When Evil Walks Into Our Lives…

One of our basic beliefs is that the people we come across will not, fundamentally, be bad or malevolent. We may expect a little friction here and there, some misunderstandings and the odd bit of egoism but in essence, we expect people to be good; as good as we are.

And on the whole, our optimism serves us very well indeed. It means we can make friends with ease, trust colleagues, create bonds with strangers, defer to figures of authority and enter with hope into relationships.

The problem is that this very trust, so handy in almost all cases, has a power to lull us – at a few critical junctures – into extremely consequential forms of blindness and error.

Very rarely but nevertheless very significantly, someone may enter our lives who is seismically dangerous, someone who is deep down extremely unwell and compelled to externalise their sickness by harming others. It may be only every decade, it might be only once in our entire lives, but given the scale of the danger, that is enough. They will enter – and, like a virus against which we have no immunity – overrun us and exact an enormous price for our innocence and benevolence. 

Nothing in our experience will have readied us for what trouble looks like up close. We’ll have no clue as to how to defend ourselves against an enemy who beats all our assumptions about how others might behave. Probably, the dangerous person will wear a charming exterior. We underestimate how subtle are the signs of pathology. The truly disturbed – those who ruin people and nations – can be highly adept at feigning normalcy, at exercising charm, at making us feel at ease around them and at spending what might be years winning us over to their cause.

A huge degree of trust may have been built up before we have any inkling of what is at play: that we have unwittingly given over our lives to what we can – for once – utterly legitimately think of under that dramatic-sounding term: sociopath.

Still the bad news may have enormous trouble reaching our deep minds. Surely this cannot be happening, it can’t be that we would have married such a person, that this person might be the parent of our child, that we would have signed over most of our worldly belongings to them, that we might have voted them into office or given them unlimited powers over us. Surely this can’t be the same person who was – at the start – immensely sweet and has such an innocent or weak-seeming or ebullient manner. Surely, on an ordinary seeming sunny day, evil can’t be unfolding in front of us.

Part of being a responsible adult is to balance two very confusing and dramatically opposed ideas: almost all the time, in almost all contexts, people will be extremely nice: reasonable, measured and well-intentioned. And then occasionally, very occasionally, someone extremely unhinged will try to ruin everything. 

In order to wake up in time, we have to carve out a conceptual space: there is such a thing as mental illness, there are sociopaths at large, they cannot be appeased and they can kill us. There is no reason why, despite all the benign times we have gone through, something very sick shouldn’t emerge. We may, to save ourselves, need to draw on all our latent reserves of fortitude, cynicism, and anger – and fight to build a very sturdy moat around ourselves. We can, and must, live with hope. We can’t ever (again) allow ourselves to be innocent.