Speaker 1: Oh hey, it's the dog toy under the couch that
Speaker 1: you won't find for another four months. Ali Ward, and
Speaker 1: it's evil. Let's talk about it with a professor in
Speaker 1: the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba who
Speaker 1: has written the book on it. It's titled Evil a
Speaker 1: Critical Primer and teaches the course Evil in World Religions.
Speaker 1: They have a Bachelor in Religious studies, a master's in
Speaker 1: critical theory in religion and feminist ethics, and a PhD
Speaker 1: in critical theory, ethics, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis. And who will
Speaker 1: deal with my questions such as what is evil? Who
Speaker 1: is evil? What do we do about evil? Can we
Speaker 1: scream over turkey at Grandma's house.
Speaker 2: We're going to get.
Speaker 1: Into it, but first, thank you so much to patrons
Speaker 1: who support the show and have from the beginning, and
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Speaker 1: after listening to last week's cockroach episode, the show made
Speaker 1: them eat bugles for the first time in over a decade.
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Speaker 1: for us to donate to a cause that theologist choices
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Speaker 1: Critical ponoralogy, So ponurology comes from the Greek word for evil,
Speaker 1: and you will understand why the critical is in there
Speaker 1: in a minute.
Speaker 4: We fudged it a little bit.
Speaker 1: But ever since I saw the word ponorrology on this
Speaker 1: bigologies list as the study of evil, I have wanted
Speaker 1: to explore the topic so much. So let's talk about
Speaker 1: the origins of evil. Different cultural approaches to the notion.
Speaker 1: Who uses the word evil to mean what if your
Speaker 1: toddler is evil? Vampires, angry mobs, seeking, vigilante justice, news personalities,
Speaker 1: saying unhinged things. When you are a subject and when
Speaker 1: you are an object, why should you be nicer to.
Speaker 4: Your coffee table? And if evil exists? And who says so?
Speaker 1: With scholar, author, professor, gem of a person and we'll
Speaker 1: just say critical ponorrologist, doctor Kenneth McKendrick.
Speaker 5: My name is Kenneth McKendrick and my pronouns are he
Speaker 5: him vebem.
Speaker 2: Let me jump right in.
Speaker 4: What's the difference between someone who studies evil and a ponorologist?
Speaker 5: So this is embarrassing. I had to look the word
Speaker 5: up because I didn't know what the word was. And
Speaker 5: the definition that I found that you may have found
Speaker 5: as well, was it's sort of a theological discussion about evil.
Speaker 5: And a theology is basically a faith based position or
Speaker 5: a belief based position. It tends to be monotheistic. It's
Speaker 5: very often associated with Christianity, and that's.
Speaker 3: Not what I do.
Speaker 5: I'm interested in human beings and what I study is
Speaker 5: people that talk about demons and who talk about gods
Speaker 5: and goddesses and deities, but supernatural representation. So I'm super
Speaker 5: interested in people that talk about comic books, and I'm
Speaker 5: super interested in you know, games like dungeons and dragons,
Speaker 5: and anytime you find like a supernatural representation like a
Speaker 5: zombie or vampires or anything like that, I'm in right.
Speaker 5: I find that fascinating because for me, the study of
Speaker 5: religion about studying how something ordinary gets turned into the extraordinary.
Speaker 1: And now you've been teaching courses in evil for almost
Speaker 1: two decades, right.
Speaker 5: Yeah, two thousand and two was the first time I
Speaker 5: taught about the University of Manitoba. But I was teaching,
Speaker 5: you know, at the University of Toronto in nineteen ninety
Speaker 5: nine while I was still a graduate student. So I've
Speaker 5: been thinking about the topic for quite a while. And
Speaker 5: never gets old, never gets tired. I'm more of an
Speaker 5: expert on I guess people talking about evil, well.
Speaker 4: Okay, some semantics for you. So is it more of
Speaker 4: a question of like, is evil really a thing?
Speaker 5: Okay? So if you sort of look at a lot
Speaker 5: of the literature and if you just type in evil
Speaker 5: to a Google search or to a book search or
Speaker 5: a public library search, would it be even better than that?
Speaker 5: You'll find a whole bunch of books on evil. For
Speaker 5: the most part, you'll find that these books read pretty
Speaker 5: much the same. So you're going to have a chapter
Speaker 5: on genocide, You're going to have a chapter maybe on torture.
Speaker 5: You're going to have a section on natural evil, which
Speaker 5: is like earthquakes and you know, environmental hazards. You're probably
Speaker 5: going to have a chapter on ecoside and the destruction
Speaker 5: of the environment. And then almost always you're going to
Speaker 5: have a chapter on like Darth Vader and sort of
Speaker 5: representations of evil and literature and in film, because that's
Speaker 5: really fun and these are great, These books are inspiring
Speaker 5: their importance because I draw attention to things like atrocity
Speaker 5: and the dismantling of humanity and colonialism, misogyny, and racism,
Speaker 5: and it's very useful, it's very interesting and very moving.
Speaker 5: And I was like, there's something missing in all of this.
Speaker 5: How did we get to evil? Like how did we
Speaker 5: get to this idea of evil where we could actually
Speaker 5: apprehend something as evil. I thought a lot about this,
Speaker 5: and I was trying to figure out one. I think
Speaker 5: if we all know what evil is, there's nothing really
Speaker 5: else that we can learn about it right, because we
Speaker 5: know everything there is to know, we just recognize it
Speaker 5: when we see it. This was really really unsatisfying. And
Speaker 5: so a colleague of mine, Darling Rishka, she in one
Speaker 5: of the classes she was teaching, she was a novel Dracula.
Speaker 5: This is a fantastic novel by Bram Stoker.
Speaker 1: Side notes, So for a past Spooktober episode, we have
Speaker 1: a two parter on vampires with Professor Doctor Jeff Holden,
Speaker 1: as well as a terrritology episode on monsters in pop
Speaker 1: culture with Doctor W.
Speaker 4: Scott Poole.
Speaker 1: And we have a twenty twenty four episode on genocide
Speaker 1: which may be of interest.
Speaker 5: But one of the things that I found to be
Speaker 5: most striking about the novel Dracula is that all of
Speaker 5: these good characters come together and they have a job
Speaker 5: to do, and they have this really weird experience with
Speaker 5: Count Dracula. Then they decide they're going to kill this guy.
Speaker 5: So he comes over to England and they just obliterate him.
Speaker 5: They decide that he's an abomination, and they decide to
Speaker 5: totally destroy him, and they even go out of their
Speaker 5: way in order to hide what they're doing from the
Speaker 5: police and from attorneys. And lawyers and stuff like this,
Speaker 5: and other medical professionals, and so I thought, okay, I
Speaker 5: love the novel. Right, And in the context of the novel,
Speaker 5: Dracula is a demon. There's note about he is murdering people,
Speaker 5: he's horrific. He is an abomination. But thinking about the
Speaker 5: process of how they went from this is a human
Speaker 5: being to this is an abomination that we are going
Speaker 5: to eliminate from the world, I found curious. And so
Speaker 5: that was sort of the question that I began this
Speaker 5: sort of journey about thinking about evil is like and
Speaker 5: even though it's a novel, it's like, how did these
Speaker 5: folks get to the point where they realize that something
Speaker 5: had to be obliterated? And they didn't bring him the court, right,
Speaker 5: They didn't say we think that you've done some really
Speaker 5: bad things, we're going to hold you accountable for your crimes.
Speaker 5: They just you're a demon and you must be obliterated.
Speaker 5: And unfortunately, when you look around the world, do you
Speaker 5: see this happening?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 5: You see people simply being obliterated. You see horrible things
Speaker 5: happening to people all the time. You know, I'm not
Speaker 5: a historian of genocide, and I'm not a historian of
Speaker 5: stilism and colonialism. But I'm really interested in how we
Speaker 5: get to the point where we're able to identify something
Speaker 5: as evil. And that's what I find really scary about
Speaker 5: the topic of evil is that Dracula is horrible. And
Speaker 5: I love that because it's a horror novel and he's
Speaker 5: a horrible villain, then that's great. But the characters scare
Speaker 5: me more because they just they've empowered themselves to have
Speaker 5: no guilts, no shame, no doubt, no hesitation, and those
Speaker 5: things are actually seen as weaknesses and data finds interesting,
Speaker 5: compelling and certainly worth talking about.
Speaker 4: Well, is vengeance considered evil? And where's the line between
Speaker 4: vengeance and justice?
Speaker 5: Well, that would require a scale right of what is
Speaker 5: just and what is unjust? And so where do we
Speaker 5: find the word justice? Where do we find the word criminal? Like,
Speaker 5: where do those terms come from? And how do they
Speaker 5: get used? How do they get used to vilify people?
Speaker 5: Is this a corporate sham or is it something invented
Speaker 5: by grandma or you know, is this deep seated kind
Speaker 5: of thing that we have in our society and it's
Speaker 5: been with us for a long time? And is that
Speaker 5: a good thing? Is it a bad thing. So sort
Speaker 5: of asking questions is one of the things I really
Speaker 5: try to do. You know, again, I'm not after the
Speaker 5: existential question of whether these things exist or not. I'm
Speaker 5: interested in what people do with the word evil, and
Speaker 5: as a human being, just as a non you know, academic,
Speaker 5: just in like on the street, in my everyday life. Yeah, sure,
Speaker 5: I may use the word evil when I want to
Speaker 5: control the situation, right, And if I call something evil,
Speaker 5: that gives me a little bit of control over the situation.
Speaker 5: And if people buy my conception of evil, that gives
Speaker 5: me a lot of power. Right. As an academic, I
Speaker 5: have to stand back and say, like, so, doctor Ken,
Speaker 5: how have you used the word evil?
