Does it come from an outside influence (ie Devils Satan) or is it something that is within each of us?
I have sometimes wondered how can a person become ‘Evil’. Are murderers and serial killers naturally evil? Whenever I see a terrible crime in television I sometimes wonder why would they do that? Were they just born that way and are just acting in accordance with their nature? Or was there something in his childhood something that taught him that human life doesn’t have any value whatsoever.
Or perhaps, both nature and nurture may promote certain behaviors, but they are not, themselves, the cause. ‘Evil’ may arise from repression of a destructive feeling that eventually eats away at you until you lash out. I may say something that really gets to you. You then may want to hit me in anger. You can choose either to take a swing, or consciously repress that urge. Jungians have argued that as an individual develops, his good and evil sides tend to differentiate themselves; a very good example of this might be the Smeagol/Gollum personalities so clearly demonstrated in Lord of the Rings. Smeagol represents the good part; he is the hobbit that wants to remain loyal to his master because Frodo is kind to him. Gollum is the bad part, he is the side overcome by greed that wants nothing more than to get his Precious back.
In normal people these two sides are often recognized and integrates with each other on a conscious level. In some people though the negative emotions like anger, jealousy etc is repressed or perhaps hidden away by the individual for fear of people not understanding what they feel.
Each and everyone of us has these things hidden away from the world, secret emotions we kept to ourselves, those inner thoughts that we don’t reveal to anyone. The jealousy we feel for a friend who had a promotion or getting angry and irritated, wishing someone ill just because they didn’t agree with something you believe in etc. While at this stage, of course, these are still just in our heads and we haven’t acted up them, but even at this stage, these inner ‘bad thoughts’ tend to cause much guilt and anxiety about why we think about them. Occasionally, we might commit the act – saying something we shouldn’t and can’t take back, cheating on our significant others, lying about taxes, embezzling money from our company, deliberately sabotaging someone we know… Sometimes ‘evil’ is deliberately malicious, while other times, it is done out of weakness or rationalization (ie I lash out at you because you’ve touched upon a sensitive issue).
I guess the only thing we can be certain about evil is that its seed exist within each and every one of us. The only way we can fight it is by knowing ourselves and not letting it grow within us.