Evil

I find nothing in this world more frustrating than listening to the internet talk about those it considers evil. Such confident contumely and delighted disgust. Evil is pervasive, especially among their enemies, but it can be discretised to particular individuals. It deserves the harshest possible sanctions; some of them are even brave or foolish enough to wish for a hell to punish those they despise. Fortunately, it is absent among their friends, except for a handful of traitors who will eventually be discovered. They rarely use the word evil, but the point is usually clear: this individual or group has done something so awful as to make them one of the wicked others. A kāfir, an enemy of the people, a known rāšāʿ, anathema, a pāpa-Puruṣa, a persona non grata. Abominate is my favourite term.

What I’m going to do is set out to convince you that the usual way the internet talks about evil- where there’s a bunch of different moral event horizons and some awful minority of people not like us has crossed them is not very useful. If we must measure out event horizons, they must be set far further back than they normally are, else nihilism about humanity is the likely result. Overall, though, I’d prefer to retire the concept as currently understood.

The problem with this online story about evil is that, paradoxically, it’s too harsh because it’s not harsh enough. When we see the real nature of humanity, the optimistic view that we can cauterise the diseased bits goes away.

I am interested in evil because I have OCD- because I am afraid that I am evil, and I am afraid that I will be punished for being evil. Or perhaps I have this form of OCD because I am interested in evil- I am not sure which way the causation goes. The way people talk about and engage in moral condemnation online has, subsequently, always rubbed me the wrong way. Take this as a confession that I am not neutral here.

Sometimes I read court cases, hoping to see the face of God, reason, or justice underneath. For the most part, I just see meaningless crimes, usually by the perps, all too often by the prosecutors or even the judges. Sometimes by all three, if you can believe it. I’ve read numerous accounts by people with real event OCD of the things that keep them up at night. Not all of them are small sins. I am fascinated, intellectually, emotionally, and through my pathology, by culpability and judgment.

I’ve tried to measure the prevalence of “evil” acts before by asking people if they have dark secrets that could ruin them, and examining the percentage who say yes. I wonder about this often- what percentage of people have done something truly dreadful? In this essay, I take another approach, looking at statistics for certain kinds of wrongdoing.

People are very good at avoiding this- at casting a net that reckons the whole world unrighteous, and then going on in the happy assumption that they and all their friends are of course Good People. The Egyptian Book of the Dead has the aspirant to the Ancient Egyptian afterlife promising: I have not told lies. I have not been angry without cause. I have made none to weep. I have not uttered curses. I have not wallowed in envy. I have not been an eavesdropper. I have not slandered anyone. I have not masturbated. I have not spoken too much.

We can assume, then, that if the Ancient Egyptians were going around claiming not to have spoken too much at any point in their life, probably the moderns are lying about whether they’ve drunk and driven, and certainly they’re lying about sexual assaults they’ve committed. Self-report bias comes in, and it will almost entirely lower our figures. Thus, our findings will be an understatement. The mechanisms of self-report bias are as follows:

1. Lying out of fear that disclosure might lead to punishment or be publicly revealed.

2. Rationalising, because they do not want to admit to themselves, or an interviewer, what they have done.

3. Selective memory or even just the ordinary fading of memory.

4. In some cases, people genuinely do not know they have done the wrong thing, either because they misunderstand the elements of the wrongful act (many cases of sexual assault), or because it can’t be known purely subjectively (e.g., whether or not one has driven over the BAC limit)

So, allowing that those caveats will make the picture rosier than the truth, let us lay out the tally as best we might, the sins of humanity. Again, my purpose is, by reductio, to show that a certain kind of moral line drawing that is popular online will inevitably lead you into the horrid view of humanity as a mound of filth.

I want to clarify something, because it was unclear to some test readers. It is not that I am saying these things aren’t gravely serious. With the exception of cheating and saying bad words, which I explicitly call out, I really do believe everything I discuss here is a horrendous misdeed. My concern is rather with the way we think about and respond to horrendous misdeeds. A particular style of responding is unsustainable without leading to nihilism, hypocrisy or both.

Cheating

We’ll start with this because moralising about it seems more popular than ever.

