“…it is quite within the bounds of possibility for a man to recognise the relative evil of his nature, but it is a rare and shattering experience for him to gaze into the face of absolute evil.”
– Carl Jung
Understanding the nature of evil at a deep level is a vital part of shadow work, individuation and the self-knowledge journey. Yet few people, if asked, can offer a sound and consistent description of what ‘evil’ actually is.
No problem is so important to address and yet so widely misunderstood and contentious.
One reason for this shortfall is that understanding evil cannot be reduced to an intellectual exercise. It is largely through your encounters with evil that you come to understand what good really is. You cannot develop a true and thorough understanding of evil simply from reading a book or blog post alone. You have to come to know it through experience.
A second and related reason is our culture’s fixation with outer appearances and its general disconnection from itself. We live in an age of Piscean confusion and obsession with outer particulars to the near total denial of an implicit or unconscious realm. If it doesn’t ‘look like’ my impression of evil, it must be good. It hardly occurs to anyone that there might be underlying principles at play, let alone the role of the unconscious mind in how all of this plays out. The moment you try to pin evil down it simply morphs.
While evil cannot be captured in a list of specific actions, it does carry certain hallmarks that follow logically from what it is at its core, and that unmistakably reveal its true workings. In this post I will outline four of these irreducible hallmarks of evil.
The unconscious itself is not evil or equivalent to it, and neither is the shadow, but clearly there is a relationship. This is one reason why it is not possible to truly understand evil from within a purely materialist frame of reference or without an understanding of the unconscious. It is necessary to bring on board psychological knowledge.
Making sense of the undeniable evil he saw in the world in the 20th century was a key theme wrestled with by Carl Jung, especially in the latter half of his career. No longer could he suppose that evil was merely the privation of good, let alone that evil in the world is necessarily just the result of ‘your projection.’ This tussle continues in the depth psychology world even today, but in many places seems to be not only stuck but moving backwards. The existence of evil may be recognised, but not explained or defined. Or, worse, ignored completely for fear of being accused of ‘projecting’ or ‘judging.’
Many modern systems of shadow work dwell endlessly on one largely misinterpreted aspect of Jung’s work in asserting that the primary task is to reclaim negative projections—that what you see as negative or evil in others is necessarily just a reflection of your own negativity. Aside from being a self-contradictory thesis (are its proponents not subject to their own ideas and thus undermining their own powers of discernment?), and failing to explain where such negativity comes from in the first place (apparently it’s just inexplicably ‘yours’), Jung never actually said this. In fact his later work proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that he did not regard evil as merely the badness which you just project onto others.
While there is some important truth to this form of projection as a window into shadow work, and it must be explored, these systems tend to overlook the crucial opposite side of the equation—the projection of goodness onto others when that isn’t the full picture—and never do they explain what evil is supposed to be and consist of beyond that which one apparently judges to be evil. It is this very assumption of goodness that gets well-meaning individuals involved in such corrupt coaching relationships. Duality makes no exception for projection. So which is the greater requisite for evil in our world? At what degree of empathy is someone more likely to be subject to which kind of projection? And who is more likely to take to heart such unfalsifiable claims made about their character?
Another irony is that philosophy on this point was already well advanced long before even Jung came on the scene. The most valuable and well-thought through theory of evil is arguably that of the German idealist Friedrich Wilhelm Schelling particularly his 1809 essay ‘Philosophical Inquiries into the Essence of Human Freedom’ (‘The Freedom Essay’ for short). It is regrettable how little interest many thinkers, psychologists and philosophers today have in his work. Sadly this is reflective of the modern world’s lack of interest in understanding evil and freedom.
Integrating an understanding of evil is not only part of shadow work—it is the logical end point of all shadow work, and with it an understanding of true good. The integration of the many hidden parts of yourself means deeply understanding in what ways they are good and in what ways they are evil. Every aspect of ourselves, every trait and ability, has both a light side and a dark side, which all humans can understand intuitively. The ultimate synthesis of all of this is an integrated knowledge of what light and dark, good and evil, mean in and of themselves.
Duality makes no exception for shadow work either. Inner work is outer work and vice versa, and if (inner) shadow work is coming to terms with that which renders you uncomfortable in yourself, then outer shadow work is coming to terms with that which is uncomfortable in the world. Both are necessary, and both lead to an integrated understanding of evil.
