealogy of Morality, diagnosed this as ressentiment, the bad conscience of those who cannot own their instincts and therefore project purity onto themselves while condemning others. The performance of innocence, then, is not hypocrisy in the simple sense, but a deep-seated psychological and cultural defence mechanism that allows the subject to continue believing in its own goodness while acting otherwise. What remains strange, and philosophically urgent, is not that evil exists, but that we so persistently refuse to recognise it in ourselves.
To teach evil and to embrace it as fundamentally human ought to be the foundation of moral education. Instead, when we see other evil as hateful and nonhuman, and then see individuals struggling to escape the shame that exposure brings, we are confronted with a tragic narrative about the perception of evil and its social performance.
This dynamic reveals what Emile Durkheim, in The Elementary Forms of Religious Life, called collective representations: social constructs that acquire objective force and moral authority over individuals. Through prolonged othering or preferential idealisation within complex social discourses and interactions, these representations evolve into powerful, independent entities. Once fully formed, they begin to unleash all the human fears and attributes that have been gradually infused into them, operating as autonomous agents of judgment, exclusion, or veneration.
Similarly, the slow misappropriation of inherent human evil, its repeated projection onto an abject other, has shaped that evil into an independent, hateful, nonhuman entity. As Paul Ricoeur argued in The Symbolism of Evil, the experience of evil is never raw; symbols, myths, and cultural scripts always mediate it. When those scripts externalise evil entirely, they produce a monstrous double that haunts the margins of the human. The result is not moral growth but a problem: we lose the capacity to say that to know one’s own failing is the beginning of wisdom. Instead, we cling to an innocence that can only be preserved by creating monsters.
This exclusion of evil from the site where it is performed constitutes a serious misrecognition (meconnaissance), to use Jacques Lacan’s term, a necessary misrecognition upon which the ego’s fragile coherence depends. Yet the risk is that such denial only worsens the social or individual performance of evil. A thing of this nature, if it is never to be accepted, acknowledged, embraced, or understood as fundamentally human, can only become more invasive, more virulent, and more destructive. As Carl Jung warned, “One does not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious.” The repressed, as Freud demonstrated, does not disappear; it returns, always, in symptoms, in projections, and in the very violence we claim to abhor.
Therefore, teaching the proper understanding and perception of evil should be the core of moral education. This education must begin as soon as humans become conscious of the evil within themselves, rather than allowing everyone to succumb to the perception of collective othering. This echoes the Socratic injunction to “know thyself” (gnothi seauton), but with a darker twist: to know thyself is also to know one’s capacity for wrongdoing. Spinoza argued in the Ethics that an affect, once clearly understood, loses its power over us: “An emotion, which is a passion, ceases to be a passion as soon as we form a clear and distinct idea of it.” Evil, well understood in time, could thus be brought under the guidance of the resident good in humans, not through suppression and rejection as something vile and nonhuman, but through integration and self-possession. Carl Jung writes in Aion, “The shadow is a moral problem that challenges the whole ego-personality, for no one can become conscious of the shadow without considerable moral effort.” That effort is precisely what moral education must cultivate: the courage to say, with St. Paul, “I do not do the good I want, but the evil I do not want is what I do”, and to recognise that this confession is not a defeat but the first step towards genuine agency.
Over the years at my workplace, I have closely observed the manifestation of this elaborate process. The people there are largely educated and more conscious of the genuineness society expects of them. Consequently, they appear highly vigilant of their own behaviour: how to speak, manipulate, work, adjust, curate a smile, gesture, pretend, and perform countless other micro-actions. In The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life, Erving Goffman termed this impression management, the continuous effort to stage a credible self before an audience. Yet what remains strange is this: despite knowing what is expected of them and how they ought to project their attitude, they cannot persist with these so-called sophisticated yet manufactured dealings. Unexpectedly, they fall into evil without ever claiming it as their own.
When someone is caught, they immediately shift the blame onto someone else. The other is always the evil that humans have refused to claim as their own. This is a textbook case of what social psychologists call the fundamental attribution error: we attribute our own misdeeds to external circumstances, but others’ misdeeds to their character. The fiasco can turn truly ugly, as it has many times in the small workplace, as people grope toward the real point where blame belongs. It cannot be resolved forever as long as humans hunt for evil just outside themselves.
The solution, not the final cure, lies within humans, exactly where the evil lies. It desperately needs to be owned rather than conquered, for it cannot be conquered. To own evil is not to celebrate it, but to recognise it as one’s own possibility, and in that recognition, to gain a fragile but genuine agency. The alternative, as the small workplace tragedy repeats, is an endless hunt for monsters that are only ever mirrors.
This again teaches the same lesson: once one realises that it is possible at any moment to be on the side of evil, that very realisation can make evil less effective. Acceptance of evil demands considerable effort, what Aristotle called prohairesis (deliberate choice) and what later philosophers would recognise as the hard work of self-knowledge. Performing evil, by contrast, requires only that one’s mind be shut and useless. Evil is performed largely in anger or in a debilitated state, when one actively avoids letting the mind realise its effects, its consequences, and its sway. Seneca, in De Ira (On Anger), observed that anger is a temporary madness: “It is not under control; it is reckless, heedless of danger, incapable of seeing the middle course.” To shut the mind is to surrender to passion in the most literal sense. Thus, the moral task is not to eradicate evil but to cultivate the constant vigilance of self-awareness. As the Stoic Epictetus once said, “It is not events that disturb people, but their judgments about them.” To judge one’s own capacity for evil, calmly and without denial, is to reclaim the steering wheel from rage. The alternative is not innocence but unconsciousness, and unconsciousness, as Freud tirelessly reminded us, is the soil in which destructiveness flourishes.
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