Some people consider those who have cheated in a relationship to have crossed the moral event horizon- it seems to be a popular view on Reddit, for example. Personally, I find this facile, although I admit cheating is not a triviality, it almost seems cute next to many of the other items on this list.

If you are going to treat cheating on a monogamous relationship as crossing a moral event horizon, that’s almost a third of humanity gone. About 33% of respondents in surveys have ever cheated on a monogamous relationship, with another 4% refusing to reply. Presumably, a large additional chunk has knowingly, err, assisted in cheating, which is not much better. As always with the figures in this essay, the caveats about underreporting loom.

Saying bad words

This is even more facile than the cheating one; nevertheless, I’ll mention it in passing. A substantial portion of the internet- on both the left and right- swears that you can distinguish good people from bad people on the basis of whether they’ve said bad words. The average person speaks and writes about 300,000,000 words in their lifetime- a substantial portion of them when they’re in middle school, drunk or shittalking. You do the maths! I’ve heard worse than this infamous tweet:

“Going to Africa. Hope I don’t get AIDS. Just kidding. I’m white!”

From all races, genders, and political creeds.

Sexual assault

18% of women and 26% of men in an Australian survey admit to having used sexual violence, albeit on a fairly broad conception of the term. The gender element here is interesting, both because of the large gap and because the gap is not as large as some might think. To a substantial degree, I would expect the difference to reflect differences in power - if nothing else, raw physical strength is a factor. If men and women were equally powerful, I expect the male figure would fall somewhat, and the female figure would rise somewhat. The female figure may be raised somewhat by women being more reflective about such matters, and may be lowered somewhat by ideas about what the prototypical sexual assault perpetrator looks like affecting responses. It is notable that for the most serious category of sexual wrongdoing measured, sexual assault, the gender gap was more substantial: 6% versus 16%. A missing data analysis found that 7.3% of men and 6.1% of women had not filled in one or more questions about sexual assault, much higher than other questions, and we might reasonably speculate that it is quite likely that a large percentage of these respondents were perpetrators, or had done something they conceived of as “borderline”. Underreporting is likely doing triple time here.

I am interested in differences in rates of perpetration among men and women. Two broad classes of theory present themselves: 1. Men perpetrate more because their psychology, shaped through patriarchy or evolution or both, inclines them to do so. 2. Men perpetrate more because they can- their greater physical, economic, and cultural power lets them get away with it. I think both accounts are probably partially correct. An interesting case study here is the lesbian population- using American data. About 17% of lesbians report ever having been stalked by a woman, whereas about 28% of heterosexual women report ever having been stalked by a man. About 16% of lesbians report contact sexual violence by a woman, and about 50% of heterosexual women report contact sexual violence by a man (deriving this required doing some arithmetic on the data). I’m not quite sure what to make of the comparison, but overall it suggests to me that equalising “opportunities” for sexual violence between men and women would substantially reduce, but not close the gap. In any case, predatory behaviour is common, but far from equal, among all sexes.

Domestic abuse

What about abuse? In the United States, according to the CDC, National Intimate Partner and Sexual Violence Survey : 2016/2017 47% of women and 43% of men report having experienced contact sexual violence, a physical attack, or stalking in an intimate relationship. When we only include attacks that caused fear or harm (physical or psychological), the gender gap becomes much starker- 41% of women versus 26% of men. I do not have good, up-to-date perpetrator statistics here, but the information I have suggests the perpetrator rate is probably a reasonable chunk of the victim rate.

In childhood, the numbers are no better. Australian adults report that in their childhoods, they faced a physical abuse rate of 32%, a sexual abuse rate of 28.5%, an emotional abuse rate of 30.9%, a neglect rate of 8.9% and almost forty percent (39.6%) reported exposure to domestic violence. All of these figures exclusively include violence by parents, except for the sexual assault statistic (only 7.8% experienced sexual violence from a parent). There’s no way to get these numbers without a huge, substantial percentage of abusive parents. 62% of adults experienced at least one form of abuse, so abusive parents may even be a majority.

