Before you immediately Ctrl+w away from this essay to something less jarring, allow me to clarify a misconception or two, in hopes that you'll decide to stick around for the elaboration proper.
Now that we've gotten those assertions out of the way, let's begin again:
Evil doesn't exist.
As previously established, this is not to say that Things That Are Bad (broadly speaking) don't exist, or that things are only made Bad by people's reactions to them.
Rather, I have an entirely different argument: evil, as a state of being, doesn't exist.
There is no intrinsic property of "evil" baked into any mortal person.
There are, without a doubt, people whose actions have any number of negative traits (abusive, bigoted, toxic, morally reprehensible, the list goes on) but--and I say this as the target of many of such actions by the ruling class in my own country, and someone who unequivocally condemns all those perpetrated against others--those people are, at their deepest and most fundamental cores, not "evil".
Those people are scared.
Allow me to elaborate, in sequence.
We have taken as a prior that there are any number of things that make people's lives demonstrably worse.
Some of those are, quite simply, nobody's fault, and so we exclude from this discussion anything like natural disasters or building failures or all variety of freak accidents, as none of these are considered to have any component of human malice.
This leaves us with only those stressors visited upon people by each other, from as mundane as an unreturned shopping cart to as horrific as total war.
There is, obviously, a great deal of difference between the two ends of this spectrum, and so we further narrow the scope of our discussion to anything that causes actual, measurable harm to another, the sort of thing where "evil" as a descriptor of those who perpetrate it begins to crop up in deadly seriousness rather than just exasperated hyperbole.
(Needless to say, the exact location of this threshold can be highly subjective, and so I hope you'll allow me the expedience of handwaving for the sake of getting to the broader point.)
We have one more tier of this breakdown to navigate, which is that of stressors caused by individual actors rather than by systemic forces--though really, you'll see, these are in truth the same process leading to the same end, just with a more or less direct route--but first, we must go on a brief tangent to address outgroup phobias and the way in which they underlie all interactions between different populations.
Humans have something of a unique problem, at least on Earth.
For millions upon millions of years, sheer instinct was all that was necessary to survive both individually and collectively--you acquire food and water, you protect your group members from predation and starvation, you increase that group's numbers by reproducing, the individuals most suited to success in your environment provide for those less able, and so on and so forth.
Life was hard, being constantly on the edge between survival and death, only being guaranteed of the resources that your group personally had access to, but it was simple.
In many cases, different groups would have need of the same resources, and in the event that not enough was present to sustain all of them, conflict would arise because this scenario meant that another group using that resource implied your group could not--a zero-sum game.
Now, skip forward to the present day, with present technology.
Large-scale agriculture produces far more food than could ever be dreamed of by the most inventive Australopithecus afarensis, industrialization enables the creation of far more advanced tools and goods for far less expenditure of human time and safety, modern transportation enables the redistribution of commodities between entire landmasses such that it's taken for granted, buildings with heat and plumbing provide shelter and sustenance beyond anything possible earlier in history...you get the idea.
We live, fundamentally, in a post-scarcity world...at least in theory.
"But Rudy," you say, "there's still widespread hunger.
There are people being exploited in mines and sweatshops for the benefit of those on another continent whose hands have never blistered from the handle of a shovel and whose lungs have never burned with toxic fumes.
Every block of every major city has people sleeping on the street.
Every year another war over resources or land or ideology flares up and claims millions of lives in the most horrific ways imaginable. How can you say that everything is just fine?"
I never said that, as desperately as I wish it were the case.
Humanity as a whole has the capacity to meet all its needs and more as a result of its scientific achievements and unprecedented interconnectivity with itself.
However, untold tons of produce are left to rot in holes or used as fillers in things that don't need them, vast numbers of opulent houses and apartments lie vacant, dumpsters and landfills continue to overflow with otherwise salvageable goods, excess at every turn is simply abandoned in place or actively destroyed rather than being redistributed to those who would actually benefit from it.
Why? For the love of all decency, why?
Because for all its triumphs, for all its enlightenment, Homo sapiens still runs on the same hard-coded principles of zero-sum resource availability it started with.
Other people having things means that you don't get them, even if you already have more than you could ever possibly need, want, or use.
It's better to actively deny others the chance of survival in order to reduce competition, even if no such competition actually exists.
Every axis of difference between yourself and someone else is another way they can't be trusted to count you as part of their ingroup and therefore worth providing for or protecting.