Speaker 1: So this brings up the big notion that evil is
Speaker 1: kind of in the eye of the beholder, as is
Speaker 1: justice and vengeance. So how is all this stuff defined
Speaker 1: between individuals and then among cultures and even used by
Speaker 1: leaders to polarize or vilify or categorize acts that actually
Speaker 1: require concrete action. So does everyone use the word evil
Speaker 1: about the same amount they don't.
Speaker 5: I'm actually studying some of my colleagues who use the
Speaker 5: word evil too. I turn them into my data. Whether
Speaker 5: they like it, or not. I'm interested in the people
Speaker 5: that use those terms and how they get used and
Speaker 5: what they do with them and how effective they are.
Speaker 4: Okay, be honest, how often do you use the word
Speaker 4: evil like casually?
Speaker 5: That's embarrassing. I for sure use it. I mean I
Speaker 5: teach it, and yeah, I use it, but I don't
Speaker 5: think I use it really seriously. Like if you know,
Speaker 5: I'm having a conversation at the dinner with the family
Speaker 5: and we're talking about a political decision or transphobia or
Speaker 5: something like this, and I try not to use the
Speaker 5: term because it comes with so much baggage, it comes
Speaker 5: with so much freight. To introduce it into conversation is
Speaker 5: just it's not really helpful. It's easier to use less
Speaker 5: loaded terms like religion. Is the same way. As soon
Speaker 5: as you use the word religion, people make lots of
Speaker 5: assumptions about what that word means and maybe who you
Speaker 5: are or what that entails. That's again, it's a really
Speaker 5: loaded term.
Speaker 1: So in another Spooketopra episode about mummies mammiology with doctor
Speaker 1: Karacooney and doctor Selima Ikram, we discuss religion versus ritual
Speaker 1: and magic, and also we dive into that in our
Speaker 1: Witchology episode with Pio Parma, who themselves is a practicing
Speaker 1: which with roots in Eastern and Western cultures. So the
Speaker 1: term evil and religion go hand in hand, but the
Speaker 1: word evil has of course leaked into secular culture to
Speaker 1: describe unspeakable cruelty without the religious context. So how does
Speaker 1: Kenneth handle this at a dinner party?
Speaker 5: Most hesitant? Some says what do you do? I can say,
Speaker 5: I study religion, and then I say, but I study
Speaker 5: the fun stuff, And they said, oh, yeah, what do
Speaker 5: you do? And I study zombies, and I study superheroes,
Speaker 5: and I study imaginary companions and things like dungeons and dragons.
Speaker 5: And then they're like oh, because now they know that
Speaker 5: they're not going to get a sermon, and they know that, like, oh,
Speaker 5: this is someone that studies popular culture. They're probably harmless,
Speaker 5: and you know, probably in the arts and stuff and
Speaker 5: that kind of thing.
Speaker 4: So you're not going to leave with a pamphlet, and
Speaker 4: you might.
Speaker 5: Leave with the book. You probably won't leave with a pamphlet, though.
Speaker 1: Ken published a book in twenty twenty three titled Evil,
Speaker 1: a Critical Primer, which examines academically the way that the
Speaker 1: word evil is very contextually bound, and it dives into
Speaker 1: different cultural factors that seek to define it. I like
Speaker 1: to envision Ken with a smart leather satchel, handing out
Speaker 1: hardcover copies at his wife's work functions, or passing out
Speaker 1: the volume to a table of friendly strangers at a
Speaker 1: cousin's wedding. I would be thrilled to be on the
Speaker 1: receiving end and ask him one million questions and leave
Speaker 1: with a copy, which, to be honest, is what essentially
Speaker 1: this episode is. Now, did you grow up in a
Speaker 1: religious household or did you grow up a D and
Speaker 1: D NERD or both?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's going to be both. I grew up in
Speaker 5: an academic household. My dad was a professor at the
Speaker 5: University of Windsor. He taught English. My mom eventually became
Speaker 5: a special instructor in a department of religion at the
Speaker 5: University of Windsor, and she taught verses on death and
Speaker 5: women in religion. And I grew up playing D and D.
Speaker 5: So the basement filled with horror novels. My room was
Speaker 5: filled with fantasy novels, and I played D and D.
Speaker 5: And when we went on vacation, we went to bookstores
Speaker 5: and cemeteries, and then I fell in love in high school.
Speaker 5: I've my partner and I've been together for a very
Speaker 5: long time. And her family is Pentecostal, and so they're
Speaker 5: charsmatic and speaking in tongues and all of that. And
Speaker 5: in a sense, you know, me studying religion and making
Speaker 5: evil part of that. It was trying to make sense
Speaker 5: of my world. It was trying to make sense of
Speaker 5: my everyday reality. There was people that seemed to live
Speaker 5: in very different worlds, and I had some experience of
Speaker 5: that playing D and D. Right, you're in a normal
Speaker 5: worlds and then you've got the game mechanics and you've
Speaker 5: got this imaginer world that you enter into, and that
Speaker 5: does an extension of that real world.
Speaker 1: Ken's family was less religious than his wife's because, you know,
Speaker 1: being Pentecostal and speaking in tongues, it's a real lifestyle commitment.
Speaker 5: My dad was funny. He died a few years ago,
Speaker 5: but he was funny because he was It seemed to
Speaker 5: me that he was mainly at church because of choir
Speaker 5: and of the tea and cookies.
Speaker 4: What about fellowship?
Speaker 5: You know, the family that I married into was a
Speaker 5: very different where the Bible is the word of God
Speaker 5: and it's true and it's literal. And for me again,
Speaker 5: that's why it's not a question about what isn't isn't real,
Speaker 5: it's how do people then behave what do they do
Speaker 5: with that information? That was how I made sense of
Speaker 5: these sort of worlds. I was encountering the pentecostal world
Speaker 5: where demons are alive and inside of people, and then
Speaker 5: this D and D world, which I knew to be
Speaker 5: completely imagined. You get the world of academia too, where
Speaker 5: we're all scholars and doing scholarly things and scientists and
Speaker 5: doing these sciency things.
Speaker 4: Well do you get along with your in laws? What's
Speaker 4: that like?
Speaker 5: There's been difficult times, but yeah, it's great. Like I mean,
Speaker 5: the thing is like, regardless of how you look at
Speaker 5: the world, when you come to the kitchen table, there's food, right,
Speaker 5: and there's stories, and there's people that are arguing and
Speaker 5: talking and sharing and laughing. And so when you focus
Speaker 5: on what's at hand, then a lot of these larger
Speaker 5: worlds that we occupy very often, you know, they take
Speaker 5: a chill pill, right, they just sort of calm down.
Speaker 5: It doesn't have to be these big you know, we
Speaker 5: believe that you're going to hell and stuff. It's not
Speaker 5: relevant to spending an afternoon by the pool or sitting
Speaker 5: in a canoe and going padling.
Speaker 1: Okay, I get that. In the Genocideology episode, doctor Dirk
Speaker 1: Moses said that taking the temperature down on these discussions
Speaker 1: is what moves things forward. But also say that you
Speaker 1: have deep, fundamentally different views of what other people ought
Speaker 1: to be doing with their bodies or lives, or how
Speaker 1: people should be treating each other, or how they might
Speaker 1: judge each other, especially if you know that it's simmering
Speaker 1: right under the surface because it involves people's ideology and
Speaker 1: their identities. And what if you are pissed when it
Speaker 1: comes to like having a barbecue, how do you not
Speaker 1: want to hold others accountable? Or how do you have
Speaker 1: that conversation without it becoming so heated that it does
Speaker 1: become accusatory or it does invoke, you know, notions of
Speaker 1: evil on this side or that side.
Speaker 4: How is that temperature taken down?
Speaker 1: It feels like we have an obligation in situations of
Speaker 1: like emotional proximity, where it's not just about strangers fighting
Speaker 1: strangers with hackles up and fight or flight responses, but
Speaker 1: you know how how are those situations are approached without
Speaker 1: it being so personal?
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean in a certain sense. I as an academic,
Speaker 5: I don't really have any advice. We often push others
Speaker 5: away because we're fear of being rejected ourselves. Like it's
Speaker 5: a book called Others in Mind by Phil Rosche. It's
Speaker 5: beautiful book. It's wonderful book, but it talks a lot
Speaker 5: about that we push other people away when we're afraid
Speaker 5: that they're going to push us away, so we do
Speaker 5: it first. And that seems like this is what's happening
Speaker 5: in you know, politics today, is that people are pushing
Speaker 5: other people away because they're afraid of being rejected. Like
Speaker 5: this matrix of purification is really based on I think
Speaker 5: a lot of anxiety, a lot of fears, a lot
Speaker 5: of fragility because you know, if you're really robust, you'd
Speaker 5: sit down at the table with anybody and talk to
Speaker 5: anybody about anything.
Speaker 2: Mm hmm.
Speaker 5: Theory is one way, practice goes another. But ultimately and
Speaker 5: we have to sit around the table the result these things,
Speaker 5: we're going to have to come to consensus. It's not
Speaker 5: going to happen in an academic journal or like, it
Speaker 5: doesn't matter how true.
Speaker 4: The theory is is your partner still Pentecostal or just
Speaker 4: raised in it?
Speaker 5: Raised in it?
Speaker 3: Yeah?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it was an interesting journey and moving out of that,
Speaker 5: that's still part of who we are. Like who I
Speaker 5: am in the classroom is different than who I am
Speaker 5: on the podcast and who I am going to be
Speaker 5: at the dinner table tonight. It's like we adopt different
Speaker 5: personas and ways of being in the world based on
Speaker 5: context and that kind of thing.