Perhaps you think “these liberals with their weird ideas, they’re probably including spanking, which I don’t think is real abuse.” Well, certainly abuse is a concept with nebulous borders. Drawing exact lines is difficult. Corporal punishment, such as spanking, was deliberately not included as a form of abuse, although it was measured separately. There may be a substantial number of false positives driven by over-expansive definitions, but it’s reasonably tightly done, and it would be pretty clear to the respondent that the scale is talking about abuse. I’d be shocked if anything remotely close to a majority of positives were false.

Crimes against humanity and their supporters

Changing topics, what about crimes against humanity? Knowingly supporting crimes against humanity is, itself, a crime against humanity, and advocating for an ongoing genocide makes one guilty of genocide, since genocide is a social-political process. I’ll pick just one example. Andry Romero, a Venezuelan citizen who has never been accused of or prosecuted for a crime in either Venezuela or the United States, was a guest in the United States. He arrived via a port of entry and sought asylum, claiming that he was not safe in Venezuela because of his sexuality. On August 29, 2024, at the San Ysidro Port of Entry, Romero underwent a “credible fear” interview-the gateway to formal asylum proceedings-which US officials determined he passed. He had done, as best I can tell, everything “right”.

For no scrutable reason, the government decided that this gay hairdresser was a Venezuelan gangster. Without any trial or hearing, Andry was sent to CECOT, a prison in El Salvador where he is not a citizen. CECOT is a prison for El Salvadoran gangsters (though heaven only knows how many are actually guilty since there are no trials any sane person would recognise as fair). There were no confirmed cases of anyone ever being released. 14,000+ are kept in overcrowded conditions. A court directed the plane to be turned around while he was en route, but the pilots were told to continue in breach of the court order by government officials.

When the flight ignored the injunction and touched down at Comalapa (CECOT’s private runway), Romero was herded down the ramp, cuffed at wrists and ankles, deloused, and stuffed—shirtless—into a concrete gallery where the lights never go off and the floor doubles as latrine. For five months, he subsisted on two tortillas and a ladle of bean water a day, watched men beaten unconscious for whispering, and scratched “AHR / quiero vivir” into the wall with a bottle‑cap before the guards caught him. Outside, his pro‑bono lawyer’s writ of habeas morphed into a contempt motion that finally embarrassed Washington: in mid‑July 2025, a hush‑hush swap traded 238 “gang suspects,” Romero among them, for ten U.S. nationals held in Venezuela. He was flown—not home to America, but to Caracas, handed a 72‑hour transit visa and told to disappear. As of today, he is lying low with cousins in Táchira, borrowing a neighbour’s Wi‑Fi to message the outside world, technically stateless, technically free, perhaps waiting to see whether the D.C. judge who ordered him returned will jail the officials who defied her.

According to a YouGov poll, 26% support “Deporting immigrants without criminal convictions to El Salvador to be imprisoned, without letting them challenge the deportation in court,” and another 13% are unsure.

The possibility of this, and even worse things happening, is contained in the question. Unless the respondents who answered in the affirmative lack moral competency- e.g., they are children or severely disabled, they have no excuse. They are participants in this crime.

And there’s plenty of other crimes against humanity, many of which are even more popular than this one.

If the Abrahamic God is real, the wrath of the heavens is on those who supported this, almost as much as if they’d kidnapped him themselves, because they have committed the sin of Sodom and Gomorrah. In fact, much the same is true of the Ancient Hellenic Gods, the Egyptian Gods, the Chinese folk gods; these people had best hope there are no Gods, because in many ways the history of Gods is the history of the condemnation of inhospitality, taken to be the paradigm case of violence against someone rendered defenceless by circumstances and temporarily unable to assert their rights. “You may think they are easy prey, but the God(s) watch”. This is at the heart of theistic morality.

Willingness to send others to prison for what you do yourself

I recently saw someone complaining about Europeans online because they don’t always jail people who kill through dangerous driving. Interesting! Especially coming from an American, who, in my experience, tend to see themselves governed more by a “speed suggestion” than a “speed limit”. A national sample in the US found that 49% of licensed motorists said they had driven 15 mph (24 km/h) over the posted freeway limit at least once in the previous 30 days. The yearly incidence must be much higher. But this is not necessarily dangerous driving in the legal sense, so let’s move to something that is, DUI.