The instinctual reptile brain has no concept of a social contract or of abundance freely given, only the Hobbesian "nasty, brutish, and short" life it evolved to live and has had no time to move past from an evolutionary standpoint.
As simply as possible, greed is fear in disguise.
This zero-sum lemma, as it were, enables us to proceed with the rest of the stressor progression. We left off at the split between individually- and systemically-caused hardships, with the acknowledgement that this is in some sense a false dichotomy since they both have the same ultimate result. Individual stressors may be inflicted in an attempt to relieve the actor's own burden--stealing money in order to afford food, for example, or treating others unfairly as a result of conditioned behaviors rooted in trauma responses--and thus, ultimately, reduce their fear. There are also, obviously, the individual hardships inflicted at the behest of or in order to enforce the will of systemic actors. These systems endeavor to offer a sense of security and hope for those who consider themselves part of their ingroup (regardless of whether or not this is the case), and therefore again are aimed toward the reduction of fear. Those in charge of the systems rather than being rank-and-file members are still, fundamentally, individuals in their own rights, and so will guide the system to behave in such a way as to alleviate their own fears for the welfare of themselves and their ingroup. Thus, every one of the stressors not previously excluded from this set is, at its most fundamental level, intended to reduce the fear of its agent.
There are an awful lot of different ways for your life to suck, so what can we possibly gain by lumping them all together, especially as differing degrees of directness of the instinctive fear for immediate survival? The complex answer is that there's a bit more to it than that, as will be explained eventually in the broader fear classification system I've been tinkering with for years, which expands far beyond the set of stressors this particular work is limited to. The simple answer is that fundamentally, all fear is regarding something that could happen in the future, be that future one year or one season or one second from now. This is a realm that is ultimately opaque to humans in its exact details, even if its broader strokes might be glimpsed obliquely by divination and logical extrapolation. Thus, beyond even the fear for physical survival, the simplest form of fear is that of the unknown.
At this point, those of us of a...shall we say Spookier nature, be that externally or internally defined, may have stumbled into a somewhat uncomfortable moral quandary.
What we are, fundamentally, is something that inspires fear.
We are unknowable, we are incomprehensible, we exist outside the bounds of what is deemed real or acceptable or human, and thus we are by definition fearsome.
In the shadows where those who dictate consensus reality tremble, we revel.
If you're scared, that's how we know we're doing it right.
...what, then, does this mean if we accept that fear is the root of all those things commonly construed as "evil"?
Were they right all along? Are we really, truly, fundamentally Bad People after all?
Consider the Solanum genus.
This botanical grouping contains many vital global food crops, such as potatoes, eggplants, and tomatoes, as well as numerous more regionally specific ones.
It also lends its name to solanine, a naturally pesticidal compound produced by members of this family--and, notably, a potent alkaloid, which in high enough doses can cause toxicity symptoms ranging from upset stomach all the way up to and including seizures and death.
It is at this point that one may notice that an awful lot of species within this genus have "nightshade" somewhere in the common name, especially when one branches out to other sibling taxa in its containing order Solanacea such as the sister genus Atropa--yes, as in Atropa belladonna, deadly nightshade, whose characteristic toxins (tropanes) can be used both as lifesaving antidotes to allergic reactions and nerve gas exposure...and, far more widely known, as powerful poisons.
These plants derive from a fairly close common ancestor, share the vast majority of their genetic material...you get the point.
Just because two things come from the same origin does not mean they are identical.
Eldritch/monstrous/spooky/what-have-you folk and practitioners are not inherently evil.
The tomato in your sandwich will not give you alkaloid poisoning.
Excellent question. We spent most of the past while asserting that there is a subset of all the stressors one can experience that, ultimately, all loop into the eventual goal of reducing the fear that spawned them, and that's the subset that gets labeled as "evil". We've essentially explained those as much as necessary for this argument, so now we turn our attention to the other set--those that are random, or mild annoyances, or otherwise not undertaken with this goal of self-soothing. Naturally, the first thing we must do to this fear-ological junk taxon of sorts is to start trying to characterize it meaningfully, in terms other than "--and the rest" a la Gilligan's Island. If not caused by another's efforts to assuage their own fear, then what purpose, exactly, do they serve?
As previously established, humans are a bit too smart for their own good.
Specifically, they're not particularly good at reconciling their internal and external circumstances--their instincts lag far behind their reality sometimes, when that reality has progressed far quicker than could have ever been expected evolutionarily.
