I had a brush with evil when I was 13. Newly 13. A still playing with stuffed animals 13.

The shape this evil took was the grinning faux-benign variety which hid malicious intent. I didn’t realize the danger until too late. I was small and it had all the power vested in a well-liked man.

I didn’t tell anyone, in part to spare my family the (perceived) shame, in part because I thought I was sparing his family, but mostly because I couldn’t bear to think about let alone talk about what happened. Already an anxious child, my mind turned every more relentlessly to understanding why people were cruel.  

It was an ongoing concern. Years earlier I’d asked too many questions about pictures I saw in news magazines. Why troops bombed villages, why pollution was dumped into rivers, why anyone, anywhere, was starving. My parents, realizing there were truly no good answers to repeated “but why” questions, cancelled the magazines.

The year I turned 13 read Elie Wiesel’s memoir, Night. His account of surviving the Holocaust gave me a glimpse of how vast evil could be. I embarked on a decades-long quest to understand what caused this largest of evils. I read every Holocaust memoir in the library, initially thinking this had been the only genocide, until I stumbled on other examples in history. Pogroms and holy wars and witch hunts and enslavement and horrors imposed by colonizers. It wasn’t all in the distant past. I read about genocides of the Herero people, the Armenians, the Ukrainians, the Chinese. This led me to horrors still being visited upon people, including by the US. Every book broke me a little bit more on my path from Wiesel’s book to Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart At Wounded Knee.

I gradually recharted the quest, seeking to answer for myself why people were kind. I tried to do what good I could as well, but it never felt like enough. It still doesn’t.   

I’m seeing what I’d describe as evil going on now. The heedless destruction of the very planet that sustains life in order to continue extracting every ounce of profit. The beyond-devastating mayhem and death in Palestine, funded largely by US tax dollars (whose country our current president says he wants to “own“). Empathy mocked as “woke” while measures taken to ensure inclusion and equality are discarded. The people (elected and unelected) currently in US government who are overtly doing everything possible to undermine democracy itself.

But “evil” isn’t a word that helps us understand why.

We humans have been on this planet such a short time, something like 50,000 years (although new evidence shows it may be much longer). We only developed written language around five thousands years ago. Modern capitalism and its attendant ills only emerged in the nineteenth century. Biologically and emotionally, we are still hunter-gatherers. We evolved to be a compassionate and collaborative species. We are still learning how to live in populous cities rather than nomadic tribes of around 60 people. Our technological advancements and our weapons have developed far more quickly than our ethics around their use. We have yet to grasp just how dangerous rigid economic and political systems can be, particularly when war, crisis, and division benefit the powerful.

Currently we live in a system that thrives on fostering divisions — divisions between our daily lives and nature, between our morals and actions, between our minds and bodies, between haves and have-nots, between any perceived differences from one person to another. The result is individuals likely more disconnected than in any time in history, with fragments of authentic community between us, making us much more in need of products to fill that emptiness and work hours to afford those products — good for capitalism, bad for us and the planet.    

We ignore the separations between us at our peril. Perhaps even more dangerously, we ignore what is separate within us. Denying the fullness of who we are doesn’t allow us to be whole. When we acknowledge that each of us has the capacity for evil as well as good, for greed as well as generosity, for lies as well as truth—then we can see ourselves and each other more clearly. There’s less need to fall back on blame or fear. We can awaken to the boundless energy in real choices to tell the truth, to act with kindness, to do what’s best for us as a community of beings.

I’m not losing hope. There’s humanity even in the people committing evil. I’m not deluded enough to believe that my phone calls and letters and protests will change things, but I will keep on trying. And I will keep trying to understand all the whys I can. That’s the good I can do right now.

“If only it were so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart? ” ~Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn