Kenneth McKendrick

You'll find a whole bunch of books on evil.

For the most part, you'll find that these books read pretty much the same.

So you're going to have a chapter on genocide.

You're going to have a chapter maybe on torture.

You're going to have a section on natural evil, which is like earthquakes and environmental hazards.

You're probably going to have a chapter on ecocide and the destruction of the environment.

And then almost always you're going to have a chapter on like Darth Vader and sort of representations of evil in literature and in film, because that's really fun.

And these are great.

These books are inspiring.

They're important because I draw attention to things like atrocity and the dismantling of humanity and colonialism, misogyny and racism.

And it's very useful.

It's very interesting and very moving.

And I was like, there's something missing in all of this.

How did we get to evil?

Like, how did we get to this...

idea of evil, where we could actually apprehend something as evil.

I thought a lot about this, and I was trying to figure out, one, I think if we all know what evil is, there's nothing really else that we can learn about it, right?

Because we know everything there is to know.

We just recognize it when we see it.

This was really, really unsatisfying.