What Evil Means to Us By: C Fred Alford

Author: C. Fred Alford

C. Fred Alford interviewed working people, prisoners, and college students to discover how we experience evil – in ourselves, in others, and in the world. What his informants meant by evil, he found, was a profound, inchoate feeling of dread so overwhelming that they tried to inflict it on others to be rid of it themselves. A leather-jacketed emergency medical technician, for example, one of the many young people for whom vampires are oddly seductive icons of evil, said he would “give anything to be a vampire.” Drawing on psychoanalytic theory, Alford argues that the primary experience of evil is not moral but existential. The problems of evil are complicated by the terror it evokes, a threat to the self so profound it tends to be isolated deep in the mind. Alford suggests an alternative to this bleak vision. The exercise of imagination – in particular, imagination that takes the form of a shared narrative – offers an active and practical alternative to the contemporary experience of evil.