Tonight I had to chuckle because some guy attempting to report on developments in the war with Iran said the following with respect to Trump:
This is all very tongue-in-cheek, but I’d argue that if we understand Trump through the lens of Erich Fromme’s diagnostic label of “malignant narcissist” (narcissistic, sociopathic, and sadistically cruel, basically), if we see him as singularly and spectacularly … dare I say it? … evil – then we can start to get our arms around it. And I’d argue that this doesn’t require resorting to the supernatural; although the alien “feel” of the concept – the way evil people seem inhuman – certainly temps us to assign some occult wellspring to it, but we needn’t do so.
Throughout history there have, in fact, been people who are “evil”, who have crossed some sort of rubicon where they take pleasure in destroying things and harming people. And we ignore this at our peril because “good” people have a great deal of difficulty understanding evil people or predicting their actions, simply because the evil are so untethered from any sense of empathy or common humanity and actually derive nourishment from things that would make most people feel debased. They truly do live in the “upside down” if you will.
When you think about it, this kind of dysfunction is never sustainable, so only a handful of people with particular abilities can rise to prominence and power for a time and appear for awhile to “succeed” at it. From the time Hitler rose to power until he put a bullet in his own head was only about a dozen years or so. Trump is even more time-limited due to his age and deteriorating mental and physical health, although you could argue he’s already been wielding political power for over a decade now – a decade we will never get back and that will be the work of generations to recover from – if in fact we ever truly do.
I other words evil – the kind that casually kills or torments people in mass quantities, as Trump has already done (think of the consequences of shutting down USAID alone, or his outsourcing of torture gulags to places like El Salvador, or his project of constructing prisons to put people in without due process or access to medical care) – exists whenever a person who has a talent for getting his own way without remorse is handed the reigns of power. The scope of the evil is basically the scope of the power. If you are the head of a religious cult you can fleece everyone and then when eventually the walls start to close in, get everyone to commit suicide. If you’re the head of a powerful country you can traumatize the populace (your own, and others) and start senseless wars and build dungeons and so forth.
I regard evil not as a mysterious force so much as the error of enabling the unrepentantly selfish to get their own way and allowing (or giving!) them access to unaccountable power over others.
Or maybe there’s a more accurate word than “evil” but I doubt there is one more evocative. But I’m curious what others think.
The existence of evil is one reason I believe a level of justice proportionate to this evil must come to pass if we have any hope of recovering from this. Some have described this as an “American Nuremburg”. Without that, the massive moral injury we are now enduring will never be healed.