Speaker 1: So back to evil, who defines it and what it
Speaker 1: means and where the notion of it came from? This
Speaker 1: is so interesting historically and culturally.
Speaker 5: My hunch is that we took this basic idea of
Speaker 5: clean and dirty and we grafted evil sort of into
Speaker 5: that concept and sort of blended them together in order
Speaker 5: to be able to make the idea of evil thinkable.
Speaker 5: And for me, that's really really fascinating is what are
Speaker 5: the things that make evil thinkable? Like as a concept
Speaker 5: when something is diabolical or atrocious or you know, demonic,
Speaker 5: what are all the things that went into you being
Speaker 5: able to think that? And I think dirt is one
Speaker 5: of them. There's a book by Mary Douglas called Purity
Speaker 5: and Danger, and for me, it was a bit of
Speaker 5: a revelation because she basically said, look, when you look
Speaker 5: out at the world, you classify everything that you see
Speaker 5: at the borders of your system of classcation, at the
Speaker 5: borders of your language, at the borders of the way
Speaker 5: you look at the world, there's going to be sort
Speaker 5: of blurry areas, and that blurry area that's dirt. And
Speaker 5: so dirt appears whenever things aren't orderly, and so you
Speaker 5: have I've got my water glass here, and I've got
Speaker 5: the mic, and I've got my phone and a computer.
Speaker 5: Everything is in its proper place, but there's a knowing
Speaker 5: thing on my desk. The plant is actually leaking over
Speaker 5: over top of my phone. And this is the thing.
Speaker 5: It's like, I'll move the plant off the table, I'll
Speaker 5: move the leaf of the plants without even thinking about it,
Speaker 5: like it's not evil, but there's no way it gets
Speaker 5: to stay there. And then all of a sudden way
Speaker 5: a second, when we're thinking about evil, it's like the
Speaker 5: things that we don't even register, the things that simply
Speaker 5: get swept away, that just are discarded with a brush
Speaker 5: of my hand, right like I'm not even going to
Speaker 5: register it as evil. At least you know, very often
Speaker 5: if you're identified as evil or an immoral person, you'll
Speaker 5: get a trial. Very often we're willing to do that
Speaker 5: with people that we think are immoral or evil, or
Speaker 5: people that we we call criminal. We'll give them lawyers.
Speaker 5: But dirt doesn't get a lawyer. Dirt gets eliminated.
Speaker 1: So a few years back, I got a chance to
Speaker 1: interview doctor Lydia Jennings for an Indigenous Pedology episode all
Speaker 1: about soil science and the intersections with tribal lands, and
Speaker 1: I asked her if she could help me with some definitions.
Speaker 1: Here's an excerpt from that interview. And what is the
Speaker 1: difference between soil and dirt?
Speaker 6: So it depends when you ask. Okay, I like to
Speaker 6: think about it is like, so dirt is displaced soil.
Speaker 6: Soil is naturally occurring in an ecosystem. It's really full
Speaker 6: of life and microbes and you know, helps fulture water,
Speaker 6: and dirt has kind of been removed from its home,
Speaker 6: and I think often it gets degraded as being called
Speaker 6: dirt as opposed to recognizing the buy force it is
Speaker 6: in part because of it and removal from its home.
Speaker 4: Oh that's such a good answer.
Speaker 1: I wasn't sure if it was like it's got to
Speaker 1: have a certain percentage of rock or certain percentage of dust,
Speaker 1: But it's really more philosophical.
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's just.
Speaker 6: Remouting it from its surface. And so that's like I
Speaker 6: think the easiest place is to call it like removed
Speaker 6: removed dirt soil. I think there are so many like soil.
Speaker 6: Microbiologists will also think about the microbes associated with soil.
Speaker 6: You often hear people say soil is alive, dirt is dead,
Speaker 6: which I don't think is really true, especially as someone
Speaker 6: who studied mining issues, Like there's a lot of questions
Speaker 6: about like if a reclaimed soil system or a mind
Speaker 6: soil is full of life, and so I think dirt
Speaker 6: is displaced soil.
Speaker 1: I never thought that talking about evil, which is a
Speaker 1: concept so staggering that a scholar can write a whole
Speaker 1: book talking about talking about talking about it and it
Speaker 1: would all come down to dirt. And how often in
Speaker 1: your classes do people ask you questions like is this
Speaker 1: political party evil?
Speaker 4: Was Hitler evil? Who's evil?
Speaker 1: That requires from a moral standpoint some sort of group smothering, you.
Speaker 5: Know, like it's funny. I don't know if i've you know,
Speaker 5: in twenty years and I don't know if I've ever
Speaker 5: been asked is this person evil?
Speaker 6: Just mean it?
Speaker 5: But I start the very first day, I say, okay,
Speaker 5: so if you read a book by someone that talks
Speaker 5: about evil, they're going to list these people as being you.
Speaker 5: And so you have you know it till at the
Speaker 5: Hunt and you have Hitler, and you have all of
Speaker 5: these people as evil. And they said, this is not
Speaker 5: what we're talking about. We're not talking about the bad
Speaker 5: things that human beings do. We're going to talk about dirt, right,
Speaker 5: We're going to talk about something that we generally avoid
Speaker 5: and generally think is kind of dangerous. One of the
Speaker 5: things I used to do is on the very first
Speaker 5: day of class, I would put a potato chip on
Speaker 5: the floor of the classroom and then I would have
Speaker 5: everyone do a five second count to make sure the
Speaker 5: five second rule was like totally done and over. I'd
Speaker 5: pause dramatic effect, and then I would eat the chip
Speaker 5: and invariably everybody just like you had this collective gas right,
Speaker 5: and it's like, so, now what do you think is
Speaker 5: going to happen? And people like You're gonna get sick.
Speaker 5: That's dirty, that's like you should be ashamed. And some
Speaker 5: people would inevitably just walk out of a classroom like
Speaker 5: I'm this lunatic. I am not staying around for all
Speaker 5: of this. But it sort of makes a points, like
Speaker 5: we have this nosh of clean and dirty. So what
Speaker 5: are all the associations I've done something that is potentially
Speaker 5: unhygienic or is unhygienic, whatever that's potentially dangerous. So what
Speaker 5: are the associations that you have with dirt? And they're
Speaker 5: like I associate dirt with like poverty, and I dirt
Speaker 5: with death, and you know, all of these other things,
Speaker 5: and then you start flashing out. So when you said
Speaker 5: that like this was a dirty thing to do, all
Speaker 5: of a sudden you were conjuring things like death and
Speaker 5: poverty and they had a bunch of sort of associations
Speaker 5: with that word. And for me, that was that's gold.
Speaker 5: Because then all of a sudden, you know, they're starting
Speaker 5: to see it triggers lots of different things clean, dirty, polluted,
Speaker 5: you know, not polluted, sacred, profane, All of these concepts
Speaker 5: get lumped in. So it's a really really loaded kind
Speaker 5: of idea. And so looking at you know, evil in
Speaker 5: this way is it's kind of fun. I'm not historian
Speaker 5: of genocide. It's kind of fun to do that. And
Speaker 5: I have to say, I stopped eating potatoes above the floor.
Speaker 4: What do you eat now, Like something goopier, like something
Speaker 4: wetter well.
Speaker 5: I was thinking like if I poured a cup of
Speaker 5: coffee onto the floor and then slurp that up. But
Speaker 5: that was like, there's no way I'm gonna do that
Speaker 5: because like that just triggers everything in me right, like
Speaker 5: I rationalized it. Really, but the potato chip is like
Speaker 5: it's bench, so only a little fraction of the potato
Speaker 5: chip is going to touch the floor. Like so I
Speaker 5: fell into my own theory. I freak myself out. But
Speaker 5: they cleaned up the lecture hall with us beestus one day,
Speaker 5: like it had the best list, and they all tied
Speaker 5: it up and I said, there's some powder on the
Speaker 5: floor and I said, I eat it the tent chip
Speaker 5: up the floor in this class. And they're like, yeah,
Speaker 5: you're not gonna want to do that.
Speaker 1: And if those last details made you feel some kind
Speaker 1: of way, we have an excellent episode on environmental toxicology.
Speaker 1: We also have a Bleach episode called disinfect Theology with
Speaker 1: a Chemist, and an OCD episode which also talks about
Speaker 1: moral scrupulosity obsessions. Also, we got a Discustology episode with
Speaker 1: a psychologist who has devoted his career to it.
Speaker 4: We'll link him in the show notes.
Speaker 5: So with disgust, we want objects to be removed. Shame
Speaker 5: is really difficult. Shame is when we want ourselves to disappear.
Speaker 5: It hurts because it is part of who you are,
Speaker 5: right like it's it's a self condemnation. And this is
Speaker 5: why I think there's a bit of a difference between
Speaker 5: guilt and shame. And I know that guilt gets a
Speaker 5: lot of press, but I've always thought that guilt has
Speaker 5: a little bit of pride in it.
Speaker 1: So the American Psychological Association published this interview with professor
Speaker 1: doctor June tang Me, who explain that quote in a nutshell.
Speaker 1: When we feel shame, we feel bad about ourselves. We
Speaker 1: are fundamentally flawed because we did something. It reflects who
Speaker 1: we are as a person. I'm a bad person for
Speaker 1: having done that. Guilt, in contrast, she says, focuses on
Speaker 1: a behavior somewhat separate from the self. You can be
Speaker 1: a good person but do a bad thing. And so
Speaker 1: when people feel guilt, they feel typically bad about something
Speaker 1: that they've done something specific or not done that they
Speaker 1: should have done. So essentially, guilt is like, ah, shit,
Speaker 1: I'm sorry and then you move on, and shame is like, fuck,
Speaker 1: I'm fucked up because.