So while you cannot simply outsource the need to integrate your encounters with evil, there is a place for discussing it and offering concepts that will allow you to spot evil and understand and make sense of it.
On one hand simply knowing what evil ‘looks like’ won’t be of any use where understanding remains unintegrated. Evil can be illustrated in terms of particulars, for example: ‘Murder is evil, especially when the victim is a child, and/or it comes in the form of genocide.’ But much of what evil does is not so coarse and forceful as this. You can describe what evil ‘looks like’ with as many examples as you like, but this still doesn’t tell you what evil is. All evil has to do is simply not ‘look like evil,’ and your conviction that you know what evil looks like will be precisely what prevents you from seeing it.
Alternatively evil can be understood in terms of its underlying principles. This is more definitive and crucial to understand in the end for truly knowing evil. But principles without experience are too abstract on their own and will also fall short in practically helping people to spot evil when they see it. Evil is the ultimate self-contradiction (as visualised by the Dissonance Loop of the Shadow Map); it is ‘the use of freedom to violate freedom’ and it is a lack of genuine empathy. But again, where an understanding of evil is unintegrated, these assessments help mostly in retrospect. That makes them valuable for processing and healing from your encounters, but limited in the absence of experience. Again, if evil reframes itself as something good and integration is lacking, you won’t recognise what you are seeing as a lack of empathy or an abuse of freedom.
Naturally though, because evil can be reduced to principles, and isn’t just something subjective or arbitrary, it cannot hide forever. There are certain observable hallmarks that evil always contains, arising logically by virtue of what it is. Evil itself is also capable of recognising these hallmarks. It can always try to move, shift and change forms to make itself appear otherwise, but it ultimately cannot avoid demonstrating these four hallmarks because of its own internal structure.
So this post will not attempt to get at evil by presenting a definitive list of ‘evil acts,’ but through discussing four ‘recognisable principles.’ These principles are logically consistent, progress naturally, and serve as both practical clues and modes for understanding this difficult subject. The idea is not to remove the need for integration but to provide a tool for doing it.
These four hallmarks also go some way to delineating the difference between evil and merely doing harm. Not all forms of harmful behaviour contain the hallmarks I am about to share. So if what you observe in others and the world doesn’t contain these hallmarks, then it may be harmful, but it might not necessarily be evil. However, wherever evil is, these hallmarks will be too. They therefore serve as a kind of practical middle way for understanding evil while also recognising it in actuality—one that is neither too abstract to relate to real experience, nor so concrete that evil can easily hide, reframe or escape through fakery.
1) Evil is completely committed to its disfunction
Evil is committed interminably to its disfunction and maintaining its self-contradiction as far as metaphysically possible. It does not meaningfully change, not even when met with severe consequences for its actions.
When it is thwarted in its efforts, it can only render the experience as indicative of a weakness in its strategy or approach toward getting what it wants. As far as it is concerned, it is the consequences it experiences that are the real problem—they are what need to be mitigated. Its only issue with itself is that it just wasn’t skilful enough—not that it could be experiencing the inexorable result of its own fundamental split playing out. It necessarily assumes that all problems and setbacks it encounters are rooted in something outside of itself—All evil needs to do is find some ‘hack’ or adjust course to work around such consequences in future—not to examine itself and resolve the conflict that gave rise to those consequences in the first place. It never becomes more honest upon being held to account, only more convoluted in its deception.
Like a crazed, villainous dictator holding out in its bunker as its reckoning closes in, it dives to deeper and deeper levels of insanity, doubling down on its grandiose self-narrative to the bitter end in spite of all evidence to the contrary. It is willing to deny reality to such an extent that, ultimately, reality must deny it. To a narcissist, reality is an aggression.
In psychological terms, evil is so attached to its self-image that it has decided on the deepest level that it is never going to let it go. It seeks, in the words of Schelling, to become a ‘self-creating ground’ with ‘the power to rule over all things,’ deluding itself that this can be achieved and confusing itself for God. It ignores the truth that its very existence depends on the natural order it attempts to deny.
This is the core feature of evil from which all its other hallmarks and behaviours manifest, and what makes it fundamentally different from other disruptive or harmful behaviour. This is another way of saying that it lacks empathy, self-reflection and a willingness to genuinely take responsibility (Habit 1 of the Seven Habits of Individuation). But this lack of capacity for change is, paradoxically, also grounded in choice, and a refusal to engage with the very natural order that makes its own existence, and freedom to violate it, possible.
