The Root of Evil (Part 1)

The root of evil as the desire for control

This will be the first part of a series on the “root of evil.” In this installment, I will draw on existentialist thought—specifically the works of Simone de Beauvoir and Frantz Fanon—to argue that the psychological mechanism at the root of evil is closer to home than we might think. In the next one or two parts (I haven’t decided yet how many there will be), I will explore how certain widely accepted ways of knowing, often regarded as “common sense” in our culture, are in fact a result of this same psychological mechanism. My primary intention with this series is to provoke skepticism, or at the very least, critical reflection on widely held cultural assumptions that, in my opinion, are grounded in objectification and dehumanization

If I asked a large sample size of people what they thought evil was, there would likely be a few common answers: the Holocaust, genocide, slavery, and segregation, to name just a few. When we learn of these atrocities in history class, it is natural to distance ourselves from their perpetrators, to imagine that one who can perform such an act must be a different species of human, with an inner world we cannot even conceive of, let alone imagine inhabiting. Although I am sure most of us would not be capable of committing such atrocities, I am not so confident that the way of thinking and being that snowballs into such atrocities when placed within certain conditions is as foreign to us as we would like to think.

Simone de Beauvoir, an existentialist philosopher and one of the founding figures in modern feminism, suggests that evil does not begin with an extreme form of hatred or prejudice but with an inner psychological movement that we are likely all familiar with. She writes:

“Every time transcendence lapses into immanence, there is the degradation of existence into ‘in-itself,’ of freedom into facticity; this fall is a moral fault if the subject consents to it; if this fall is inflicted on the subject, it takes the form of frustration and oppression; in both cases, it is an absolute evil.”

To understand this quote, we first need a bit of background on French existentialist thought and terminology. One of the great insights of French existential thought is that our identity is not something we internally decide upon in the controlled privacy of our minds. Rather, our identity is a function of how we concretely orient ourselves to our environment and the beings in that environment, and how those beings respond to that orientation. For example, from an existentialist point of view, someone is only truly a teacher if they act like a teacher in relation to students, and those students legitimize that behavior as valid by treating them like a teacher. For Simone de Beauvoir, identity must be acted out in a social context and affirmed by the behavior of those who inhabit that social context. Identity is not something one decides upon as an individual but something one’s entire community acts out together.

This way of thinking does not view human identity as a static, fixed phenomenon but as a dynamic, ever-changing process. The identities of beings in a community are in continuous flux because those identities are a function of the constantly changing behavior, attitudes, and interactions of the entire community. This is why de Beauvoir refers to humans as “transcendence.” In any given moment the individual transcends any notion of a fixed identity as they are required to continuously choose anew how to participate in the dynamic process of identity co-creation with those around them, never arriving at any final, fixed, and unchanging state or nature.

Evil occurs for de Beauvoir when one individual or group attempts to collapse this dynamic, ever-changing, and mutually interdependent process of identity co-creation into a fixed structure of identity relationships, usually for that individual or group’s personal gain. Let’s return to the teaching example to understand how this would work. In an ideal situation, the students treat the teacher as a teacher because that individual has valuable information and teaches that information effectively. The students naturally and freely adopt the role of learners, as this particular identity configuration allows the classroom as a whole to flourish. However, this is not how all classrooms function. If the teacher is not committed to performing their job with excellence, their only recourse is to resort to authoritative imposition—fixing their own or the students' roles and identities within their minds and then forcefully imposing that role upon the situation through power and control.

This reification of one’s own identity or the identity of another through the use of power and force is what de Beauvoir refers to as the “lapse into immanence.” A “transcendence” turns into an “immanence” when one thinks of oneself or another as a fixed object that maintains its rigid identity regardless of how many times their actions, attitudes, or social context change and transform. This “absolute evil” of reifying and freezing identity denies an individual or group the right to participate in the communal web of meaning creation, instead fixing them with an essence that they cannot change no matter how they act, think, or orient themselves in the world.

Another existentialist thinker, Frantz Fanon, illuminates an important dimension of this process of “evil.” He writes:

“If it is true that consciousness is a process of transcendence, we have to see too that this transcendence is haunted by the problems of love and understanding… he has to give up projecting onto the world an antinomy that coexists with him.”

Here, Fanon points out that it is, in fact, impossible to only fix and stabilize our own identity; the desire to fix our own identity necessarily leads us to fix and reify the identity of others. Since we gain our identity—and the social privileges or lack of privileges that identity comes with—within a context of relationships with others, we can only fix our own identity by fixing and controlling the entire structure of relationships in which that identity gains its function and meaning. Or, in Fanon’s words, we must project an “antinomy onto the world.”

For example, in presenting ourselves as intelligent or virtuous, we must frame those who are different from us as unintelligent or unvirtuous. Fanon does not mean to imply that we cannot be virtuous or intelligent. However, to embody these qualities, we must choose in each moment to act that way anew, never arriving at a final, fixed notion of a “virtuous self” but instead renewing our commitment to the embodiment of virtue in each moment. If we want to avoid this constant and never-ending process of embodied adaptation and instead fix virtue, intelligence, or any quality we identify as an unchanging aspect of our character, we must deny all others the possibility of transforming the relational web of meaning in which that identity gains its significance. In this way, Fanon suggests that we cannot fix and reify our own identity without fixing and reifying the identity of everyone around us.

Fanon wrote this while observing the obvious evils of a racialized, segregated colonial state. In this context, the fixed identity structure of the white, rational, civilized colonizer in contrast to the nonwhite, uncivilized, savage colonized justified and maintained a power structure that allowed the colonizer to economically exploit and often enslave the colonized population. Although most of us would never support such a state of affairs, if we are honest with ourselves we may find that often participate in the same way of thinking. We might frame our modern scientific beliefs as more “rational” than what we see as “irrational” religious or mystical commitments. We might consider a friend or partner as “caught in their emotions” in contrast to ourselves, a balanced and put-together individual. We may think of ourselves as inhabiting the “right” religious traditions, closing ourselves off to learning from all those who are “wrong.” In all cases, we present ourselves as the absolute “knower” who understands others better than they understand themselves and, in this sense, participates in the same logic that has justified racism, genocide, and slavery. Existentialist thought suggests that this desire to control the uncontrollable is the seed that, when placed in particular sets of conditions, leads to some of the worst atrocities humanity has committed.

It is because our identity and our social position are never fully in our own hands, that human beings are haunted by the problems of love and understanding. It is natural to desire control and certainty in a world where our social identity and social role can affect our self-esteem, our social capital, and even the regularity of our meals. However, De Bevouir and Fanon point out that the cost of submitting to this desire for control can easily become our humanity itself. A subtle act of reification and objectification in one corner of the pulsating web of interconnectedness that undergirds all life sweeps throughout the entire network, draining its vitality and life. The only way to live without sacrificing our humanity, Fanon suggests, is to commit to love and understanding; to trust in the ability to make and continually remake our sense of self and world with our fellow beings as each new context and situation requires, resisting the temptation to keep our identity, our world, and our social position within the realm of our control.

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