Speaker 4: I'm the fuck worst.
Speaker 1: I hate myself. So fun game, which one are you?
Speaker 1: It can determine the course of your life and mental
Speaker 1: wellness and the fate of everyone on the planet.
Speaker 5: Shame is just really, really, really painful. And these are
Speaker 5: great emotions to focus on because they are so deeply aversive, right,
Speaker 5: and so anything that might cause us shame or that
Speaker 5: discuss this, those are prime candidates for us targeting those
Speaker 5: things to be evil. So if a professor says, you know,
Speaker 5: you can do better on your exam, I think if
Speaker 5: someone experiences shame, they may then say, well, that professor
Speaker 5: is causing me so much pain, so they're the evil one.
Speaker 1: Yeah.
Speaker 5: Or if something is disgusting, we'd just say it's disgusting,
Speaker 5: it's evil, yeah, And so it's kind of a slippery
Speaker 5: slope in many respects.
Speaker 1: Well, yeah, I think that's one thing that really surprised
Speaker 1: me because you know, as a religious scholar with someone
Speaker 1: who has kind of a background socially around really hyper
Speaker 1: religious things. Yeah, and yet also comes from an academic family.
Speaker 1: When I think of the word evil, I think abuse
Speaker 1: of power to oppress people.
Speaker 4: And then when you're looking at.
Speaker 1: It a religious context, maybe evil could mean someone who's
Speaker 1: trying to undermine the will of God or someone who's
Speaker 1: going against something divine, some kind of indoctrination.
Speaker 4: So it's like those the same word for really different things.
Speaker 5: Yeah, but like the perfect I'm gonna have to I
Speaker 5: have to call you on you said, a person that's
Speaker 5: trying to right. You said, a person that's trying to
Speaker 5: That's the modern idea, like that evil is associated with
Speaker 5: your will. The ritual understanding or evil is impurity. It's
Speaker 5: not about your intention, like you can intend harm, or
Speaker 5: you can intend love or wonder or whatever. It doesn't matter.
Speaker 5: Doesn't matter what you intend. It's contact that determines the impurity.
Speaker 5: If you touch a corpse, or if you can come
Speaker 5: into contact with blood, if you come into contact with
Speaker 5: a forbidden material like what's prohibited, then you carry that
Speaker 5: with you because it transfers that chaos, that disorder, that
Speaker 5: dirt or whatever that that impurity transfers over to you.
Speaker 5: It doesn't matter what you intend. So it's it's not
Speaker 5: someone that's trying to undermine sacred rules. Is that they
Speaker 5: have come into contact with chaos, and now you can't
Speaker 5: tolerate them unless they become ritually pure. And so they're
Speaker 5: just dangerous. They're a threat to themselves, they're a threat
Speaker 5: to the community, and they're a threat to the cosmos.
Speaker 5: That the danger of impurity is precisely that, like, if
Speaker 5: we don't fix this, the entire universe could come to
Speaker 5: an end. We have to fix that. But recognizing that
Speaker 5: that's what's going on I think will help you change
Speaker 5: your toolbox a little bit. You may approach that a
Speaker 5: little bit differently. When say this is a purity crusade.
Speaker 5: This isn't about you know, argumentation, it's not about right
Speaker 5: and wrong as we understand it morally. If you're a
Speaker 5: fan of contemporary you know, moral theory, then you'd be like,
Speaker 5: we have to get this to a point of human
Speaker 5: rights and justice, and we have to move it out
Speaker 5: of just you know, obliterating people that are different than us,
Speaker 5: or that we define as dirt, you know, that matter
Speaker 5: out of place that Mary Douglas talks about.
Speaker 4: Yeah, that potato chip on the floor. Yeah, the potato
Speaker 4: chip on the floor.
Speaker 1: So going back in time, we have a medieval cotacology
Speaker 1: episode about weird old manuscript art and memes and snails
Speaker 1: with Evan Pridmore, and it involves more nuns harvesting dogs
Speaker 1: from trees as you probably expect, and we also discuss
Speaker 1: depictions of snails to represent some dark antisemitic sentiment and
Speaker 1: some old timey harmful propaganda.
Speaker 4: So let's talk a little bit about that.
Speaker 5: You might say demons are evil in the medieval period
Speaker 5: in Europe, but then after nobody believes in demons, then
Speaker 5: saying the demons are evil doesn't really hold any weight, right,
Speaker 5: And so you say, oh, we're going to call the
Speaker 5: rich evil now, or we're going to call the monarchies evil.
Speaker 5: And again I'm not into it, like is it true
Speaker 5: or is it not true? It's just like, how did
Speaker 5: you get there? How did you get to that point
Speaker 5: where you were able to say that evil? Like who benefits?
Speaker 5: It was the school teachers and principles that were using
Speaker 5: the word evil in the residential school system. They were
Speaker 5: using that word in order to enact and carry out genocide.
Speaker 5: But we use words in all kinds of different ways, right,
Speaker 5: that was a particularly malicious way.
Speaker 1: Can points out that we, of course can call people
Speaker 1: who commit acts of atrocity evil, but they often use
Speaker 1: notions of impurity or evil to oppress their victims.
Speaker 5: I don't know if it's cynical, but I'm thinking how
Speaker 5: convenient it is for both of those groups to have
Speaker 5: this word at hand to use how they want in
Speaker 5: order to push their agenda. You know, we start noticing
Speaker 5: parts of our behavior that are almost on automatic pilot,
Speaker 5: like you know, the residential school system in Canada, right,
Speaker 5: the ongoing you know, finding of corpses and schools. Right,
Speaker 5: this was going on up until like the early nineties,
Speaker 5: and this was made public information, you know, in around
Speaker 5: nineteen ten. So people knew about this and nothing was
Speaker 5: done about it. Some people knew exactly what was going on,
Speaker 5: the indigenous communities knew what was going on, but many
Speaker 5: people chose not to look at it.
Speaker 1: In his twenty nineteen memoir from Bare Rock Mountain, The
Speaker 1: Life and Times of a Dane Residential school Survivor, author
Speaker 1: Antoine Mountain writes that quote, the churches saw to it
Speaker 1: that anyone who still had anything in the way of
Speaker 1: traditional medicine ways was shunned with their savage and evil ways.
Speaker 1: Quote and Ken referenced the residential schools in Canada, and
Speaker 1: for a little more background Canada specifically, their residential school
Speaker 1: system began in the late eighteen hundreds with one hundred
Speaker 1: and fifty thousand estimated First Nations children removed from their
Speaker 1: homes and family to attend Christian run schools that would
Speaker 1: supposedly civilize them and change their clothing and keep them
Speaker 1: from learning their native languages and ways of life. And
Speaker 1: up to a third of these children may have died
Speaker 1: and a mass amount of unmarked graves are still being found.
Speaker 1: And the last residential school in Canada closed in the
Speaker 1: late nineteen nineties, not eighteen nineties, nineteen nineties. They were
Speaker 1: operating up until the late nineteen nineties. So for more
Speaker 1: on this, including survivor's testimonies, you can see the twenty
Speaker 1: fifteen paper Honoring the Truth, Reconciling for the Future, Summary
Speaker 1: of the Final Report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission
Speaker 1: of Canada. And we talked to doctor Dirk Moses about
Speaker 1: this in the Genocidology episode, and here's a clip of that.
Speaker 7: Now, the last residential school finally closed in nineteen ninety six,
Speaker 7: and in twenty twenty two, the Canadian government finally recognized
Speaker 7: these acts as genocide, which is historical progress, like finally
Speaker 7: an admission of a genocide. It took two hundred years
Speaker 7: for that. Badoville too misty about this kind of meager act.
Speaker 7: Our lead editor, Mercedes Maitland, helped produce and research and
Speaker 7: encourage this episode for the last few months we've been
Speaker 7: working on it, and she notes that as a Canadian,
Speaker 7: for her, it's very frustrating to see because very few
Speaker 7: of Canada's National Truth and Reconciliation Commissions, calls to action
Speaker 7: in regard to child welfare and education and health, justice,
Speaker 7: language and actual reconciliation have actually happened. And mostly it's
Speaker 7: just acknowledging or appointing someone to think about a problem,
Speaker 7: but there have been virtually no material or policy changes.
Speaker 7: So that's a government acknowledging a genocide, which is different
Speaker 7: from a conviction.
Speaker 1: Now, the victims and survivors of the Canadian Residential school
Speaker 1: system are recognized on September thirtieth every year in Canada
Speaker 1: for Orange Shirt Day, and it's a tradition coined from
Speaker 1: the story of this one survivor, Phyllis Jack Webb's Dad's
Speaker 1: account of having this bright, brand new shirt that was
Speaker 1: a orange that her grandmother gave to her right before
Speaker 1: she left for the residential school, and it was stripped
Speaker 1: from her wardrobe. It was replaced with a uniform. All
Speaker 1: ties to her real life felt severed, she said. And
Speaker 1: this system existed for over one hundred years under the
Speaker 1: noses of modernity when you may have been alive, because
Speaker 1: the victims and survivors were being cleaned of their old
Speaker 1: evil ways in the eyes of those that ran them.
Speaker 5: And it's because it was sort of below the love,
Speaker 5: the threshold of perception in a way. And that's what
Speaker 5: like a system like colonialism does. It tries to move
Speaker 5: things below the love perception so that they can be
Speaker 5: swept away without people noticing, like cleaning your floor. I mean,
Speaker 5: it's an awful analogy because what we're talking about is murder.