Now, the reverse is also true, for there are humans whose smarts get a bit too far ahead of their reality, and fail to remember that they're still trapped in fragile mortal flesh, that there are creatures out there bigger and stronger than they are, that the entirety of their power is the equivalent of a mosquito bite in comparison to the vast time and cataclysm that the planet has experienced, that their knowledge is still only a tiny portion of the true scope of reality.
To take a more classical perspective, there are some key differences between humans and gods, and to act as though these weren't the case is what we can call hubris.
Of course, a little bit of being an arrogant bastard is necessary to get where you want in life, sometimes.
All manner of advances for humanity have been made by people getting too big for their proverbial britches and doing something objectively incredibly ill-advised, and then that thing working and becoming the foundation for a completely new avenue of inquiry.
There are, indeed, many cases where fortune favors the bold after all...and then, we're reminded that that aphorism came from Pliny just before he was killed in the eruption of Mt. Vesuvius, which he intentionally went back into after having had the chance to escape, for the sake of science or some friends' property depending on who you ask.
The benefit of foresight tells us that this was, obviously, an incredibly stupid idea, but the heat (figurative and literal) of the moment urged...also that this was, obviously, an incredibly stupid idea.
The post-survivalist life that most of humanity leads today has obscured the fact that there are some fears that are completely rational.
The instinct to avoid falling off a cliff or drowning in a stormy sea or being eaten by a bear is still a massively useful one, because those are all still things that will very much kill you as a denizen of a mortal flesh body, whether those are perils that are present in your life on a daily basis or not.
Intelligence doesn't protect you from being squashed in an earthquake, the tornado barreling towards your house doesn't particularly care how much money you have, and so on.
Humans are not invulnerable or immortal, no matter how much they enjoy pretending to be, and so the fears that remind them of that function as what I like to call a "hubris ceiling"--that is, in the words of a wise man, "your scientists were so preoccupied with whether they could that they didn't stop to ask whether they should."
Of course, the very fact of modern humanity's insulation from the sources of this sort of fear means that there's precious little of it going around to nudge society's progress into a slightly more sensible direction, and that's how we get things like building unimaginably vast metropolises in the middle of desert wastelands where access to water is very much not guaranteed (and then panicking about the completely foreseeable water shortages), or going to the bottom of the ocean in a submarine built to purposely ignore safety standards in the name of flouting "excessive regulation" (and then joining the victims at the site of the earlier instance of hubris you went down there to visit), or taking an ill-advised selfie with a bison at Yellowstone (and then immediately getting gored by said bison), and the like.
This type of fear, I would argue, is not only beneficial, but arguably necessary to a certain extent.
The final twig, so to speak, on the tree of our taxonomy of terror is the fears of those things which don't quite meet the criterion of causing a clear-cut harm should they come to pass--the more abstract fears, hinted at by the uncanny valley and illogical superstitions, the curious quiet dread instilled in many by liminal spaces, the indescribable petrification of sleep paralysis, and so forth. They come about from no conscious agency, they betoken no instinctive aversion to a mortal threat, they just strike something strange within the psyche that can't articulate exactly why something is wrong, only that it is--and that lack of knowledge in itself is cause for fear, as discussed at the end of section 1. This category is broad enough that it can't really be productively generalized any further, and the characterization we have at present is sufficient for our purposes, which you may well have forgotten about by now since I've spent so much time digressing on the different types of fear (I can hardly blame you, truthfully).
3000 words, give or take, is an awfully long time to spend defining different categories of fear--so, what's the point of it?
Put simply, the importance of drawing distinctions between the fear involved in what is erroneously called "evil" and that which isn't lies in the fact that the latter category is not the cause of any conscious agency on the part of an external stressor, and that these are often the fears invoked by those of us who align ourselves with the spooky, the monstrous, and the Dreadful.
These fears are not something that one does, they are something one is, and it is because of what we are that so many of us embrace these alienating qualities of self.
It is possible to take actions that augment the effect of these fears on others, but this is not malice--this is a creature existing as itself.
Only by the fact of Dread as something that exists in conversation with wider society does it seem to invite a moral connotation that a cat being a cat or a bear being a bear does not--indeed, it is more like the judgement inherently passed on the existence of species considered to be beneath humanity and less worthy of life, such as insects or rats or other "pest" species, because the situation of their existence as adjacent to this moralizing consciousness is their only crime.
Proximity to death, as a detritivore or a psychopomp, is a trait that exists on its own.
The attaching of connotations of evil and impurity to this trait does not.
Physical bodies unlike those of specific primates in shape or sustenance or function are natural (and indeed the norm, statistically speaking).
Denigration and alienation based on the facts of those bodies is not.
