The Anatomy of Everyday Evil
A new inventory serves as a foundation to further public health by identifying the many facets of maleficence.
“The history of man is a graveyard of great cultures that came to catastrophic ends because of their incapacity for planned, rational, voluntary reaction to challenge.”
-Erich Fromm
Questions surrounding the nature of evil have been of profound importance for humanity since time immemorial. When we try to make sense of how we behave toward one another, how we act within the world, whether we work toward or against the greater good, often we are left confused, disempowered, and distraught, in a state of moral injury relative to harms perpetrated against and around us.
Philosophers and theologians have long struggled to understand malevolent behavior. On an individual level, we make attributions about motivation that help determine how we respond when others perpetrate terrible actions-for example, psychologists studying tensions between Republicans and Democrats have focused on whether we see our opponents as evil-or merely stupid.
