Julie Bozza’s Reviews > What Evil Means to Us > Status Update

"The informants [free citizens] were a group of slightly quirky but by no means strange or alienated individuals, many deeply attuned to the contemporary culture. ... Many struck me as more sensitive and reflective than the average citizen, though that difference is hard to determine."

"If we want to lessen the amount of evil in the world, then how people get to be the way they are matters. To explain evil is not the whole story, but to abandon explanation is to reify evil, making evil a more-than-human character, like a Greek god. Evil is not that either. Evil is human, all too human, the poisoned gift we pass among ourselves, and down the generations."

"We want there to be evil in the world so that there can be some explanation or force adequate to the horror of our experience, our existence, our suffering. Because the world hurts and disappoints us so very much, we create the concept of evil in order to give dignity and meaning to our suffering, creating a cause for our suffering worthy of our pain."

The Lisbon earthquake used to be the paradigm of evil; now it is the Holocaust. "If evil is a discourse, then what needs to be said about it will change over the course of history. Today there is a horror of passivity and powerlessness. ... to be an evildoer is bad, to be the powerless victim of evil is simply unimaginable." If you have no sense of history, you'll see being a victim as being lost to history forever.

"Most of [them] are quiet, gentlemanly, respectful, contrite, and thoughtful. Among them they have killed 15 people [but] their decency is not just an act. They really are decent gentlemen 99% of the time. It is the other 1% that is hell. It does not add up: the evildoer seems so inadequate to his deed, the deed so heinous we must call it evil, even if we have to work to create an evil commensurable to its horror."

"The problem of evil is to know our [own] dread, so that we may contain it in ourselves rather than inflict it on others. ... that containment is achieved not by holding it in but by projecting it: into cultural symbols rather than onto the bodies of victims."

"Consider the possibility that being able to imagine evil is the only real alternative to doing it. If you can imagine evil, you can imagine the consequences of doing it, including the terrible loss it inflicts on others and oneself. You may even be able to imagine how terrible you will feel later."

Individuals and societies are quite capable of hardening themselves against their guilt, blaming the victim, and all the rest. The only thing that will change this tendency is the ability of individuals and societies to traffic with their dread, to give dread creative form so as to be able to live with it.

... I did know better than to start this late last night. Woke up from the most ghastly nightmare this morning ...