Thomas Aquinas defined sin as the violation of human wellbeing. Erich Fromm (1973) calls such behavior irrational:
“I propose to call rational any thought, feeling or act that promotes the adequate functioning and growth of the whole of which it is a part, and irrational that which tends to weaken or destroy the whole” (p. 295).
Marjorie Hewitt Suchocki (1995) defines evil as anything that undermines the wellbeing of another, human or non-human.
Wellbeing relies on fulfilling one’s nature. This requires a fulfillment of basic needs, those that conduce to growth and flourishing—the provision of our species’ evolved nest, especially in early life.
Accordingly, what we see around us is widespread impairment of wellbeing. We are surrounded and embedded in sin, evil, and irrationality.
Evil is now pervasive because the modern world—industrialized-capitalist-corporate colonialism—is grounded in the disruption of planetary ecologies and the robbing of the lives of plants, animals, and humans through unceasing extraction to convert what it sucks up into capital for the few. It’s slavery by another name. Wellbeing for the many, human and non-human, is not a concern, unless they are needed to maintain the megamachine of commodification.
These forms of evil were not commonplace until recently and only in a small corner of our millions-year-old existence. They have now been forcibly spread across the planet.
Most of the time when people commit evil (harming) acts, they think they are good acts. In fact, when a criminal takes violent revenge (Gilligan, 1997), or a parent sleep trains their baby, they are acting in the moment with an aim for the good, often not realizing the harm they are doing. Or, they minimize the harm for a greater good (‘I’m spanking you for your own good’). Or, they choose to believe in and follow some ideology not based on their personal experience or on facts.
Each person’s actions (Narvaez, 2014) are guided by a combination of the following:
Worldview, a subconscious set of assumptions about how life works
The culture they live in, the values and behaviors they share with their community
The story or advice they are following in the moment, what is presumed to be a good goal
The affordances (action possibilities) they perceive in the moment, channeled by their neurobiological capacities, the mindset they are in at the moment, and the particular goal they are aiming for
When one’s actions are aiming for the good, they have a moral purpose. They may not be objectively moral, but they are subjectively moral, as in the case of an honor killing setting right the scales of justice.
A moral goal can also distort perception, narrowing focus to that single goal, causing one to miss all other morally-relevant factors in a situation.
The most famous experiment in this regard was done by Darley and Batson (1970). On a seminary campus, the experimenters asked participants to prepare a sermon on the “Good Samaritan” (the story Jesus told about a wounded man on the road who was not helped by all sorts of ‘good’ people who walked on by but was helped by a despised outsider, a Samaritan—a good Samaritan). Participants were told to cross the campus to give the sermon right away. The amount of time to get to the other building was varied. Along the path, a confederate (an actor) laid as if in pain. When the time was short, hurried participants were more likely to ignore the confederate and even step over him.
Participants had a moral goal, an assignment from an authority, that hindered their sensitivity to other potential moral actions.
Directives from authorities often narrow one’s focus. Think of the infamous ‘Stanford prison experiment’ and the Milgram shock experiment (each fraught with ethical and methodological issues). Participants in these studies had a tendency to do what the authority requested –mistreat prisoners when playing the role of a guard, shocking a person giving wrong answers in the next room, respectively. Those who refused apparently had a broader view of moral responsibility than following an authority (Rochat & Modigliani, 1995).
How is it that a person obeys an authority against their better judgment, damaging the wellbeing of another, doing evil? Unfortunately, it’s easy in societies where children are expected to do what adults tell them to do or be punished, places where children cannot grow their full selves.
Isolated or uncomforted babies mute themselves—learning to ignore their body signals, their psychological needs—undermining the development of healthy, informed intuition and various intelligences (e.g., emotional, social, receptive) (Narvaez, 2014). Instead, they twist their unsatiated needs into unique pathologies, physiological and/or mental. They are primally wounded.
Erich Fromm described how this happens step by step across childhood. He tells a story of a child who returns home to tell his mother of his enjoyment playing with a new friend. She tells him that he should not play with that child because they have the wrong background. He is disheartened, knows she is wrong, but complies. So starts the path toward self-betrayal, a source of many mental disorders.