Speaker 5: From my perspective, I don't see a lot of people
Speaker 5: thinking about it that way. Think about like what goes
Speaker 5: into thinking about people? Like how do we get to
Speaker 5: the point where we can call something evil?
Speaker 6: Right?
Speaker 1: Well, I'm wondering too, which cultures tend to work on
Speaker 1: a really stark dichotomy with good and bad and sending
Speaker 1: a toning and this really like bifurcated kind of philosophical
Speaker 1: concepts or categorizations of behavior. And then which ones tend
Speaker 1: to think of it on a gray scale more, which
Speaker 1: cultures tend to do that big splitting.
Speaker 5: Well, I think it happens in a lot of different places.
Speaker 5: If we look at it in terms of subject object, right,
Speaker 5: you have a subject which is a person, and an
Speaker 5: object sort of which is a thing. If your cultural society,
Speaker 5: your friends, your peers, your boss tells you to look
Speaker 5: at things in a subject object kind of view. So
Speaker 5: you know, if I look outside my window and there's
Speaker 5: like a bunch of trees there, and I can look
Speaker 5: at that, ooh, that's you know, that's fifty dollars of
Speaker 5: lumber or something like that, as opposed to seeing the
Speaker 5: trees right, treating it like an object or as a commodity.
Speaker 5: So if you have that subject object model, and you
Speaker 5: really double down on that model, then you're going to
Speaker 5: be turning subjects into objects all the time.
Speaker 1: This can certainly happen in terms of casualties and war
Speaker 1: and pay attention to who is humanized and who isn't.
Speaker 1: And again we talk a lot about dehumanization and the
Speaker 1: language of transgression in the Genocidology episode, who is portrayed
Speaker 1: as an animal or an object and who is considered
Speaker 1: a fellow human? And in our Victimology episode with doctor
Speaker 1: Cally Renaisson, she explains how certain homicide victim cases are
Speaker 1: followed closely by the press and pop culture, usually white people,
Speaker 1: usually women, when in actuality, the largest demographic of homicide
Speaker 1: victims in the US is black men. So who is
Speaker 1: the subject and who is the object? On a day
Speaker 1: to day level, when do we look at ourselves as
Speaker 1: objects versus subjects? Which isn't possibly positive though, right this.
Speaker 5: Might be good in medicine where you don't really want
Speaker 5: the doctor doing surgery and then crying get the pain
Speaker 5: that they're causing your body. Really you do want them
Speaker 5: to take up an objectivating perspective. You want them to
Speaker 5: treat you like an object. If you're about to get
Speaker 5: hit by a car, you want someone to treat you
Speaker 5: as an object and to push you out of the way,
Speaker 5: like okay, so this is how much you weigh, this
Speaker 5: is the kind of force that's going to be applied
Speaker 5: to to get you out of the way, right. But
Speaker 5: there's other ways in which we're treated like objects, you know,
Speaker 5: maybe by an employer, or maybe by peers or students
Speaker 5: or anybody, right or subjectivity is no longer seen or recognized,
Speaker 5: and being treated as an object, as a thing, and
Speaker 5: not as a person is very, very painful, you know.
Speaker 5: In terms of evil, I'm interested in how subjects get
Speaker 5: turned into objects, and sometimes it can come across this
Speaker 5: kind of loony, but we're really really good at animating
Speaker 5: things all the time, like our stuffies, all of the
Speaker 5: stuff around us. I mean, it makes a lot of
Speaker 5: sense to me. I think we would probably live better
Speaker 5: if we lived treating the world alive.
Speaker 1: So we might take better care of the planet or
Speaker 1: at risk species or livestock or our couch if we
Speaker 1: imbued this greater sense of humanity to it as if
Speaker 1: it were a subject and not an object.
Speaker 5: And so evil is part of that, because you know,
Speaker 5: when someone talks about good and evil, they're saying, okay,
Speaker 5: what healthy is the good stuff and heart is the
Speaker 5: bad stuff. Then they really get to set the pace
Speaker 5: for what isn't isn't real as well you know, then
Speaker 5: they get to design what counts as a real woman
Speaker 5: and what gets to count as a real man, or
Speaker 5: what gets the count as property and like all of
Speaker 5: that kind of stuff. So that's another curiosity is that
Speaker 5: very very few people are willing to say on there's
Speaker 5: no sarching as evil. It's all relative. We can just
Speaker 5: sort of get rid of it. You may say that,
Speaker 5: but you still use the word in the sentence.
Speaker 1: Well, I'm wondering if it's a matter of treating subjects
Speaker 1: like objects. You know, then if you look at like billionaires,
Speaker 1: are they evil if they are taking a lot of
Speaker 1: resources and taking advantage of other people's situations or livelihoods, Like,
Speaker 1: at what point does an entity become evil because it's
Speaker 1: doing kind of more harm than good?
Speaker 4: And like what do you think of Google?
Speaker 1: I think their missions would just be don't be evil
Speaker 1: and then changing it along the way.
Speaker 5: Okay, so this is the point in the program. We
Speaker 5: really need to talk about definitions.
Speaker 1: Yes, let's define finally, can we we can try what
Speaker 1: Kenneth can And so.
Speaker 5: You know, what do you mean by evil? And first
Speaker 5: of all, there's number of ways of defining something. And
Speaker 5: so when I say, you know what is the definition
Speaker 5: of evil. Let's talk about the definition of definition first. Okay,
Speaker 5: I hate that, I hate that meta thing, but okay,
Speaker 5: like we should talk about So when you're using the
Speaker 5: word evil, first of all, you have to figure out
Speaker 5: what kind of definition are you using. So if we're
Speaker 5: going to say that billionaires are evil, is a billion
Speaker 5: dollars the criteria? And okay, so is that personal wealth?
Speaker 5: Is it capital wealth? Or is it like a metaphor
Speaker 5: for social capital? So does that mean like a billion
Speaker 5: dollars worth of political power or like a billion dollars
Speaker 5: worth of friends. You know, you have to figure out
Speaker 5: the definition that you're using and then you can go
Speaker 5: ahead and use it. As a scholar. You know, that's
Speaker 5: super important because if I'm going to study something, I
Speaker 5: have to start out by defining it. And when I
Speaker 5: define evil, I've got this insanely big definition. You know,
Speaker 5: dangerous and aversions. Anything that we decide to be dangerous
Speaker 5: or that we avoid, that's evil.
Speaker 6: Oh.
Speaker 5: When I do it in my classes, it for the
Speaker 5: purpose of this class. We're going to define evil's dangerous
Speaker 5: and a versions. And so anything that you decide is dangerous,
Speaker 5: anything that you've avoided, that's going to be evil. So
Speaker 5: if somebody calls you and you don't answer the call,
Speaker 5: they've avoided the call, then that person is evil, you know.
Speaker 5: Or somebody doesn't listen to your podcast, they're avoiding your podcast,
Speaker 5: that person is evil.
Speaker 1: Listen Thispooktober twenty twenty five. I'm going to admit it
Speaker 1: goes too hard. Usually our spooktobers are like candy and bats,
Speaker 1: But in the context of a very fucked up twenty
Speaker 1: twenty five diving into homicidal clowns and cockroaches giving live
Speaker 1: birth and the nature of all that is evil, it's
Speaker 1: like a lot. Listen, we work on these months in advance.
Speaker 4: We didn't know.
Speaker 1: But if you're hearing this and you're not avoiding it,
Speaker 1: you're not evil in my eyes.
Speaker 5: Obviously, this is an artificial definition, right, Like we're not
Speaker 5: saying you're and demonic. What I like to do is
Speaker 5: then start looking at, Okay, what do we avoid today?
Speaker 5: You know, what do we seem to be dangerous? And
Speaker 5: then when you start looking at it that way, like
Speaker 5: pictures of sexuality and corpses and stories about stuff, all
Speaker 5: of these things, all of a sudden we find out like, wow,
Speaker 5: we avoid a lot of things, and there's a lot
Speaker 5: of things we decide are dangerous.
Speaker 1: And then once you have that definition, how do you
Speaker 1: even begin to apply that? Because anything that you avoid
Speaker 1: or is dangerous, like is a wasp?
Speaker 4: Evil? Is an assignment? Evil?
Speaker 5: Yeah, it's I mean it's too big, right, encompasses a
Speaker 5: lot of different things.
Speaker 4: It's too much.
Speaker 1: And me as a non academic, as a non scholar,
Speaker 1: as someone who's just like my horrified face is lit
Speaker 1: up by the news on my screen, you know, I
Speaker 1: can't help but want to apply these two things I
Speaker 1: see happening around me. And I look at things like
Speaker 1: an AI video of Trump's Gaza comes out with this,
Speaker 1: the rubble of what is now Gaza, Palestine being cleared
Speaker 1: away to make a riviera of gambling. And I'm seeing
Speaker 1: things like a Fox News commentator who've retained his job
Speaker 1: saying that people who are unhoused should be subject to
Speaker 1: involuntary lethal injection.
Speaker 4: Or involuntary lethal injection or something, just kill them. And
Speaker 4: I see things like that, My brain wants to say
Speaker 4: people who say that are evil. Obviously.
Speaker 1: What we're talking about, though, is the crusade for purity
Speaker 1: to clean up this area and make it a glittering
Speaker 1: Western front of commerce.
Speaker 4: The idea of cleaning up the streets by mass murder.
Speaker 1: Of unhoused people, It's like that doesn't even seem political
Speaker 1: at that point.
Speaker 4: And right now I'm just ranting.
Speaker 1: But Mercedes, our lead editor, sent me a really interesting
Speaker 1: piece of data about how often the term evil comes
Speaker 1: up in official congressional papers on the right versus the left.
