Next-door Neighbor Evil

My next-door neighbor is evil.

Was he born that way? No, he wasn't. But it grew in him.

Often people ask themselves this question: where does evil come from? Where do those horrific folks whose names are infame get their start, so to speak, in evil?

I declare the answer to you today.

Virtually all evil, whether great or small, grows from one seed: immaturity.

Everyone is throwing up their hands right now, saying, "Oh, there you go again Elliott! Being melodramatic and overly-critical!" If that describes you, go ahead and go back to Facebook. You probably won't enjoy reading this. I won't be offended if you don't finish, I promise :)

Think of this: is anybody BORN evil? Is there anyone that truly is born completely, wholly, and helplessly enslaved by the devil to do his will? No. That doesn't happen. We're all born on a roughly equal footing. (Anybody who thinks otherwise has not dedicated enough time and attention to the subject, and should think more along the lines of propensities and perversions of positivities than those along which he has heretofore been thinking.)

Evil GROWS in us. But how does it develop?

It NEVER comes and knocks on the door and says, "Hi, I'm Evil. May I come in?" We all know that. Yet despite knowing that, we still are completely ignorant of it!

The seeds of evil are in us, and they find shafts of sunlight throughout our lives from which they can nourish themselves. As mentioned above, the most common hole through which the light can shine (if not the only one; I can't deny that it's possible, but I haven't been able to plumb this thing all the way to its depth yet, so I don't know what awaits me at the bottom) is immaturity. Immaturity, if properly staunched and disposed of, can be virtually harmless. But the first acts of evil an eventually evil person commits are born, not from evil motives, but form an immature need for attention, or love, or some other (typically) positive thing. Gratifying this immaturity (so often emotional!) gives the first growths to the fledgling seedling.

If left unchecked, this immaturity outlet will grow in size, until more and more light and rain pours in on the evil seeds and helps them to grow into sprouts.

It is very hard to catch this before the process gains too much momentum, because so often an evil person doesn't realize it's going on. One typically doesn't stop as he's about his business and say aloud, "I'm going to kill that man," or "I'm going to rape that woman," or "I'm going to destroy this boy's reputation." They are much more likely to think to themselves, "He needs to be stopped before he talks," or "I need to have this, I need it," or "I'm going to tell my girlfriends what this boy did to me because that will make me feel better, will give me emotional gratification." Thus, evil acts are committed without overtly evil intentions. Does this make them any better? No. Evil is evil is evil. (I'm not saying that there aren't overtly, brazenly evil people out there. There are. There are those who know exactly what they're doing and don't care. Murderers and rapists are more likely to belong to this category, though it's not guaranteed, so those first two examples were perhaps not optimal. At any rate, I'm not writing about people who can baldly self-admit their evil, because they are less of a threat to society and, especially, to you. To paraphrase Michael Savage, a do-gooder will hang you faster than a thug any day.)

The kicker is that if those immaturities are condoned--if excuses are made for the actions because so-and-so is a "really nice person," or has had a really rough life," etc. (you might balk at the idea of excuses flying about for murderers and rapists, but believe me, the phenomenon happens on all levels and for all types of evil), the perpetrator--the budding evil person--is harmed, not helped, because their outlet for evil is allowed to grow. The best possible favor you can do for someone whose seeds are beginning to get a little too much light is not to allow them to use you to tear the gap wider. Tolerating their evil acts, allowing yourself to be their punching bag, does you, them, and everybody a disservice.

This is how overtly evil people come to be. As they grew, immaturities did not leave their system but were allowed to fester. Excuses were made, both in their own heads and, likely, by others that knew that "at heart" they were "good."

I use folks like Lucifer of Hitler as examples of evil. The thing is, you don't have to become a Hitler or a serial killer to be overtly, truly evil. Remember the principles outlined in the blog post Evils of Men vs. Evils of Women? In there I talked about how the reason one sees less women committing violent crime and other forms of overt evil, etc, that men more often commit, is not because the entire female gender is in a statistically significant way less evil than men, but because the evils of women have different manifestations because women are inherently different than men. Just as two different people will have two different favorite books or two different ways to express love or happiness, they will also have different ways of being evil.

