Martin LeFevre: How Evil Works

Evil is the intentional component of the collective darkness in human consciousness. It is the calculated expression of the entire content of the willful ignorance, hatred, envy, jealousy, and selfishness built up in the human mind and heart over the generations. Darkness is a vast content, needless to say, and it is not only accumulative, but it’s growing exponentially.

As such, darkness must be confronted within, or it will snuff out the human spirit, perhaps soon. If that happens, it won’t matter how much longer we go on physically.

The legions of living dead are people who have had a brush with collective darkness, and have chosen to deaden themselves as a way of coping with its enormity. Jesus must have lived in a culture like this, though perhaps at a point when a significant number of people wanted to live again (unlike America at present, in which most of the walking dead are comfortable in their deadness). Is this the true meaning of his ‘miracles’ of raising the dead?

This nascent understanding has been forged not through philosophizing, or even questioning, but through terrible encounters with evil, beginning with encountering the devil itself when I was in the USSR in 1990.

It was the most terrifying experience of my life. I didn’t believe that there was such a thing as the devil before this assault in the Soviet Union, but the experience left no doubt, as I was nearly destroyed by it. That began a long period of philosophical questioning into the nature, origins, and operation of evil.

I discovered that these ‘things’ (the chief devil and all the legions of demons) are man-made, not some supernatural phenomena. I also saw that they repeat, with new twists, the same old stuff over and over again, with boring sameness (giving a lie to the notion that darkness and evil are much more interesting and exciting than goodness).

Carl Jung’s description of our “shadow” is similar to what I call the darkness within us (as distinguished from, but inextricably related to collective darkness and evil). His word is too benign though, at least as it’s come to be used, with the term “shadow side” having been appropriated by countless New Age and feel-good ‘life coaches,’ spiritual guides, therapists, etc.

The result? Individual and collective darkness have continued to grow unabated. Indeed, these soft-soaping approaches have encouraged the growth of malignancy in the human heart and spirit, because they are designed to hold the terrible reality at arm’s length, while convincing people that they are growing by touching the edges of their ‘shadow side.’

If one comes into contact with evil outside, it brings up the deepest darkness within oneself. The denial of evil outwardly, and darkness inwardly, allows it to grow within one, and therefore in human consciousness.

I don’t believe even the worst people, like Stalin (whose legacy was integral to what I encountered in Russia) are evil. Rather evil is the most impacted and intentional component of collective darkness, out of which some people act.

As such, it isn’t just serial killers and such who act out of darkness and evil, but anyone in a dead, darkness-saturated culture who has numbed themselves beyond human recognition. And since more and more people in the global society are becoming zombies, the challenge for the living person is to have discernment without paranoia, and strength without ill will.

People can have a considerable degree of darkness within them, as almost all of us do, but when someone does evil, they are acting as conduits of collective darkness--that is, evil. Though they are still responsible, the individual person is not the source of evil, as this hyper-individualistic culture maintains.

What is the goal of evil? It wants to make every person and every people like itself--inwardly dead. In how many people, and peoples, has it already succeeded?

Nonetheless, collective darkness and evil can be a spur to learning—if one has the deep intent to learn. Indeed, learning through negation turns the tables on collective darkness.

If even a small minority of people adopted this approach, not only would the evil in the world diminish greatly, but also the growth and emergence of true human beings would vastly increase.

- Martin LeFevre is a contemplative, and non-academic religious and political philosopher. He has been publishing in North America, Latin America, Africa, and Europe (and now New Zealand) for 20 years. Email: martinlefevre@sbcglobal.net. The author welcomes comments.

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