It’s not that evil doesn’t change—it does adapt and change, but it doesn’t meaningfully connect and dialectically transform with anything outside of itself. So while it still engages in a kind of development, the object of circumambulation is not truth but its own alienated self.
This is the ultimate non-negotiable point for evil. Everything is rendered in terms and in service of this pre-existing self-image, with no consideration to anything else. It does not realise that what it must encounter in the world is also a function of itself, beyond the ego, and is therefore necessary to be reconciled with for any meaningful self-knowledge to occur. This is why, in Jung’s words, “the inflated ego is incapable of understanding contemporary events,” because it can not separate its own self-serving assumptions from what it sees.
It lacks all empathy—the willingness to meet and transform with experience—not only for others but fundamentally for itself. It is unwilling to truly engage with itself. And there is all the difference between having some propensity for empathy, even a minimal amount, vs. none.
2) It is willing to commit unlimited harm
If left unchecked, evil will do incalculable harm. It carries no self-imposed limit on the amount of harm it is prepared to commit.
Practically speaking, just as there is a profound difference between having some empathy vs. none, there is all the difference in the world between having some propensity to do harm vs. having no limits whatsoever. This difference is not merely of magnitude but of a fundamentally different quality. Left unchecked it could indeed be the end of the world.
There is no limit to the harm evil is prepared to do because its actions are a compensation for a content that is unconscious, must remain so, and is therefore effectively infinite and indeterminate. The unconscious cannot be measured. Its effects can be, but only to the extent that they are made conscious. Therefore compensations to immovable unconscious content are also unlimited. No compensation is too great for something that remains undefined. Their buried pain is a psychological black hole, seeking to subjugate all the world and everything else to it and its project of self-avoidance. As long as it refuses to acknowledge the inner tension or the meaningful existence of anything beyond itself, this tension must play out in the world outside of it.
This also gives rise to the phenomenon of projection—not exclusively the domain of evil but certainly a core part of its modus operandi, and taken to a pathological extreme far beyond that of the healthy, dialectical individual. Projection is one of evil’s primary features precisely because it must constantly bat away the very things that make it uncomfortable about itself, unwittingly revealing in every comment what it itself is doing.
Rather than make the matter conscious it must be kept unconscious at all costs. This is what produces the recognisable response of ‘narcissistic rage’—recognisable at least if you’ve seen it before, but potentially traumatic to the empathic person who hasn’t, or doesn’t have the concepts to understand it and its destructive effects.
While an otherwise healthy person may engage in tit-for-tat, they eventually realise that ‘enough is enough.’ Evil, however, will do whatever it takes to placate its dissonance and will kill you for any perceived slight. It will slaughter a billion people just for the extra comfort of putting its feet up. It lives by the Machiavellian principle that “the injury that is to be done to a man ought to be of such a kind that one need not fear his revenge.”
Your well-being in and of itself is not even of the tiniest consideration. It is interested in your welfare only insofar as this serves utility towards its own grandiose endeavours and only for this reason. The moment you are no longer useful, any apparent ‘concern’ it had will be discarded along with you. This is when evil starts to ‘look like’ evil. In truth it secretly detests your happiness and wishes to destroy it out of nothing but spite and jealousy.
3) It steals, twists and weaponises goodness
Distorting what is essentially good is another of evil’s primary hallmarks. Such is its lack of any real aspiration for goodness, that evil, when it sees good, regards it not merely as neutral or irrelevant but as positively ripe for exploitation.
What then, is ‘goodness?’ In practical terms, the ‘hallmarks of goodness’ can be considered as the opposite of these four hallmarks of evil.
- Goodness is not committed to any disfunction. Goodness is never perfect in practice and may appear dysfunctional at times, but at some point it embraces tension and the self-reflective nature of mind. It knows on some deep level that it could not exist without either. It responds to feedback, not just adapting pragmatically and selfishly, but transforming through meaningful change, rooted in an empathic interaction with itself and the world around it. Practically this might even ‘look like’ empathy and compassion, and a willingness to work effectively for both itself and others.
- Just as harmfulness is not the same as evil, good is not the same as harmless. But goodness does not commit inordinate levels of harm. Good can be harmful, but there is ultimately a self-imposed limit to how far it is willing to go, or how far it can go before something inside itself checks-in to offer help and a course correction. This self-imposed limit on its capacity to harm is a strength, even if evil regards it as weakness.