These differences exist between virtually identical people, between the sexes as outlined, and also between classes and societies. Some evil people are easy to recognize because they are put in positions that give their evil much clout. Hitler is obviously the vastly-overused prime example of this. He was an evil man, did evil things, and had evil things done with his influence. But what if Hitler hadn't become Chancellor? What if he had lived out his life as a middle-class working German? Granted, there is some truth to the concept that "power corrupts, and absolute power corrupts absolutely," but not so much as to make it the sole or even dominant factor. I declare to you that if Hitler had not been chancellor, and had been a regular German Joe, he would have still, in all likelihood, been an evil man. He would buy his hot dogs in packets of eight just like you (so to speak), put his pants on one leg at a time just like you, enjoy watching sports and reading a good book just like you... in fact, he would be just like youy, but he would still be evil. It is not power and riches that make men evil, but evil that does it.

In short, he would have been an evil next-door neighbor.

Some people wonder why I'm so paranoid when it comes to people, or why I have such high expectations (I prefer to call them "standards") for something as routine as friendship. Well, now you see (at least partially) why. I see evil all around me. I eat it and drink it. I inhale it. I shake hands with it. I sell it tile. I do the homework it assigns me. I live under its ominous shadow at all times.

What's even worse is that it lives in me! (Don't think that I sit here astride my high and noble steed pointing my bourgeois finger at you proletariats. I count myself among the ranks of people with evil seeds, and sometimes I catch myself giving them too much sunlight.)

I see evil and seeds of evil all around me in people who are, for the moment, perfectly "good" people--and I use the term purely for the sake of mutual understanding because I know that's the term you'd use and I know that's how you use it because I hear you do it all the time.

We need to accept the fact that the rich and powerful aren't the evil ones--we ALL are. They merely have more sway, and thus their evil is very easy to see. (That, by the way, puffs up rather sanctimoniously and dangerously the "little" evil guys.) I declare to you that it is possible for a poor man to be even more greedy and depraved than a hedge-fund owner, for my next-door neighbor in the suburbs to be as manipulative and evil as a dictator, for the gossipy girl I go to school with to drink the same brand of blackness as that guy I saw on the news last night.

Words mean things. So do actions. (Remember my post on the Motive Enigma? Now you see what I mean when I say that, to a certain extent, in a certain way, motives aren't important?) We are in a world of action. Evil acts are evil acts. Good people, truly good people, do evil things all the time completely inadvertently. But what we need to worry about is those good people who, as time goes on, continue to use "innocent" immaturities as outlets for wickedness that they garnish with excuses. Evil is so clever at getting out. It will twist virtue into a crowbar with which to extract itself out. It will even use sin, it's congruence, as a cross upon which to sanctimoniously raise itself above the crowd in order selfishly to gain attention. It will even adopt "good" causes and use them to manipulate, twist, and scheme, thus growing itself. We must not be fooled by next-door neighbor evil! We must not make excuses for those of us--especially ourselves--who do sketchy, a-little-bit-not-good things but who have "good reason" to. ("Oh, so-and-so has had a really rough life, you'll have to forgive him," or "They just got over something really hard," or any of a littany of innocent-sounding excuses sewn from the foulest of tarnished yarn. You know the type.)

Take it from someone who has seen more evil at the hands of regular Joes than he has ever seen roll out of the halls of Congress or the offices of Wall Street. Take it from someone who has had lots of opportunities to go down the evil road and chose not to over and over again, even when the price was steep and stifling. Take it from someone who has a whole spread of excuses from his past he could pull out evilly to use as excuses, or to use evilly in and of themselves. There is no such thing as a predisposing condition so strong it is insurmountable. There is no 100% excuse for evil. The devil wasn't born in a test tube, and he doesn't raise up his followers that way either. He pulls them from our ranks. Our neighbors are evil. I am evil. You are evil. He is. She is. It's time we accepted that and acted in accordance. Happiness and light await us just around the corner if we do.