If you think only of evil, then you become pessimistic and hopeless like Freud. But if you think there is no evil, then you're just one more deluded Pollyanna.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
Evil is an attack against human spiritual development and enlightenment. All evil, badness, neurosis - it has one motive and one motive only, which is to destroy - to destroy your chance of arising above yourself.
You seem to think that the only genuine existence evil can have is conscious existence - that no one is evil unless he admits it to himself. I disagree.
For something to be completely evil is to be nothing. Satan has good attributes - intelligence, for instance - but they are corrupted. I cannot reconcile myself emotionally to alternative understandings of evil.
If evil is empathy erosion, and empathy erosion is a form of illness, then evil turns out to be nothing more than a particularly awful psychological disorder.
Every minute you are thinking of evil, you might have been thinking of good instead. Refuse to pander to a morbid interest in your own misdeeds. Pick yourself up, be sorry, shake yourself, and go on again.
I don't believe in evil, I believe only in horror. In nature there is no evil, only an abundance of horror: the plagues and the blights and the ants and the maggots.
Psychology doesn't like to talk about evil. It likes to talk about bad childhoods. But I very much believe that some people are evil and motivation is not necessary for evil.
Some people give themselves over to their most evil desires, and those people becomes evil. But in general, it's reductive to think of evil as something foreign and separate from the rest of us. Evil is part of everyone. We all have the capacity to commit evil acts.
Evil, by definition, is that which endangers the good, and the good is what we perceive as a value.
I am not a pessimist; to perceive evil where it exists is, in my opinion, a form of optimism.