How to Stop Evil
I am as mad as anyone when I see malevolent governments, movements, and people, who oppress, persecute, and kill in order to hoard, dominate, or selfishly enrich.
And I want to fight - but I have to be wise - and faithful.
The idea that we can eradicate "evil" by destroying a specific person or a nation using violence is a deeply ingrained human impulse, but it relies on a fundamental misunderstanding of what evil actually is.
History and psychology show us that treating evil as if it were a physical object, person, or a localized disease that can be excised with a scalpel consistently fails.
The primary flaw in trying to "kill" evil is a category mistake. We treat evil as an entity—a physical thing that resides in certain "bad" people. But evil is not a substance; it is a set of behaviors, choices, and systems - and one way or another it gets into us all.
What to do? This is one lesson from Sunday's gospel about an enemy who sews weeds alongside a gardener's good crop.
The interesting advice from the gardener is not to pull out the bad weeds, because in doing so, the good plants will be gone too. Instead we're told to wait.
The gardener understands that the good and the bad make up one crop - and the answer is patience. Patience to do the things that have historically been successful at combatting evil:
Build robust institutions: Building legal systems, human rights frameworks, and democratic checks that prevent power from being concentrated and abused.
Practice empathy and truth: Facing historical harms honestly (like truth and reconciliation commissions) rather than burying them under fresh violence.
Address material scarcity: Reducing the desperation, poverty, and isolation that make communities vulnerable to demagogues and radicalization.
Stopping an active perpetrator of violence is sometimes a necessary act of immediate defense. But confusing containment with eradication is the tragic error of human history. To permanently weaken evil, we have to change the soil so its seeds can no longer take root. Something us gardeners can do.