Speaker 1: And this was from a September twenty twenty five five
Speaker 1: piece by Lindsay Krmack, which showed that in congressional emails
Speaker 1: to constituents over the last fifteen years, the word evil
Speaker 1: has occurred two four hundred and ninety times. And this
Speaker 1: was from a few weeks ago, so maybe it's more.
Speaker 1: But eighty nine percent of all the mentions the word
Speaker 1: evil came from Republicans, eleven percent from Democrats. So when
Speaker 1: you hear someone in a powerful position use the word evil,
Speaker 1: just listening closely to the context, the right use is.
Speaker 4: It much more than the left.
Speaker 5: I think when you're saying like these people are evil,
Speaker 5: I think you are also trying to paint them as corrupt,
Speaker 5: like an impure and I think you also want to
Speaker 5: apply a moral standard, right that these people are behaving
Speaker 5: immorally as well, And so I do think you're probably
Speaker 5: pivoting the word in precisely the way that I think
Speaker 5: it probably shouldn't be if we're going to study something better.
Speaker 1: So evil we all use it, but maybe incorrectly, maybe
Speaker 1: when better, more realistic adjectives could be used, like homicidal
Speaker 1: or detrimentally callous, or in violation of humanitarian laws, we
Speaker 1: could say greedily, deceitful, felonious, sexually predatory. But isn't language elastic?
Speaker 1: So all these labels, so many adjectives, so many facts
Speaker 1: obscured when this vague notion of evil crops up.
Speaker 5: Instead, from a practical political perspective, it's about who gets
Speaker 5: to control the discourse and evil. I've actually gone through
Speaker 5: several of your podcasts and I've tracked a little bit
Speaker 5: of the term evil as it's come up podcast Right, So,
Speaker 5: vampires are evil? Okay, that comes up, Evil spirits, evil spells, yep,
Speaker 5: evil demons. You know everyone sort of gets that. Evil spiders, Yes,
Speaker 5: people have asked.
Speaker 1: About that, Evil landlords Okay, yeah, tracks evil babies.
Speaker 5: But I think that was a question, is like, are
Speaker 5: babies evil?
Speaker 4: It's a good question.
Speaker 5: Everybody's got to ask that question. At least, that's right.
Speaker 1: I mean, aren't they kind of vampires taking blood ingestation?
Speaker 1: And aren't vampires evil? So thus kind of baby.
Speaker 5: Vampire needs a good lawyer is what they need. Somebody
Speaker 5: needs to come to the defense.
Speaker 1: Right, vampires are like I never said it was vegan,
Speaker 1: so it's on you, it's right. Yeah, But back to
Speaker 1: all the times I've called something evil.
Speaker 5: Let's hear it, the evils of capitalism, right, algorithms, evil algorithms,
Speaker 5: the evil of tobacco marketing, evil stepsisters doing what was it?
Speaker 5: Evil with the written word accomplishing evil with the written
Speaker 5: word That might be a bit of a paraphrase. And
Speaker 5: then nazis right, And so there was maybe twenty three
Speaker 5: uses used in all. For me, this is interesting, right.
Speaker 5: Some of the contexts are sort of joking around, others
Speaker 5: are serious. So there was other comments that evil has
Speaker 5: to be remedied, evil has to be confronted, evil has
Speaker 5: to be fixed, and it's a force to be stopped.
Speaker 5: All of these are coming from different context right, So
Speaker 5: I'm not pretending that this isn't just sort of like
Speaker 5: a fun little game to play It is a kind
Speaker 5: of a fun game to play to see how we
Speaker 5: use the word in the Ologies world in so many
Speaker 5: different ways. Right, But we see evil used to apply
Speaker 5: to people or occupations. We also see it to apply
Speaker 5: to institutions. But we also see it applyed to the unseen,
Speaker 5: in the invisible, and it's used in the singular in
Speaker 5: the plural. And so when we take this sort of
Speaker 5: a Oologies discourse on evil as a package, you can
Speaker 5: see it's a pretty fun, handy term to be able
Speaker 5: to use. You know, it denotes almost anything, right, So
Speaker 5: we could apply it to billionaires, we could apply it
Speaker 5: to parents, like it's wide open. In other words, it's
Speaker 5: really useful, and that for me is one of the
Speaker 5: more interesting parts about discourses on evil.
Speaker 1: Does that mean I have to stop using the term
Speaker 1: evil casually when talking about tobacco marketing and stuff.
Speaker 5: I'm not going to tell you what to do, okay,
Speaker 5: I'd be.
Speaker 1: More conscious malicious perhaps, or I guess there's such a
Speaker 1: spectrum between like selfish or malicious, or deceptive or deceitful
Speaker 1: or I suppose there are so many adjectives we could use.
Speaker 5: But the thing is, like evil isn't like the only
Speaker 5: thing we do this. We do this with basically all
Speaker 5: of our words. Yeah, the terms good and evil have
Speaker 5: a pretty big resonance across cultures.
Speaker 1: Well, you know, I'm wondering because potato chips and asbestos
Speaker 1: didn't always exist in lecture halls, and you know, we
Speaker 1: didn't know about bacteria, and we didn't know about traumatic
Speaker 1: brain injury or calcium channels or lead and all of
Speaker 1: these things that might biologically or sociologically cause someone to
Speaker 1: do harm to another. So as we learn more about
Speaker 1: behavior and choices and systems in place, are we looking
Speaker 1: at evil a little bit differently because it's not quite
Speaker 1: so mystical?
Speaker 5: Yes, No, Politically and environmentally, like, we're in a really
Speaker 5: complicated place as a species. We're witnessing the unmaking of
Speaker 5: the environment as we know it very very quickly, and
Speaker 5: we're seeing some responses to that catastrophe which is unfolding
Speaker 5: that are very unpleasant in many kinds of ways. Right,
Speaker 5: We're seeing certain kinds of politics that are emerging that
Speaker 5: are very divisive and you know, not really interested all
Speaker 5: in communication and that kind of stuff. So philosophically and
Speaker 5: scientifically we know more about how we use words and
Speaker 5: how the brain is constructed and how social worlds are constructed.
Speaker 5: We know a lot more about that, But even when
Speaker 5: we know about those things, that doesn't necessarily release us
Speaker 5: from the tentaption of making use of that information in ways.
Speaker 5: Like one of the things my evil course is really
Speaker 5: good for, for example, is business advertising, because as soon
Speaker 5: as you've heard that we're clean and dirty, it's just like,
Speaker 5: as an advertiser, if I can sell purity, yeah, I'm
Speaker 5: going to be able to sell anything. So if I
Speaker 5: can describe someone in terms that someone will recognize as
Speaker 5: disgusting and have them stick, we can get rid of
Speaker 5: that person.
Speaker 1: Oh wow.
Speaker 5: Yeah, Like if we can convince someone that so and
Speaker 5: so is evil, then we don't have to take them
Speaker 5: seriously anymore. We just can ignore them or we can
Speaker 5: wipe them away.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 5: And it's horrible when we see ourselves doing it, and
Speaker 5: it's horrible when we see other people doing it to us,
Speaker 5: when we see sort of populations vilified in these kinds
Speaker 5: of ways and describing these kinds of ways, and unfortunately
Speaker 5: we're seeing a lot of it. And so fortunately for me,
Speaker 5: it keeps me in business because you know, people are
Speaker 5: super interest in the topic of evil because it's confronted
Speaker 5: them on a daily basis, and it doesn't seem to
Speaker 5: matter how much more we know about cognitive processes and
Speaker 5: development and evolution and all of these kinds of things.
Speaker 5: It's still getting used. It's used in marketing, it's used
Speaker 5: by political parties. It's used by family members, like siblings
Speaker 5: are really excellent wielders of caustic terms and harmful terms
Speaker 5: and that kind of stuff. And I get these stories
Speaker 5: about how, you know, kids really stick it to their
Speaker 5: siblings and family members, like, yeah, you know, we've really
Speaker 5: developed a knack for hurting the ones we love, and
Speaker 5: in part because we were aware of our own vulnerabilities.
Speaker 5: We're aware of our fragility and we can make use
Speaker 5: of that. And that's things like racism, misogy, homophobia, and transphobia,
Speaker 5: like all of these things. This is why it's so difficult,
Speaker 5: because you can see the manipulation at work. You can see, oh,
Speaker 5: they're triggering disgust here, they're engaging in a ritual. So
Speaker 5: it's produces my options to their response, right, Like they're
Speaker 5: pushing me into a tunnel. So the only thing that
Speaker 5: can be is angry. And I can't say, wait a second,
Speaker 5: you're triggering my discussed mechanism because you're triggered right.
Speaker 4: Well, I have questions from listeners, May I ask them?
Speaker 5: Yes?
Speaker 1: But before we answer your questions, patrons, let's donate to
Speaker 1: a charity of Kenneth's choice, which is the North Point
Speaker 1: Douglas Women's Center, developed twenty five years ago as a
Speaker 1: hub where women and gender diverse folks and their families
Speaker 1: can gather in a safe and welcoming space, building friendships
Speaker 1: and providing access to needed resources and programs to help
Speaker 1: restore what has been lost through violence, racism, and poverty.
Speaker 1: And to find out more about them, go to NPDWC
Speaker 1: dot org. And thanks to sponsors of the show for
Speaker 1: making that donation possible.
Speaker 3: So you want to go open this road here and
Speaker 3: get it around a bit. Now you take a left
Speaker 3: and then you go past the Murphy's house, you know,
Speaker 3: to Murphy's there, your lad Sean, I thank you so
Speaker 3: for in London now, Oh yeah. FBD doesn't stand for
Speaker 3: frustratingly bad directions. FBD stands for support. We support van
Speaker 3: drivers in Ireland with up to seventy five percent off
Speaker 3: new van policies.