58% of Australians admit to having driven drunk at some point in their life- given that’s only what people admit, and given that people often do not know they are driving over the limit, the real figure has to be so very much higher- at a guess, maybe 80%? And of course, there are other forms of dangerous driving.

Now personally, I don’t think ever having engaged in dangerous driving is a mortal sin. However, I do think that engaging in dangerous driving while calling for more people who engage in dangerous driving and kill someone to go to prison is a mortal sin.

I couldn’t find statistics for the percentage of Australians who think that drunk drivers who kill someone should be sent to prison. However, in the UK, 76% of people think that those who kill someone through careless driving (often momentary inattention) while drunk should go to prison. Even killing through careless driving alone, and everyone who has driven has driven carelessly at some point, attracts 38% support for incarceration.

Thus, at a guess:

1. >50% of drivers

2. Call for prison sentences for killing someone by dangerous driving of one form or another

3. while at least sometimes engaging in dangerous driving themselves.

Whatever happened to “there but for the grace of God go I”? You should take this very seriously! Locking someone up in prison is one of the most serious things you can do to a person, and we live in a democratic society. We would think very poorly of a gang member who was constantly advocating for the gang to kidnap and punish others who had committed the same wrongs he had, even if he had relatively little influence within the gang. I do not think it is much better when it’s the state instead of a gang. The people in the study I quoted were participating in an academic survey that they knew might well inform future criminal law. They were given every chance to think through their answers.

Failures of compassion

Truly, it’s almost all of us: The other day I was walking on the street. I found a man who looked about 18 with a sign saying “18, kicked out of home, trying to raise money for somewhere to sleep”. I gave him some money. I didn’t offer to let him stay with me. I didn’t call around to try and find somewhere he could stay. The nights here are well below freezing, about minus 6 degrees Celsius or 20 degrees Fahrenheit. When I meet other people like this who aren’t very young or visibly disabled, I scarcely even feel troubled by it. Most of the time, I don’t even give them money, emboldened by the oh-so-convenient: “I haven’t got any cash on me”- a lame excuse because it is not beyond me to carry cash for this purpose.

That kid’s gonna nearly freeze, and I didn’t stop it! Still, wretched as I am, it could be even worse; I could be one of the 41% of Americans who think it should be illegal to sleep outside if you’re homeless (hint, the nature of being without shelter is you have to sleep in public- that’s almost what “public” means). So you see, it’s alright, I’m not as bad as they are, which means I’m one of the good ones.

Moral luck

And after all that, Moral luck is a fascinating thing. Around 380 AD, Gregory of Nyssa wrote a tract. Gregory is a saint of Catholicism and Orthodoxy alike, but he might well be considered a saint in the eyes of all mankind because this tract is the oldest known surviving work explicitly condemning slavery as immoral in all cases. No doubt a fair few opposed slavery and aren’t recorded, but with those exceptions, everyone before Gregory of Nyssa failed the test. Do you think you would have passed the test if, to the extent the idea is comprehensible, you’d been born in the Roman Empire? It’s unlikely.

But it doesn’t have to be supporting slavery because you were born in the Roman Empire- that’s the moral luck equivalent of a sledgehammer. How many of those who haven’t committed each category of sin would do so if the circumstances were exactly wrong? Roiling fear, awful lust, experience of childhood abuse, lateness for a job interview as you go through a school zone, a moment of ambiguity you choose to see the way you want to, concern about crime in the neighbourhood, losing your income, your kid screaming at exactly the wrong moment. What would it take for you to do something dreadful? Don’t answer that, you’ll just be deceiving yourself. You can’t possibly know. There are countless trillions of ways things could go wrong, and some of them would click like a key into the lock of your soul, opening a door to hell.

Excursus against Cultural Christianity

And while we’re on the topic of redemption, Christianity, and stupid ideas about right and wrong, let me take a moment to call out one of the stupidest trends of the current moment: “Cultural Christianity”. I understand this to be a proposal that we should culturally affirm a sort of custom of Christianity without necessarily believing it, for purposes of cultural stability, primarily concieved of in rightwing terms.