Wildly different existential paradigms and models of consciousness to those of "standard" humans arise from the circumstances and natures of the creatures that bear them just as logically as those to which they stand in comparison.
The use of this comparison as a value judgement is anything but logical.
I don't want to have to scroll all the way back up to see what I've covered so far. You don't want to have to scroll all the way back up to see what the hell I'm talking about. For both our sakes, a recap of things as they currently stand:
Fear may be the underpinning of what's classified as "evil", but is also arguably the antidote to it.
Set aside all the "evils", and consider only the "positive" fears--that is, the hubris ceilings and the abstract fears, as previously defined.
These are very real psychologically, but as they've been defined here, their actual physical consequences are minimal for the average person.
This balance, this sort of suspension of concrete effects even in the presence of purely internal fear, leaves a space for the unexpected to happen with relatively little risk, and this space is that in which the Dreadful flourishes and does its work.
Recall the assertion from earlier that the most fundamental fear is that of the unknown future.
Specifically, the presence of fear implies the possibility that this future will hold something that is, in some way, bad--otherwise, there'd be nothing to worry about.
Evolution comes into play again here, because one of the things that's gotten the broad category of Creatures With Brains this far is the fact that those brains tend to greatly skew toward focusing on these hypothetical negative outcomes out of an abundance of caution--focusing on them, in fact, to the exclusion of nearly all else...including potential positive outcomes.
The expectation of neutrality under normal circumstances becomes the expectation of negativity under fearful ones--and thus, crucially, the subversion of expectations becomes something inherently positive.
The mechanism here is essentially one of context.
Imagine, for the sake of illustration, that you're the sort of person who likes warm weather, and that you're experiencing the end of summer, approaching the beginning of fall.
Assuming a predictable temperate climate (unfortunately becoming more and more of a rarity these days, but bear with me), you've been enjoying the clement summer all this time, but now there's starting to be a bit of a chill in the air later in the day, perhaps even the occasional cold snap, and the average overall temperature is starting to drop out of your comfort zone.
It's come time to wear layers, and start adjusting the heater, and to pay attention to whether the temperature will fall below freezing at night, and so forth.
Then, as often happens, summer rallies again with one last burst of warmth for a week or two, a far cry from its former glory but still a welcome change from the encroaching cold.
If a day like this were to happen at the height of summer, it would feel almost chilly, but in its place in the transition to fall, it's downright balmy, despite the fact that it would be the same temperature either way.
It is both a memory of past warmth, and a reminder that cold is not the only weather to ever exist--it will take months, but your favored temperatures will return again eventually.
Similarly, the addition of the context of fearful uncertainty to any circumstance brings down the baseline level of expected outcomes such that even the most mundane and completely predictable thing that would be unremarkable under normal conditions becomes something wondrous when it replaces that uncertainty with its blessedly benign reality.
Now, crucially, there is one significant difference between the changing of the seasons and the cultivation of positive fears, of Dread.
The cycle from summer through fall to winter through spring and back to summer is an inevitable consequence of Earth's orbit and axial tilt with respect to the Sun.
Its outcomes will always be more or less the same within a certain margin of error, and no human action can keep it from progressing through its course--even as the world gets warmer and storms get stronger, nothing short of an utter nuclear catastrophe can change the course of the Earth through space, and so these orbital and axial effects on local conditions will never go away.
A meteor may cause a summerless year by filling the atmosphere with dirt and debris to block the Sun's heat, but this is still only an additional layer of temporary circumstance over the unchanging fundamental cycle, and the Earth keeps on spinning long after the dust has settled.
Conversely, conditions of fear, in arguably all cases except natural disasters, are not inevitable.
All non-environmental fears have an element of agency somewhere in their past, where someone chose to do the things that created them--intentionally or not.
They are not enforced by the immutable laws of nature, but by the massively tangled snarl of causality created by conscious agents interacting with and affecting each other through their separate wills.
There are absolutely sections of this chaotic pile of interdependencies that, due to time and friction and outside influences, have matted together into nigh-impenetrable masses that pull on everything around them and shrink the set of all possible arrangements of strands in this space down to only the ones that preserve these anchoring clots of current conditions.
Collectively, these mats form the ossified status quo of society, keeping everything firmly in place through their individual institutions of capitalism, patriarchy, colonialism, and the like...but they are ultimately comprised of strands all the same, and those strands had to get into that configuration through some inherently reversible process of tangling.
