Evil Shades of Gray

By: Bradley Binversie

“No Man Choose Evil because it is evil; he only mistakes it for happiness, the good he seeks.”
-Mary Wollstonecraft

When I first read this quote, it made me think deeply about empathy and the perspective of others. I see the innocence and joy in the faces of my children. There is no malice or hurt, but something pure and untouched yet by the world around them. It makes me sad to think that some day they might lose this through their encounters with the world. Yet this is what happens to all. I have never seen any baby that had evil in its heart.

People are influenced by the world around them and every single person will have a different perspective of the world depending upon their unique set of circumstances and experiences. We tend to think of the world as black and white, good and evil. Yet it’s many shades of gray and those shades often depend upon the lens of the viewer.

When you ask someone who has committed a crime. They usually do not see themselves as an evil person. They did not choose their actions because they wanted to be evil. They chose it because they believed their actions would bring their life meaning or happiness.

The person who embezzles money from their company, justifies their actions by saying, “I worked hard all these years, I deserved that money.” They truly all believed that money would bring them happiness and that they were entitled to it.
An extreme example would be Hitler. If you ask anyone who might be evil, Hitler would most likely be the first they would say. But if you asked Hitler, he most likely saw himself a crusader and hero for the German people. So from his point of view, he could rationalize his actions (terrible as they were) because this made his life meaningful to him.

To do evil things requires a person to rationalize that the evil actions will bring them happiness and meaning. Usually, it’s a combination of being lost, confused, and fooling themselves.
I’ve listed pretty serious examples, but this could also apply to our daily lives on a smaller scale as well. How we treat people around us, when we eat things that are bad for us, drinking alcohol, speaking harshly to our friends and family, when we are tempted to cut corners, and even the pursuit of material items could all be examples in our daily lives of us mistaking something bad as something that would bring us the happiness we seek.

I think it’s important to practice empathy when we encounter people or situations that hurt us or appear difficult to understand. It’s very difficult to do, but ask yourself, “Why is this person behaving this way? What is their background, unique circumstances, or point of view that would let them rationalize this? There are so many behaviors in this world that I have a very difficult time understanding, but it’s most likely that all of those behaviors are somehow tied to a person trying to find the meaning that they seek in their lives from their own, unique point of view.