Where Do You Park The Evil?

by Alexandra Molotkow

There is a difference between evil-evil and “naughty” evil. “Naughty” evil is eating chocolate ice cream in a chocolate-dipped waffle cone and having sex beneath a weeping willow tree that belongs to the public, which is to say: not evil at all, just “wrong” by the standards of an unusually boring mom or an exceptionally obedient preteen. I am not talking about “naughty” evil; I’m talking about evil-evil, as in cruelty, malice, deliberate harm, pleasure in the sufferings of others.

I think of evil as a substance of which we all have a certain amount. (You can have a lot of evil a lot of kindness at the same time.) I know people who definitely have at least 70 liters of evil in them, and others with no more than five, but generally I think levels of guilt vary more widely than levels of evil, which actually makes very little difference behaviorally, but that’s a whole ‘nother rant.

We can all agree — I mean we might say we don’t agree — that being mean, for instance, is really fun, but usually only to certain kinds of people, as in people who seem worse, morally, than we are. This sometimes gets into iffy essentializing that reduces people to the worst of their behavior, which kind of weirds me out, but currently it’s our best excuse to be mean, and if we never simply enjoyed ourselves at someone else’s expense, we might crack and really hurt someone, or subtly manipulate them in ways they’ll never be able to blame us for. That is way more evil.

What percent evil are you? And where do you park it?