In the shadowed corridors of human understanding, few concepts unsettle us as profoundly as the idea that some individuals do not merely commit evil acts out of compulsion, desperation, or ignorance—but actually desire them. They savour the suffering they cause. They derive a perverse thrill from the unravelling of another’s dignity. This is not pathology as mere malfunction; it is something colder, more deliberate: a will deliberately twisted toward darkness. Along these chilling lines, the historian and theologian Professor Jeffrey Burton Russell, whose lifelong study of evil has illuminated its many masks, speaks of a “fundamental warping of the will that underlies individual actions.” He goes further, warning that there exist individuals who have—through choice, habit, or inner corruption—allowed their personalities, their moral compasses, even their very sense of self, to be consumed by what he calls Radical Evil. Not accidental cruelty, not the byproduct of social failure, but evil as an end in itself.
Yet for many of us, such a notion is almost unthinkable. We struggle to believe that someone could wake each morning not just indifferent to the pain they cause, but eager to inflict it. We rationalise: They must be traumatised. They don’t know what they’re doing. They’ve been failed by society. And while these explanations hold truth in many cases, they falter when confronted with the true believer in malevolence—the one who laughs while pulling the trigger, who manipulates with artistry, who sees life not as sacred but as clay to be broken for their satisfaction. Our refusal to acknowledge such figures stems not from ignorance, but from a deeper, more insidious blindness—one that Carl Jung, with his unflinching eye on the human psyche, termed a lack of “imagination for evil.”
Jung’s phrase strikes like a bell in the silence of denial. To lack an imagination for evil is not to be morally pure, but to be dangerously naive. It means we cannot picture the mind that delights in cruelty, that finds joy in the scream, that views empathy as weakness to be exploited. We imagine evil as a monster under the bed—grotesque, obvious, and rare. But Jung knew better. Evil often wears a smile. It speaks kindly. It blends in. And it thrives in the fertile ground of our disbelief.
This failure of imagination is not passive. It is an active enabler. By refusing to entertain the possibility that some people enjoy doing harm, we grant them sanctuary. We allow them to move unnoticed through our institutions, our relationships, our governments. We mistake their charm for character, their calculation for competence. Our discomfort with the concept of intentional malice creates a kind of psychic camouflage for those who practice it. They hide not in shadows, but in plain sight, shielded by our collective insistence that “no one could really be that bad.”
Jung’s insight reveals a disturbing truth: to combat evil, we must first imagine it—fully, honestly, without flinching. We must entertain the idea that evil is not always a symptom, not always a mistake, but sometimes a choice made with enthusiasm. Only then can we recognise its footprints: the subtle manipulation, the erosion of truth, the deliberate sowing of discord. When we finally allow ourselves to see evil not as an aberration, but as a possibility woven into the fabric of human freedom, we begin to build defences—moral, psychological, societal—that are not based on hope, but on vigilance.
The absence of an imagination for evil does not make us good. It makes us vulnerable. And evil—true, radical, willing evil—depends on that vulnerability. It flourishes where disbelief reigns. To see it clearly is not to become cynical, but to awaken. As Russell and Jung both imply, the fight against darkness begins not with weapons or laws, but with the courage to envision the unthinkable—and to name it when it walks into the light.
Worldwide Temple of Aurora 