- Goodness doesn’t regard the good in itself as a weakness or try to exploit it in others. This doesn’t mean that it is always entirely comfortable with its own goodness or in others, and it doesn’t necessarily feel good at being shown where it is missing the mark. But it will never try to exploit goodness in others. The ultimate self-contradiction lies with evil, not good.
- And even though good is not harmless, neither is it entirely harmful. It is not afraid of revealing its real aims, and its actions do not unify around a purely self-serving end. To evil, this appears as though good just doesn’t ‘get it’ or is weak. It’s one thing to do harm, but it’s another to weaponise goodness.
All of these four hallmarks of goodness appear as weakness to evil, and it believes its exploitation of them is a product of its strength, skill and the ignorance of others. It simply cannot understand how it could be anything otherwise.
Evil, for example, when held to account, uses shameless ploys designed to garner sympathy. It might respond with a gormless, grinning photo from a hospital bed, taken at who knows what date or time—the not-so-subtle message being ‘how vindictive of you to attack someone so vulnerable.’ It has contrived a whole portfolio of such material ready to call upon whenever convenient to it.
What it fails to realise is that, if it wasn’t for your goodness, such a ploy would be ineffective. Not to mention that it is its own history of lies and con-artistry that renders itself incapable of being taken seriously, rather than others’ ostensible lack of care or concern for their fellow humans. If it wasn’t for your empathy (as undiscerning as it may still be) evil would have nothing to appeal to and manipulate. It relies on the very thing it tries to deny. It tacitly admits your goodness in its very attempts to exploit it; ploys which naturally would never ‘work’ on itself.
It acts out such tragic performances with the finesse and sophistication of a seven-year old putting on a puppet show for its parents. Its protests invariably come in the precise flavour that serves to affirm the very concerns being levelled against it (a phenomenon I’ve termed Narcissistic Irony), because it simply doesn’t know what else to do. Yet it itself remains pitifully and perpetually unaware of how it is revealing itself through this mechanism, while wave after wave of its associates figure it out. It simply packs up, moves on, and repeats the pattern again elsewhere.
As a result of this impoverished self-awareness, and assured of its own intelligence, it completely underestimates the abilities of others to see what it is doing and what this says about its motivations—that, rather than being an act of goodness (far from it, since that would look wholly and fundamentally different and be of an entirely different composition and quality) it tacitly reveals that it knows nothing of real goodness at all. Moreover, that whatever real goodness lies in you—including empathy, sympathy, humanity and a willingness to help it in apparent misfortune—is regarded by it as nothing more than a opportunity to be twisted towards its own distorted ends. What does that say about its real attitude to all that is good? It could take a lifetime to assimilate the tragedy of this fact alone.
Evil doesn’t only weaponise goodness but plunders it for itself. With no real strength of its own, it can only appear strong through what goodness projects onto it. No doubt it will claim and shout ‘projection!’ whenever criticism is levelled against it, but it will never do you the same honour for your goodness. It praises itself on pointing out other people’s partiality, but has no interest in knowing its own. It is at base a spiritual and psychological thief, betraying its own covetousness in its very attempts to plunder. Evil, as Schelling put it, “borrows the appearance of Being from true Being, as the serpent borrows colours from the light,” and thus only appears powerful insofar as it parasitically feeds off the genuine and true.
The everyman and woman’s shadow does not do this—it simply has a distaste or revulsion to its own dark side and opposite. It might damn what it sees as evil, sometimes misguidedly, but it will never proactively exploit goodness. And yet it is rare to hear any distinction being made between the two phenomena, even amongst practitioners of shadow work today.
True evil will not hesitate to pounce on and exploit what it perceives as weakness, laying bare for all who dare to see that it harbours no genuine respect for goodness or morality whatsoever.
4) It is pervasive in its disfunction
Evil is not only interminably committed (as per hallmark 1) but always committed. If hallmark 1 was ‘it’s never going to stop,’ then hallmark 4 is ‘it’s always doing it and showing up in everything it does.’ Its disfunction is pervasive.
Again this follows logically by consequence of what evil truly is and what it values—what it circumambulates—and its unwillingness to meaningfully connect with anything outside of itself. It has already decided long ago that it is better off doing nothing that doesn’t support its real aims. It is beyond the point of no return and there is simply no space or negotiation for anything else. It is saturated with itself.
