The Entropic Heart of Evil

And its sources

Gemini Image: Author Prompt: Modern Wendigo

Chaos and its agents are the entropic heart of evil. Our understanding of evil is historical, but in the American cultural tradition, we have abandoned historical knowledge, and with that, we have lost the ability to identify and understand evil.

We have cultural remnants, but they are linked to Judeo-Christian-Islamic religions, which view evil in terms of Augustinian concepts of the absence of good that is further complicated by conflicting definitions of agentic evil. These traditions have no reasonable justification for evil in a universe governed by an all-powerful, benevolent divinity.

Evil: From Privation to Positive Force

The philosophical inquiry into the nature of evil is characterized by a critical divide, with the dominant Western tradition framing evil in terms of a deficit, while other schools of thought assert that it is a positive and willed force. The most influential of these is the privation theory of evil, a doctrine with roots in ancient philosophy and codified by theologians like St. Augustine and Thomas Aquinas. This perspective posits that evil is not a substance or an entity with its own existence. Instead, it is defined as the “absence, or lack (‘privation’), of good”.