Fear, dehumanization, and ordinary evil

Source: why is the modern world so evil?, Sisyphus 55, 12:49, uploaded 2023-10-25.

Evil often looks ordinary because institutions make appropriation, distance, and dehumanization routine. Ernest Becker’s explanation begins with an animal that knows it will die and builds symbolic systems to make that fact bearable.

Evil without a monster

The opening moves away from serial killers, supernatural creatures, and spectacular acts of terror. Distant wars, factory farming, sweatshops, prisons, ecological destruction, and exploitation belong to ordinary systems whose participants may feel decent and unremarkable. Modern evil often arrives through the banal and acceptable cycle of daily life.

Becker’s starting condition is stranger than simple fear. A human being emerges from nature, recognizes itself as an individual, and knows that the individual will end. He calls the resulting unease existential guilt: the bafflement of standing out from nature without knowing why and without being securely placed inside an eternal order.

Immortality projects

People seek roles, beliefs, nations, religions, careers, wealth, and achievements that promise participation in something longer-lived than the body. Becker calls societies hero systems: they tell members how to become meaningful and what threatens that meaning.

Ancient ritual and industrial work differ in content while performing the same psychological task. Each provides a blueprint for becoming worthy, significant, or remembered. Symbolic participation in the nation, church, profession, family, fortune, or historical project offers a victory over biological death.

When another group challenges the system, the disagreement can feel existential. If their account is true, my route to symbolic permanence may be false. Ideology therefore locates dirt and evil in an enemy that can be controlled, expelled, or destroyed.

This is why disputes over apparently fine points of belief can produce rage. The adversary does not merely hold a false proposition; they threaten the structure that makes one’s life enduring and justified. History becomes a succession of immortality ideologies, each locating the contamination outside itself.

Dehumanization

The video’s use of “dirt” is bodily. Decay, waste, sex, illness, and animal vulnerability remind people that the symbolic hero remains matter destined for decomposition. Cultural devils often represent this unwanted body.

An enemy can then be made to carry the group’s rejected animal qualities. Once represented as vermin, filth, disease, or an inferior species, the other appears available for control and sacrifice. Otto Rank’s formulation is brutal: killing another person can temporarily purchase relief from one’s own death.

The mechanism becomes reciprocal:

1. One group represents another as less than human.
2. The representation licenses exploitation or violence.
3. The targeted group experiences the aggressor as monstrous and responds with its own dehumanization.
4. Each side receives new evidence for its original image.

Social-psychological research has since studied this cycle in racial prejudice, political hostility, and war. Becker’s distinctive contribution is to connect it to mortality: the other is dangerous because they expose the fragility of the self’s symbolic world.

In this account, evil grows from fear and weakness rather than supernatural malice. Scapegoating lets one group purchase a temporary sense of purity through another group’s suffering.

Capital as death denial

Money can become an immortality symbol: a stable public sign that one mattered. Surplus production continues beyond material need because accumulation promises distinction and continuation. The system then distances consumers from environmental destruction, prison labour, war, exploitation, and other harms embedded in ordinary transactions.

Norman O. Brown describes economic activity as sacred at heart. Mary Douglas calls money an extreme and specialized ritual because it turns unstable judgments about value into a fixed, publicly recognizable sign. Wealth records importance in a form that seems capable of surviving the moment.

The pursuit cannot finish because money cannot be carried through death. It produces brief experiences of symbolic permanence followed by the need for more. Production also exceeds material need: useless goods, avoidable labor, and surplus become proof of successful participation in the hero system.

The consumer is alienated from both creation and consequence. A comfortable transaction hides the prison labor, extraction, political corruption, environmental damage, or war that made it possible. Older ideologies identify a visible devil; capital standardizes appropriation so thoroughly that no participant needs to feel like an aggressor.

Beyond evil nature and the blank slate

Becker rejects both a fixed evil nature and a blank human nature corrupted only by institutions. Humans are vulnerable and frightened, and they build institutions that standardise their defences. That view does not excuse harm. It changes the diagnostic question from “which monsters must be removed?” to “which fear is this system converting into appropriation?”

Conservative theories and Freud often emphasize innate selfishness and aggression. Rousseauian and some Marxist traditions place corruption in institutions imposed on an otherwise neutral nature. Becker locates a recursive relation between the two. Frightened animals create institutions to defend symbolic meaning; those institutions organize and amplify the fear.

He proposes, somewhat grandly, an international body drawing on different sciences to develop a shared theory of human unhappiness. Societies would be studied as hero systems that attempt purity and fill the world with graves in the process. His preferred Marxism would retain material analysis while including psychological and spiritual needs.

This produces a deliberately deflationary picture of powerful offenders. A billionaire’s accumulation can be read as terror rather than mastery. A murderer acts from pathetic weakness rather than demonic exception. A warmongering nation is a collective whose symbolic immortality feels threatened. Explanation does not absolve them; it denies them the grandeur that evil often claims.

Appreciation instead of appropriation

Becker offers no institutional route to utopia. Elsewhere he gestures toward Kierkegaardian faith and artistic creation as ways to live with mortality without converting it into domination. The video closes with the more direct opposition between appreciation and appropriation.

Love sounds inadequate precisely because it refuses the heroic scale of the problem. Its function here is courageous recognition: the other person is another frightened, mortal form of oneself rather than material for securing one’s own meaning.

The final James Baldwin excerpt makes the demand personal. A person walking through a city must remember that every stranger could have been them, including the monster and the police officer. Freedom begins with deciding not to reproduce the role one fears.

Further reading / references

• Ernest Becker, Escape from Evil.
• Nour Kteily, Emile Bruneau, Adam Waytz, and Sarah Cotterill, “The Ascent of Man: Theoretical and Empirical Evidence for Blatant Dehumanization”.
• James Baldwin, Meeting the Man: James Baldwin in Paris.