Every little action, every movement, every word, is nothing other than instrumental towards its ultimate aim of power and bolstering and preserving the self-image at all costs. Its very breath implies evil. It can appear genuine only insofar as it needs to in order to deliver it the result it wants. Although it can appear any particular way, its presentations are invariably facile and caricatural, banking primarily on others’ unwillingness to see it.
So pervasive is its disfunction, and its unwillingness to engage even with itself across time, that it can’t act even in its own self-interest reliably. Even in terms of raw, selfish pragmatism its acts cease to make sense. It’s attempts to protect itself inevitably backfire, consistently killing all golden geese and remaining forever unreflective of its self-created hurdles. It may try to play a ‘long game,’ but, despite its macro master plan, it simply cannot fail to reveal itself at the pettiest levels simultaneously. It struggles to refrain from thieving a drink from the hotel fridge today, even if it means forfeiting the ‘opportunity’ to steal millions later.
It’s like some large part of it wants to be found out, and indeed it does. Because it desires a reality where people are undiscerning, foolish and disconnected from truth. It just consciously wishes this would only apply to other people.
Evil is inherently deceptive because it cannot otherwise handle its own self-contradiction. Deception, just as always, is an attempt to placate tension. So it can appear to be all kinds of things. It might buy you gifts, be overly charming and appear everything you want it to be. Thus every act of kindness, generosity, productivity and contribution are just that—performances that serve the real aim of self-avoidance. But for these reasons it is not only evil’s own motivations and disfunction that allows it to manifest in our world, but the inability of individuals to see, understand and to call it for what it is. In truth evil cannot hide for very long once you—not only know what to look for, but—are willing to see it when its there. It goes from being hidden everywhere to revealed in everything it does.
Final Thoughts
In this post I’ve aimed to communicate two important distinctions that are rarely made in present day shadow work.
Firstly that, although there is a subjective element to what appears as ‘evil,’ it is also an objective phenomenon. In other words that there is a difference between what one might judge as ‘bad’ and what is actually harmful or evil. While there is something essentially good about people and the human mind, it is also precisely this goodness that gets warped and distorted in the case of evil. It feels comfortable—and often pleasingly self-flattering—to pass off heinous crimes and immoral behaviours as purely the result of a ‘bad childhood’ or a lack of love. Indeed everyone gets something out of the deal of denying free will, with the defenders of evil tacitly betraying their own discomfort with responsibility. What’s even more enticing is the idea that any boundaries set by others—any concerns raised by them about yourself or anyone else—are and can only be just their shadow projection talking. This unfalsifiable, self-sealed system of superiority is an old trick among those that weaponise spirituality. Genuine shadow work is not about denying badness in the world and assuming it’s all just in your own mind, but about understanding and integrating the subjective elements that influence your perception.
Secondly, given that there is an objective reality to harm, there is also a crucial, qualitative difference between these objective phenomena of ‘harm’ and of ‘evil.’ Just because something is harmful or hurtful, does not necessarily mean it comes from a place of evil. But where evil is at work, and there is an active use of freedom to violate the very ground on which it depends—as identifiable through these four hallmarks—it is vital to be conscious of the difference and to see and respond to it as it is.
These are distinctions that you can’t afford not to make. Evil is not only a judgement by the mind, and as long as one holds this belief—consciously or unconsciously—their mind and world will conspire catastrophically to call that belief into question. The need to know the difference is a key part of shadow work that will inevitably rear its head. Coming to terms with what you find uncomfortable in the world—outer shadow work—is intrinsically linked to shadow work and individuation in general.
As uncomfortable as it is to confront the truth of evil, it is necessary to reconcile with it. You cannot wholly assimilate the essence of evil on your own as an individual (just as you cannot wholly integrate any archetype), but there is a need for understanding its reality and why it exists, and hence coming to terms with it. This won’t eliminate the capacity for evil from life, but it does do your part to deprive it of manifestation. If everyone did this then evil would have a very tough time finding a footing in the world. In the end it can only self-select for the hollow echoes of its own making.
Evil can only hide when you refuse to look. The best thing you can do is become unwavering in your gaze.
Looking to integrate your own encounters with evil? You might be interested to check out the Outer Shadow Work self-study course, part of the Know Yourself Programme from Make it Conscious.
