Demons of the Self

Tristen Taylor finds problems in meaningfully defining ‘evil’.

- Tristen Taylor

On the night of 27th January 2015, in the beautiful but not so tranquil university town of Stellenbosch, South Africa, Henri van Breda killed his parents and brother with an axe. His sister somehow managed to survive her wounds. At his trial, van Breda showed no remorse, and refused to take responsibility for his dreadful crimes.

On the 8th of May 2017, a bright philosophy student at Stellenbosch University, Dean Dart, and his comrades, pasted replicas of Hitler Youth posters from the 1930s all over the campus. Since Stellenbosch University was the intellectual cradle of apartheid, the posters were more sinister than the mere childish rantings of an ignorant alt-right teenager. The posters called upon white students to gather, reboot South African fascism, and fight: Sieg Heil.

The list of evil acts in the world goes on and on. Yet ‘evil’ is the most useless of all descriptions of profoundly immoral acts. Although we might start by saying that ‘evil’ is ‘extreme wickedness’, when a person or action is called ‘evil’, that’s no explanation. The description yields no understanding of either the person or the act, and we still have to ask what counts as ‘extreme wickedness’, what doesn’t, and why. ‘Evil’ is a rather empty construct that is used to separate us from what the warlord of Iraq, George W. Bush, liked to call ‘evildoers’. But what is evil, and where are the borders to be drawn concerning what is evil and what is not?