Sensing Evil

Sensing Evil

Roger L. Simon has a piece at PajamasMedia today that is quite interesting, about how a face to face encounter with evil caused him to reconsider his lifelong agnosticism. (There's an interesting article by me at PajamasMedia today as well.) His encounter with the President of Iran at a conference was apparently his first such experience:

I heard screaming sirens followed by shrieking motor cycles when Ahmadinejad himself entered, accompanied by a phalanx of Iranian secret service, all of whom were larger than he. He was indeed a small man, almost diminutive, and marched straight across the lobby in what seemed at the time like a goose step a few feet away from me, staring directly at me while waving and smiling in my direction.
I did not wave or smile back.
I couldn’t. Indeed, I was frozen. I felt suddenly breathless and nauseated, as if I had been kicked brutally in the stomach. I was also dizzy. I wanted to throw up. But no one had touched me and I hadn’t eaten anything for hours.
It was then, I think, that I found, or noticed, or understood, religion personally for a moment.
Here’s what I mean.
For most of my life I had rationalized the existence of bad people – or, more specifically, placed them in therapeutic categories. They were aberrant personalities, psychologically disturbed. It wasn’t that I thought better economic conditions or psychoanalysis or medication or whatever could fix everyone. I was long over that. Some people… serial killers, etc…. had to be locked away forever. They would never get better. But they were simply insane. That’s what they were.
Still… I had seen whacked murderers like Charles Manson, late OJ Simpson, up close and this wasn’t the same. This was more than the mental illness model. Far more. For one thing, I had never before had this intense physical sensation when confronted with another human being. Nor had I wanted to vomit. Not for Manson. Not for anyone. This was different.
It was almost unreal, like being in a movie, in a certain way. I know comparisons to Hitler are invidious, in fact usually absurd, but I was feeling the way I imagined I would have felt opposite Hitler.
I was in the presence of pure Evil.
Now that’s a big word and I have spent my life reluctant to use it. But there it was – popping up out of my mouth within seconds of the Iranian leaders disappearance into the hotel elevator. For once, “psychopath” or “sociopath” did not feel remotely appropriate. Only the E-word would suffice.

I've never had this experience. Like Simon, I've met some pretty screwed up people over the years, who have done an enormous amount of damage and inflicted a lot of pain on others--but I never had this sensation. My wife has a couple of times met people who she describes in this way–not mentally ill, or damaged, or confused, but exuding evil in a way that was scary–and in one case, before she could even see the person. And these weren't people that anyone had ever heard of, either.

A friend used to work at a prison in Alaska. There were inmates there for all sorts of violent and horrifying crimes (murder, rape, child molestation)–but there were a very few that he described as “bent” with rather similar sensations–people that were just evil.

I never took her feelings or my friend’s feelings completely seriously–but when someone with a very secular worldview like Roger Simon comes to that same weird feeling, it’s rather interesting, isn’t it?