When the right ends are freed, friction is reduced to the greatest extent possible, and those doing the work are just incredibly, unbelievably, impossibly stubborn...any knot can be untangled.
And, as a certain story teaches us, any knot that we become fed up with untangling can still be cut.
Capital-D Dread, as used by myself and my colleagues, is what finds the ends of these metaphorical strands and starts working them back through and out of the tangle to restore them to freedom--and, failing that, what readies its sword and takes a swing at the whole blasted affair.
It forces acknowledgement of the capacity for change.
When the current situation is hopelessly locked in place under the restraints of its own horrid mess, Dread is what starts dismantling it in the only way it can be--through manipulating what it can, and breaking the hold of what it cannot.
If I was at all right about your thought processes in section 1 when discussing the nonexistence of evil, you're most likely aware that the current status quo for the majority of conscious language-capable beings on this planet right now is...pretty shit, in all honesty.
The state of things is the expectation of all those living it, and that expectation largely sucks at the moment.
We could all use a little subversion of expectations given the situation, yes? Yes.
Generally, there are two ways of going about this that naturally come to pass when one exists as some degree of spooky in proximity to other people.
Depending on the timeframe and type of exposure, one possibility is that their expectation is subtly changed by the fact of your presence, to something less mundane and much stranger than the grim consensus reality it's largely trapped in otherwise.
Whatever it is, it's confusing, it's weird, it's unknown, and therefore it's a new variety of fear instituting a new baseline from which any deviation is considered positive, as explained earlier.
The other possibility is that when your effect on them is less subtle and more immediate, this shifting of the baseline is bypassed altogether, and now you are the subversion of expectations--that is, the expectations of mundanity.
You have now become the positive deviation from the inherently negative status quo, and at this point, you may realize that what you're engendering may not quite be properly considered "fear" at all--it's hope, perhaps even capital-W Whimsy in the sense currently being studied by some certain strange and spooky folk who have taken it as their mission to spread this bafflement far and wide as a force for change through wondrous confusion.
You are living, breathing proof that there exist things beyond the bleak consensus reality imposed by the humans arrogant enough to proclaim themselves the "powers that be".
Others now understand that the weird walks amongst them, and offers an alternative to that which keeps them in misery...and, if they follow it on its path, it may lead them somewhere better.
There are far more things in Heaven and on Earth than are dreamt of in Horatio's philosophy.
You are one of them, and the fact of your existence asks him: "What else lies beyond?
What other seemingly inviolable norms are, in truth, artificial?
Is there, somewhere, something better than that which has been forced upon you?"
As I've explained in the past, we will not be saved if not by the bizarre.
When the going gets weird, the weird turn pro--and if the going isn't weird enough yet, well, then that's step 1, isn't it?
I started writing this piece before the 2024 US presidential election.
I'm finishing it...afterwards.
Right now, the air purifier whirs in the other room to mitigate the wildfire smoke drifting in from the next state over.
My mother has been messaging me on a daily basis about possible plans to get me out of the country to somewhere less hostile to my existence.
My roommate is out celebrating a friend's first anniversary of hormone replacement therapy, while posts are already circulating online about the potential for banning trans healthcare.
And I'm here, tapping away at an argument for a kind of ethics that perhaps a double-digit number of people have ever thought about before in their life, let alone have any interest in reading thousands upon thousands of words about.
The truth is, a little less than a week ago, this stopped being a work of ethical justification for me, and became a moral obligation.
I'm not socially adept enough to organize protests, or physically fit enough for confrontations with law enforcement.
I'm not well-connected enough to spread the word about human rights abuses or share crowdfunding campaigns for refugees, or even to put together a mutual aid group.
My work doesn't pay me enough to donate much of anything to anyone when I can barely keep myself fed, but takes too much out of me to leave any energy for volunteering.
...but by gods, I know how to be strange on the Internet, and that's what I'm going to do.
The freaks are the bane of conservatism, and conservatism is the banner these bastards have chosen to fly as they stomp over our rights and our lives.
This is the time to be a beacon for those who need one, and to strike fear into the hearts of those who deserve it--and truthfully, I'm making this argument to myself just as much as to anyone reading this, because how else are we supposed to carry on?
What the fascists want is for us to be suffocated into our rightful "sane" servile cisgender heterosexual places in their abhorrent Christo-nationalist diorama.
I deny them that satisfaction by continuing to live as the incomprehensible queer nonhuman anarchist witch I am, and I'm dragging all of you out of this dystopian hellscape with me.
We've survived this shit once, and I swear to you from the depths of my soul, we're going to fucking do it again.