It’s the Fourth Friday Challenge for September. My friend Paul and I, both posting daily in 2011, decided to give each other a job once a month to keep things spicy. In his words, “we want to push ourselves to do something more interesting than we might otherwise.” I will put his challenge to me at the bottom of this post — it’s your choice to read the challenge or my response first.

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My dad said his perception of the world changed when he took a certain job in his career. He was a psychiatrist and held different positions, but in the 80s he accepted a job at a correctional facility for the criminally insane.

He stayed on there only a year or two, but this was the gig that changed him. He said, once he spent a few months there, he started believing that all people were born with the potential to be evil. Before this experience (of having to interact with people that committed hideous crimes) he believed that all souls started off as good, but became bad.

This is a major outlook shift for a shrink. I don’t know if this was a permanent change, or, once he took a less-horrifying job, merely a temporary condition.

I feel that it’s the latter; one of his great traits was his deep compassion for his patients. I’m sure that that trait got temporarily overused while working with those inmates. He told me the nature of some of their crimes, and I can see why one could believe in the idea of an evil nature.

Do I believe in evil? I guess I do. I think in particular of some of the world’s past and current despots, and have a hard time feeling like they were just misunderstood, or products of a bad upbringing, or simply – tragically – wired wrong.

Hell, I even think about some of the sociopaths I’ve known directly, and imagine that their souls were pretty rotten, and without redemption.

And that leads me back to compassion. Lack of compassion can sometimes cause behavior that can be construed as evil. Maybe it’s just as simple as that.

This whole thought thread is tinged with irony, as I used to think my father was evil. When I was pretty small, my parents would get into it, and my father would start yelling, and I remember thinking that he (with the pitch and volume of his voice) sounded like a demon.

Of course, he was not, nor ever, evil. He was troubled and misunderstood and emotional at times, but I look at my memories of him now and just think: human. He was just a weirdly-wired, imperfect jumble of a human, like most of us are.

I do struggle with my own demons. I can be thoughtless and combustible and have been horrible to loved ones. I don’t want to. I don’t mean to. But it can happen. Hopefully I can be compassionate and kind a much larger majority of the time, and try to right wrongs as they occur.

I really hope (and pretty much suspect) that my soul is not rotten. In fact, I know that I’m pretty much a good, imperfect, weirdly-wired, prone to emotion, human being. Just like all of us.

However, I am aware of my ability to scorch the earth, and will do my best to keep the flames under control.

I feel like the next step of this essay is to discuss hell, since I’ve mentioned flames and all, but that is a big mistake. No religion discussion here, sorry.

I don’t share the deep compassion for the mentally ill that my father and a couple of my siblings possess(ed); instead I get angry at the system and at bad parents and at unlucky breaks and genetics. It’s just not fair. I guess it is a kind of compassion, but I find it difficult to tune in to deep empathy. Maybe it’s having some alarming interactions with some of my dad’s sicker patients when I was young, or the depressing and out-of-control homelessness issues in cities where I’ve lived, but I feel … wary.

Maybe the people I consider as “evil” lack compassion and are able to experience hate. Those can be bad people. Deserving of some flames, maybe.

“If the devil were to explode, and evil were gone forever, what kind of party would you have?”
— Michael Scott, The Office

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This post was in response to Paul’s Fourth Friday Challenge to me, September 2011:

I challenge you to write a post that is exactly 666 words long.

Read Paul’s response to my challenge here.