Speaker 2: FBD insurance support. It's what we do. Can't miss it.
Speaker 3: Once you pass there, a little terrier will start to
Speaker 3: chase yet and once he gives up, he should be there.
Speaker 3: Seventy five percent off based on five years no claims
Speaker 3: discount terms and conditions apply. Underwritten by FBD Insurance Plc
Speaker 3: FBD Insurance Group Limited trading his FBD Insurance is regulated
Speaker 3: by the Central Bank of Ireland.
Speaker 1: You too, can submit questions for Theologists ahead of time
Speaker 1: by joining our Patreon for one hot dollar a month
Speaker 1: at patreon dot com slash ologies like Elwink did, but
Speaker 1: on the topic of siblings and age, Elwink wanted to know,
Speaker 1: is there a correlation between the age of the person
Speaker 1: and the evilness of an act?
Speaker 4: Who is eviler? Kids?
Speaker 1: Teens, young adults eighteen to twenty five? Middle aged? Are
Speaker 1: the elderly evil? I have a feeling that's going to
Speaker 1: be a difficult question to ask.
Speaker 4: But if you are.
Speaker 1: Something like, let's say, a dirty diaper, some people might
Speaker 1: avoid that. Is there anything to do with age and evil?
Speaker 5: Okay, so what do you mean by evil? What do
Speaker 5: you mean by the term evil? Like we all have
Speaker 5: our wonderful moments where we are totally, utterly unbelievably annoying, right,
Speaker 5: Like do babies treat like everything as an object that
Speaker 5: they miss or something like that? I doubt it. I
Speaker 5: mean the brain is so social, like so thoroughly social
Speaker 5: that you know, again we have others in mind, and
Speaker 5: that that persists. There are times which subject subjects like
Speaker 5: imagining that can be really really difficult, right, with certain
Speaker 5: kinds of brain injuries, in that imagining the viewpoint from
Speaker 5: another person can be stifled or very very difficult. So
Speaker 5: it's a I don't really have a real answer to
Speaker 5: the question, Like, let's say, you know, our adolescens really
Speaker 5: more evil than you know, Like what are you trying
Speaker 5: to do with that information? Like what are you trying
Speaker 5: to do with that question? Like what do you hope
Speaker 5: to accomplish by.
Speaker 1: That, perhaps justifying grounding a child or taking away certain
Speaker 1: internet privileges? Right? I have an eleven year old daughter
Speaker 1: and we have managed to raise her entirely without screws.
Speaker 1: But a large part of that, philosophically is that she's
Speaker 1: a poodle and that I am simply too lazy to
Speaker 1: raise human children. Average Pie wants to know why are
Speaker 1: all the bad guys in kids TV shows evil? What
Speaker 1: does that teach the kids? And Christine Pikestein said, how
Speaker 1: can we explain evil to children? We're Jewish and I
Speaker 1: am dreading this.
Speaker 5: That's sorry, I'm going to be a broken record. It
Speaker 5: depends on what you mean by evil, right, like good
Speaker 5: and evil, like the battles between good and evil, and
Speaker 5: we really do thrive on the conflict. And clean and
Speaker 5: dirty are always going to be with us, right because
Speaker 5: it's attached to how we think about things. That's just
Speaker 5: how I think, cognition and after social relations work, so
Speaker 5: it's always going to be with us. When you can
Speaker 5: put a narrative behind that and then some visuals behind that,
Speaker 5: it can be really great. Like great storytelling makes use
Speaker 5: of these things like it just it incorporates these elements.
Speaker 5: It incorporates like shame or discussed or angered.
Speaker 1: That sounds fine.
Speaker 5: So all of these things are mechanisms that we have
Speaker 5: at our disposal for accomplishing certain kinds of things. And
Speaker 5: that might be to get more viewers, but it might
Speaker 5: be to tell the good story to friends out of
Speaker 5: bonfire or something.
Speaker 1: I'm wondering if you've ever seen the account Nature's Metal,
Speaker 1: which is just a lot of really graphic depictions of
Speaker 1: animals doing unkind things to each other. Megan Lynch, German Sill,
Speaker 1: Celia Labant, Kristin Akuda, Scott Sheldon, Ewen Winroe, and some
Speaker 1: random frog want to know do other animals have concepts
Speaker 1: like evil? Celia asked, is there a way to measure
Speaker 1: evil in animals? Thinking about dolphins specifically, And Kristin's daughter
Speaker 1: Emilia wants to know why certain animals are perceived as evil,
Speaker 1: like her black cat. So do you think animals ever
Speaker 1: think about like that's a good antelope, that's a bad one,
Speaker 1: that guy's a dick.
Speaker 4: Do you think that even comes into their minds?
Speaker 5: Yeah? I mean yes and no? What do you mean
Speaker 5: by evil?
Speaker 4: Right?
Speaker 1: Yeah?
Speaker 5: I stop, I'll stop, I'll stop it. I'm pretty sure
Speaker 5: animals have a notion of health and harm to some degree.
Speaker 5: Maybe not, Like there's some pretty dumb animals that just
Speaker 5: get squished pretty easily, right, Like, I think dangerous and
Speaker 5: versions register for animals. Sentient creatures of all sorts, I
Speaker 5: think have a sense of dangers, and they have a
Speaker 5: sense of things that they avoid and things that they're
Speaker 5: attracted to. Like it's something that we can infer in
Speaker 5: animal behavior that they have some sense of healthiness of
Speaker 5: maybe toxicity, and they have some sense of harm, and
Speaker 5: they have some sense of well being. You know, when
Speaker 5: we look at studies on play in animals, we see
Speaker 5: that animals play and learn and that kind of thing,
Speaker 5: and human beings do the same thing. So there's a
Speaker 5: massive amount of overlap between you know, human beings and animals.
Speaker 5: I wouldn't say there's good and evil in animal world,
Speaker 5: but I would say that there's things that animals avoid,
Speaker 5: and you know, they learn to avoid them. But then
Speaker 5: there's probably also a pretty wide range of instinctual sort
Speaker 5: of hardwired you know, mapping systems which dictate to the
Speaker 5: mind or the animals how to behave right away, almost
Speaker 5: read from birth. We've got a few of those processes too.
Speaker 4: Mm hm, well, Stacy's pinkoet's for time. Question.
Speaker 1: Asker wants to know can you speak on the connection
Speaker 1: with the concept of evil and the role of language.
Speaker 1: Do you think that it's really just when we have
Speaker 1: enough words to look into this, we really start to
Speaker 1: try to classify thinks almost too much.
Speaker 5: You never have too much classification, can you.
Speaker 4: That's a good point.
Speaker 5: Yeah, I mean one of the really exciting things about.
Speaker 5: You know, being an academic does that. We're constantly trying
Speaker 5: to find new ways of describing the world around us,
Speaker 5: and sometimes that involves inventing new words and new ways
Speaker 5: of thinking about things. Adolescents are great at this. They
Speaker 5: invent words all the time, or they use words and
Speaker 5: novel ways all the time.
Speaker 7: Skippity toilet six seven type shit.
Speaker 5: And poetry does this, and amazing lyricists do this as well.
Speaker 5: And these offer us new ways of approaching something like
Speaker 5: if you think about language and color, for example, just
Speaker 5: to move it outside of the topic of evil, if
Speaker 5: you don't have the color orange, like the word orange,
Speaker 5: you're never going to see orange. You see the colors
Speaker 5: that you have names for because you have no other
Speaker 5: way of communeicating apart from those words, right, yeah, and
Speaker 5: so you see more colors because you've got the language
Speaker 5: to do that. We are developing the vocabularies all the
Speaker 5: time to talk about, you know, our feelings, to talk
Speaker 5: about how the world works and that kind of thing,
Speaker 5: and that's really exciting, you know.
Speaker 1: Jasmine Lou wants to know do all cultures associate evil
Speaker 1: with female identifying individuals? Do women tend to get categorized
Speaker 1: that way for some reason, or do you find that
Speaker 1: in your reading and your research.
Speaker 5: Yes, like and almost an unequivocal yes, it's not across
Speaker 5: the board, but very very often the feminine coincides with
Speaker 5: prevalent notions of evil. If you're looking at like dangerous
Speaker 5: or harmful or not to be trusted, or polluted or
Speaker 5: profane or contagious, very often the feminine is associated with that,
Speaker 5: and it tends to be fairly cross cultural. It's not universal.
Speaker 5: I wouldn't say we find this everywhere all the time.
Speaker 5: We do find exceptions where there are cultures and places
Speaker 5: that which, you know, women are not viewed as polluted
Speaker 5: or dangerous. But time and time again, and there's there's
Speaker 5: a lot of reasons for this. You know, go to
Speaker 5: a women in gender studies departments and they you know,
Speaker 5: every single person there will be able to, you know,
Speaker 5: sort of talk about this, I think all day long,
Speaker 5: Like there are so many reasons that and so many
Speaker 5: possible explanations for why this is the case. But it's
Speaker 5: extremely common, very cross cultural finding. You know that men
Speaker 5: are pure and women are impure, and if a woman
Speaker 5: is menstruating, she's you know, not allowed into the sacred sites,
Speaker 5: and they have to be kept aside. This is just,
Speaker 5: but it's it's remarkably durable. Randy Warren has an excellent
Speaker 5: chapter on this in a book called The Guide for
Speaker 5: the Study of Religion, where she talks about all of
Speaker 5: the different strategies that patriarchs and introcentric thinkers have used
Speaker 5: in order to either justify, rationalize, or force women into
Speaker 5: these positions and how their voices have been marginalized and
Speaker 5: completely ignored.