With repeated incidents over time, the child learns to shut down his own unaccepted interests and listen to external forces instead of his inner compass. This creates an inability to be oneself because one does not know the self. That inner voice has been shut down. They grow only a partial self.
Authoritarian regimes, familial or political, of left or right, do not want full selves—i.e., free people.
Free people are unpredictable, free people like nomadic foragers (Wolff, 2001). That is why the Bushmen were hated and hunted by the European empire builders in Africa. They, like all free people, ‘could not be tamed.’ They had not learned, through punishment at an early age, how to obey the rules and commands given by a human authority. They had not been primally wounded.
In species-normal conditions (small-band egalitarian hunter-gatherers; Narvaez, 2013), the self actualizes in babyhood. The baby feels ‘good’ when they are welcomed, listened to, and their needs are met by the evolved nest. Full nestedness in babyhood, childhood and adulthood promotes full self-actualization. (Right, you don’t have to wait for maturity to be self-actualized.)
Full selves do not obey authorities outside their own experience of communal cooperation and the honoring of Nature’s laws.
Obeying an authority without much thought is easy for a person who is missing their full self. Such undergrown people shallowly slide through their moral responsibilities by claiming “I was just doing my job,” or “I don’t know anything about that.”
Partial selves carry primal wounds and pass them onto others.
Europeans who emigrated and conquered the rest of the planet came from generations of primal woundedness. European history of the last millennium or so is a story of one set of tortures and wars after the other—against “heretics,” “witches,” elders, the poor, Jews, Muslims, children (deMause, 1995; Federici, 2014). The brandings, tortures, and burnings were often public spectacles with required attendance, traumatizing the community.
Fear was the coin of the realm.
The elites, whether religious, political or wealthy, used terror to beat back the resistance to their takeover (enclosures) of public common lands, denying subsistence access for hunting and gathering (Federici, 2014; Polanyi, 2001). Mercantilism and capitalism took over the cultures and lives of everyday people, forcing peasants into wage labor, exile, or death.
The Culture of Life Destruction spread from Europe to the rest of the world through conquistadors, missionaries, migrants, and the exiled (Turner, 1994). They passed on their trauma and diminished worldview, forcing it on Natives the world over (Menakem, 2017). Lands, bodies and minds were colonized. Still today. All of us.
Consumerist corporate capitalism piles on as the docent for our diminishment:
“Thus the individual is reshaped to fit the industrialist landscape so that feeling and bodily awareness become mute and directionless, and we become the tame, needy ‘consumers’ envisaged by politicians and advertisers” (Kidner, 2007, p. 137)
Many people try to fit into the contemporary consumerist society, even making it part of their religion (Du Mez, 2020). Their worldview is one of ‘dominate or be dominated.’ Their values and behaviors center around having things (‘prosperity gospel’). Advertisers and influencers immerse them in advice about the next product to buy for status or happiness or salvation. They don’t see too many other options as they swim in a fishbowl of self-enhancements and identity protection.
So now we have a world full of half-baked ‘needy’ people, many without an inner moral compass except ‘what suits me in this moment,’ or ‘what helps me/mine win,’ or what an authoritative script or figure tells them is right.
Many people try to fit into the contemporary consumerist society, even making it part of their religion (Du Mez, 2020). Their worldview is one of ‘dominate or be dominated.’ Their values and behaviors center around having things (‘prosperity gospel’). Advertisers and influencers immerse them in advice about the next product to buy for status or happiness or salvation. They don’t see too many other options as they swim in a fishbowl of self-enhancements and identity protection.
Full selves follow their inner moral compass which is escorted by the kinship worldview (Topa & Narvaez, 2022) and the insight-intelligence of the cosmos (Bohm, 1973). When we re-indigenize ourselves and observe the nested pathway, we grow full selves that can stand against authoritarianism. We don’t ignore what needs to be done. Instead, we step up to re-indigenize and re-nest others. We become good Samaritans.
References
Bohm, D. (2004). On dialogue. Routledge.
Darley, J. & Batson, C. D. (1973). From Jerusalem to Jericho: A study of situational and dispositional variables in helping behavior. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 27, 100-108.
deMause, L. (1995). The history of childhood.: The untold story of child abuse. Psychohistory Press.
