As we saw in our last articles, many of us assume that man is good by nature. In fact, the Bible starts with a statement that astonishes us today: « There is none righteous, no, not one; no one has understanding, no one seeks God; all are lost, all are perverted; not one does good, not one » (Rom 3:10-12).

Unfortunately, this biblical understanding has, for the most part, been abandoned. The implications of this abandonment are many. For example, we’ve already talked about post-modernism, which leads to chaos by removing all restraints on our impulses. The first time I thought about what this abandonment had caused, was when I was reading The 5 Seconds Rule by Melanie Robbins. According to her, « When it comes to goals, dreams and life change, your inner wisdom is genius. Your impulses, needs and goal-related instincts are there to guide you. You must learn to bank on them. »¹ A little further on, she describes a situation we all experience: « Your values and instincts will tell you what you should do. And your feelings will scream ‘NO’. »² As you’ve seen, it’s all based on the premise that our impulses and values are naturally good and therefore we can trust ourselves. But… what should we think? In this article, we’ll look mainly at the problems with this way of thinking. We’ll look at what the Bible says about evil in a later article.

Two kinds of humanities?

Christianity has led us to believe that human beings have a sin problem rooted in themselves. Over the years, however, our mentality has changed. As Pastor Timothy Keller put it: « Many non-believing thinkers see human evil as the result of bad social systems or psychological illnesses. In the nineteenth century, it began to be suggested that serial killers were the product of poor upbringing, poverty or deprivation of some kind. Something must have happened to them to make them commit murder, evil not being inherent in human beings. »³ By denying the problem inherent in every human being and asserting that our basic instincts are good, the only way to explain evil, without denying its existence, is to assert that it comes from physical, psychological, social or mental abnormalities. This leads us to consider those who do evil as atypical people (in one way or another) whom we need to control through teachings, medication, etc. On one side are the « normals », who are considered good, and on the other the « atypicals », who are considered bad. With this comes a feeling of superiority or hatred towards a certain type of person, which leads, of course, to a certain type of racism in our society.

A trivialized evil

It also leads us to no longer see the problem in ourselves, but in the circumstances around us. Evil is thus trivialized, and we often ask ourselves: « How can we punish someone who has been pushed to the limit by circumstances? » In this case, the human being cannot be held responsible, because evil has no consistency. It’s actually quite paradoxical, because we often deplore the lack of justice in our society, or the insolence of young people: How is it possible that this person who killed twenty people ends up with only 20 months in prison? It’s because we think the problem lies not with the person, but with a psychological disorder. Why are children often unbearable in schools? It’s because they’re taught that they don’t have any problems, and therefore can’t be made responsible.

This way of thinking often collapses when we realize that those who do evil are, more often than not, perfectly normal. One of the great mysteries for our society is that Nazis were highly educated people, that some killers grew up in good families and had no money problems, that dictators were loved by their wives because they were normal and good to them. Asserting that man is normal and that it’s only the « abnormal » who are bad doesn’t correspond to what we see of reality, and is destroying us little by little. We need to think differently…

1. ROBBINS Melanie, The 5 Seconds Rule, Transform Your Life, Work, and Confidence with Everyday Courage, Savio rebublic book, États-Unis, 2017, ch. 2 ↩︎
2. Ibid, ch. 5 ↩︎
3. KELLER Timothée, Rencontres avec Jésus, des réponses inattendues aux plus grandes questions de la vie, Ourania, Suisse, 2015. ↩︎