Speaker 1: So well link will Lebron's Guide to the Study of
Speaker 1: Our Legion on our website, which is linked in the
Speaker 1: show notes. Well, I'm wondering, Katie Murray, and maybe this
Speaker 1: is also making me think about women being seen as equal,
Speaker 1: even going back to apples and gardens and stuff. But
Speaker 1: Katie Murray wants to know why is evil so often
Speaker 1: linked with genius? But why is evil linked with genius?
Speaker 4: That's true, yeah, right.
Speaker 5: Evil genius, So genius and madness. I think there's an
Speaker 5: overlap between these two notions.
Speaker 1: At least before we had brain scans and like doctors.
Speaker 5: So you know, and when you have things coming from God,
Speaker 5: they could also come from the other direction as well,
Speaker 5: you know, from the devil, and then it could also
Speaker 5: be madness. When you've got that cauldron all swirling around,
Speaker 5: it's exciting and it's interesting, and it will attract her
Speaker 5: attention to call someone an evil genius.
Speaker 4: Well, they're scarier.
Speaker 1: I suppose if you had a really slapstick, tired, groggy
Speaker 1: chess opponent, you'd be like whatever. But if you had
Speaker 1: a really sharp chess opponent, there would be so much scarier.
Speaker 1: It'd be so a much bigger threat of outsmarting.
Speaker 5: Right. And one of the really you know, fun villains
Speaker 5: that we have now is our villains that are more
Speaker 5: like machines, right, because machines are really smart and so
Speaker 5: much powerful calculation, and you know, having a machine inside
Speaker 5: a human being that's really scary, like the Terminator kind
Speaker 5: of thing.
Speaker 6: Right.
Speaker 5: It's just a very it's a scary, sort of compelling
Speaker 5: villain in many ways. So yeah, it's got a lot
Speaker 5: of it's got a lot of mileage on it.
Speaker 1: We do have an episode, a recent one on AI
Speaker 1: and ethics, which is wonderful and it addresses the question
Speaker 1: will AI kill you. It's a fun one and it's
Speaker 1: made entirely by breathing, thinking, eating, crying, shitting, humans, which
Speaker 1: is rare in this day and age. The last questions
Speaker 1: I always ask are I guess, do you have a
Speaker 1: least favorite depiction of evil? Do you have like a
Speaker 1: flim flam or something that just really pisses you off
Speaker 1: about the notion of evil that makes your job hard?
Speaker 5: H Well, you know something, the idea that women are
Speaker 5: evil looms pretty large. Like if you know, I'm in
Speaker 5: a boardroom and woman talks, and then Alderman then pretend
Speaker 5: that I shouldn't say anything names on the side of
Speaker 5: my face. But like in the classroom, it's the devil,
Speaker 5: like it just the devil just comes up right. It
Speaker 5: doesn't piss me off. It's sort of expected. But the
Speaker 5: devil is a pretty common, sort of go to kind
Speaker 5: of thing. It's not that it really bothers me. It's
Speaker 5: just that it's one of the things I really want
Speaker 5: to get away from. I want to get away from,
Speaker 5: like you know, God is good and the devil is evil.
Speaker 5: You know, let's look at dirt. Let's look at the
Speaker 5: things that you consider to be polluted, Like what are
Speaker 5: things that you're willing to put in your mouth and
Speaker 5: what are the things that you're willing to go near,
Speaker 5: and what are the things that you're not willing to
Speaker 5: go near? So getting away from that just really that
Speaker 5: binary of like this is good and this is evil?
Speaker 5: You know that's I really like to to be able
Speaker 5: to do that, to look at other ways in which
Speaker 5: we divide up the world.
Speaker 1: Well, I think that's interesting that the actual harmful concept
Speaker 1: is the binary. Is the classification that that's maybe a
Speaker 1: harm that we should be more aware of.
Speaker 5: Yeah, like we're always classifying. To what use are we
Speaker 5: putting that schema? And who does it serve? Who benefits
Speaker 5: from this? Is it corporations? Is it my parents? Is
Speaker 5: it the teachers? Is it students? And that kind of thing,
Speaker 5: like what system does this serve? Is a good question
Speaker 5: to ask.
Speaker 1: Well, on that note, last question, I usually ask what's
Speaker 1: your favorite thing about your job? Kte Munker, mushroom screams.
Speaker 1: I want to know who is your favorite villain? What's
Speaker 1: your favorite evil movie or book? Do you have a
Speaker 1: villain that you're just like, that's a good one.
Speaker 5: The thing is that I find most interesting is dirt.
Speaker 5: Like that's the thing I'm continuing to draw in too,
Speaker 5: and dirt defined by Mary Douglas. This matter out of place,
Speaker 5: and like, it's the things that don't fit in, it's
Speaker 5: the things that defy our categories. It's the things that
Speaker 5: fall in between the crevices of how we view the
Speaker 5: world and right, and so, you know, Dracula in a
Speaker 5: sense is dirt, matter out of place. He doesn't belong anywhere,
Speaker 5: so they try to destroy him. But the other thing
Speaker 5: is like, sometimes the dirt is something. It's like, wait
Speaker 5: a second, I can learn something from that. And so
Speaker 5: in that sense, you know, it's a villain that isn't
Speaker 5: very villain is. I find that completely fascinating. I find
Speaker 5: the permutations on you know, matter out of place to
Speaker 5: be never ending, right, because we all have limits. We
Speaker 5: all have a horizon that we can't see beyond, and
Speaker 5: other people have different horizons, right, and we can share
Speaker 5: those horizons. But then at the edges, you know, there'll
Speaker 5: be monsters. It's it's dirt. It's the stuff that doesn't
Speaker 5: fit how we see the world. It's like oh, red apples,
Speaker 5: huh yeah, okay, so red and green apples, yeah, I
Speaker 5: can groove to that.
Speaker 1: I'm so appreciative that you can help my brain. Try
Speaker 1: to understand your brain when you start to look at
Speaker 1: something through that different lens and you have more context
Speaker 1: for the world around you. And so yeah, the work
Speaker 1: you're doing, I think, Thank you, I think is endlessly fascinating.
Speaker 5: Thank you for being here.
Speaker 1: Thank you so ask critical thinkers confused questions, because honestly,
Speaker 1: without questions, there would be no knowledge or thinking. Maybe,
Speaker 1: So here we are, and thanks for sticking around to
Speaker 1: get evil with us. And for more on Ken and
Speaker 1: his work, you can find his book Evil a Critical Primer,
Speaker 1: linked in the show notes, and we'll also link to
Speaker 1: his cause of choice, the North Point Douglas Women Center.
Speaker 1: Doctor mckndrick, Thank you so much for all that you do.
Speaker 1: You are a gem. We are at Ologies on Blue
Speaker 1: Sky and Instagram. I'm Ali Ward.
Speaker 4: On both.
Speaker 1: We have shorter, kid friendly episodes of Ologies classics in
Speaker 1: their own separate fee. They're called Smologies SMO l OGI
Speaker 1: whatever something like that. It's linked in the show notes.
Speaker 1: You can search for that wherever you get podcasts, or
Speaker 1: check the link in the show notes. SMO l O
Speaker 1: g i e s.
Speaker 7: Long Day.
Speaker 1: Thank you to patrons who submitted so many great questions.
Speaker 1: You can join them for as little as a dollar
Speaker 1: a month. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch dot Com.
Speaker 1: Thank you to Aaron Talbert for admitting the Ologies podcast
Speaker 1: Facebook group. Aveline Malick makes our professional transcripts.
Speaker 4: Kelly R.
Speaker 1: Dwyer works on the website. Noel Dilworth is our kind
Speaker 1: scheduling director, Susan Hale is our benevolent butwur full managing director,
Speaker 1: and the two angels at the editing decks are Jake
Speaker 1: Chafe and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick
Speaker 1: Thorburn wrote the theme music and if you stick around
Speaker 1: until the very end, I give you a little nugget
Speaker 1: of a secret this week. It's a little behind the scenes.
Speaker 1: We actually recorded portions of this episode in October twenty
Speaker 1: twenty three, and although it was fascinating, Doctor M. Kendrick
Speaker 1: is the best and crushed it. We have held onto
Speaker 1: it because so many terrible bummer things were happening in
Speaker 1: the world, and we've been putting out more topical episodes
Speaker 1: to address them, and I just had a hard time
Speaker 1: throwing evil at you as well, especially what it wasn't
Speaker 1: Spooptober And then a month or so ago we re
Speaker 1: recorded an updated interview and it all came together beautifully
Speaker 1: and I think that it hatched at just the right time.
Speaker 1: So there's some background of how much our guests put
Speaker 1: into being on the show and how much our editors
Speaker 1: also put into stitching all the pieces together. So thanks
Speaker 1: for everyone who made this evil episode of reality. I'm
Speaker 1: so happy it's finally up and now you can discuss
Speaker 1: evil amongst yourselves.
Speaker 4: Okay, by byde pack a.
Speaker 1: Dermatology, meology, no zoology, lithology, yeah, zology, meteorology, theology, technology, seriology, seology.
Speaker 5: No baby is not evil.
Speaker 3: So you want to go up this road here and
Speaker 3: get to the roundabout and you take a left and
Speaker 3: then you go past the Murphy's house. You know the
Speaker 3: Murphy's their young lad Sean. I think he's over in
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Speaker 3: FBD stands for support. We support van drivers in Ireland
Speaker 3: with up to seventy five percent off new van policies.
Speaker 2: FBD insurance support. It's what we do.
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