Imagine taking a doctrine that works conceptually like an alien light in the dark, whose founder promises to set brother and sister against each other: “Do you think I came to bring peace on earth? No, I tell you, but division. From now on, there will be five in one family divided, three against two and two against three …” Whose founding principle is belief before action, that preaches boundless selfless love,

And then:

1) Taking out the belief and

2) Treating it as a unifying doctrine against cultural subversion and for excluding the other.

Christianity is supposed to be the subversive element.

Review

Based on the (admittedly imperfect and limited) statistics above:

More than 30% of people have cheated, and an unknown portion have knowingly slept with a person who is cheating.

More than 22% of people have used sexual violence.

At a guess, about 50% abuse a partner or their kids, or both.

41% of people want to lock up those with nowhere to live, and almost everyone has insufficient compassion for the homeless, even when they’re right in front of your face.

At least 50% or more of people want to send others to prison for things they do themselves (bad driving), with the sole difference being that they’ve been lucky enough not to kill.

Most people support some crime against humanity or another. In our case study, 26% supported the persecution of poor Andry.

And who the fuck knows (or cares) how many more additional people have said bad words.

All the preceding figures are probably really much higher due to social desirability bias, memory failure, and rationalisation.

And even if you escape all of that, if your circumstances were different, you’d almost certainly do dreadful things.

So you see, even allowing a huge overlap in percentages, I have to think most of us are doing something very wrong. If you’re typical of a certain kind of internet denizen, then you have your evidence that the vast bulk of humanity consists of trash people. We’ve spilled the tea on the human race.

Wokeness

Am I being terribly woke with all this? We’re all afraid of being woke now, aren’t we? I think the problem with wokeness, more than anything else, was that they didn’t realise what they’d found. They were like Puritans. They saw the sin of it all, and rather than making them reflect on humanity generally, it led them to say: “Gosh, good thing I’m not like that.”

Oh, there were little rituals of repentance and self-recrimination, of course, the odd flagellant parades like a Robin di Angelo audience (she’s white btw), but not really a broader reflection on the moral estate of humanity. “I might have done terrible things- sure, but I’m wholly different from those beasts outside.” You might have sins, but not any of the bad sins- and you even swore to reject friendship with those who had done the bad sins. If I had to choose, I’d prefer the (claimed) amoralism of hardcore classical Marxism than the selective moralism of woke.

What is there to say

I’ve laid out this essay to try to convince you that a certain style of confident moral judgement of persons leads to a kind of nihilism. I’ve considered the sorts of things that make someone judge others as a garbage person (TM), and tried to show you that collectively, most people are trash if you apply these standards consistently.

I don’t want to live like that, I don’t want you to live like that. Hence, I reject these standards.

What’s the alternative? I have no complete theory. I’m not so sanguine as to imagine a world without judgment would be better. Sometimes scolding is needed, sometimes ostracism is needed. There are countless people who, based on their wrongs, should no longer participate in public life. In the last few days, I’ve even personally publicly called for some people to be cast out of public life.

So what am I then insisting on? All I can say is that the high-handed, vicious-happy way judgment is it is done online, so confident in the difference between the judge and the accused, is bad.

I don’t have anything to say that hasn’t been said before. Consider others wisely. Do not rush into judgment even in grave cases. See others as large, morally capacious enough to have horrific flaws and beautiful virtues simultaneously. Recognise graduations of wrong even in grave cases. Treat punishment and sanction as a tragedy. Confirm your dedication to our collective wellbeing, and to the love of humanity, recognising that we are capacious enough to contain vast evil and still be worth love. See the sin, the horror, and the glory of moral agency. I have no clear rules to give, at least for now, perhaps because it is the pretence of clear rules that got us here. Maybe just read the Ballad of Reading County Gaol and see where it takes you.

One day, if we survive, we’re going to make it all better.

Further reading

Also, after this rather dark chapter, you might be interested in my Forgiving Everyone, article, in which I outline - in an unfinished academic article - why I think we should forgive everyone for everything they’ve ever done against us, or might have done against us, but for moral luck.

Disclosure: One paragraph in the above essay was written by an LLM; I was too depressed by the topic to chase it up myself. See if you can spot which.