Du Mez, K.K. (2020). Jesus and John Wayne: How white evangelicals corrupted a faith and fractured a nation. Liveright.
Federici, S. (2014). Caliban and the witch: Women the body and primitive accumulation. Autonomedia.
Fromm, E. (1973). The anatomy of human destructiveness. Henry Holt.
Gilligan, J. (1997). Violence: Reflections on a national epidemic. Vintage.
Kidner, D.W. (2007). Depression and the natural world: Towards a critical ecology of psychological distress. International Journal of Critical Psychology, 19, 123-146.
Leacock, E.B. (1981). Myth of male dominance. Monthly Review Press.
Menakem, R. (2017). My grandmother’s hands: Racialized trauma and the pathway to mending our hearts and bodies. Central Recovery press.
Narvaez, D. (2014). Neurobiology and the development of human morality: Evolution, culture and wisdom. Norton.
Narvaez, D. (2024). Returning to evolved nestedness, wellbeing, and mature human nature, an ecological imperative. Review of General Psychology, 28(2), 83-105. https://doi.org/10.1177/1089268023122403 (text at ResearchGate)
Narvaez, D. (in press, fall 2025). Overcoming climate havoc with inner development from deep nestedness. Ecopsychology.
Polanyi, K. (2001). The great transformation: The political and economic origins of our time, 2nd ed. Beacon Press.
Rochat, F., & Modigliani, A. (1995). The ordinary quality of resistance: From Milgram’s laboratory to the village of LeChambon. Journal of Social Issues, 51, 195-210.
Suchocki, M.H. (1995). The fall to violence: Original sin in relational theology. Continuum.
Snyder, T. (2024). On freedom. Crown.
Topa, Wahinkpe (Four Arrows), & Narvaez, D. (2022). Restoring the kinship worldview: Indigenous voices introduce 28 precepts for rebalancing life on planet earth. North Atlantic Books.
Turner, F. (1994). Beyond geography: The Western spirit against the wilderness. Rutgers University Press.
Micro-cosm of the collaboration we have undertaken. An essential distillation. Novel for me to consider, "In species-normal conditions (small-band egalitarian hunter-gatherers; Narvaez, 2013), the self actualizes in babyhood." This feels to me to address the developmental fractality (self-similar at varying stages of development, not scale in this case) of the nest.
"So now we have a world full of half-baked ‘needy’ people, many without an inner moral compass except ‘what suits me in this moment,’ or ‘what helps me/mine win,’ or what an authoritative script or figure tells them is right."
Yes. I didn't know how much I lacked an "inner moral compass" until I finally left a community that wouldn't accept me outside of my codependent "hero child" role at the service of a few of the community's key members. I hurt people by my complicit silence, and I asked and received forgiveness from those people just before I left.
Two weeks after I left, I woke up with my conscience on fire. I was disloyal, it told me. I had forsaken the group. But I had the inspiration to read Paul Tillich, the existentialist philosopher and theologian, on the issue of innocence. The key passage (Theology of Culture, pg. 141) for me that night:
". . . every moral act involves a risk. The human situation itself is such a risk. In order to become human, man must trespass the 'state of innocence,' but when he has trespassed it he finds himself in a state of self-contradiction. . . . A morality which plays safe, by subjecting itself to an unconditional authority, is suspect. It has not the courage to take guilt and tragedy upon itself. True morality takes guilt and tragedy upon itself. True morality is a morality of risk."
My conscience had internalized an external authority. I was full of what Tillich calls "moralisms"--rules from an external authority that one must live by. If I manage to follow those rules pretty well, I remain "innocent." But I never develop the inner moral compass you speak of.
So, late in life, I'm freer from the effects of my primal wounding. Hopefully, in the moment of political choice, I'll be among the unpredictable you speak of.
And, yes! There's a political connection between primal wounding and authoritarianism. In this respect, your essay is close to Hannah Arendt's notion of the "banality of evil," a phrases that many don't like in part because of its suggestion that any civilized person, by virtue of their civilized upbringing, is capable of great harm.