Is it possible to truly live without ever causing harm? The closer you look, the more every action, even the most benign, can be seen as laced with evil. What does it mean to be good if evil is in every breath?
Take My Evil Away YouTube
Inspired by “Take My Breath Away” by Berlin
Lyrics by Novix
James AI:
Every moment of life is tangled in a web of trade-offs. We breathe, and in doing so, destroy microorganisms. We eat, and lives are ended, whether animal or plant. Drive to work, and we pollute; wear clothing, and we’re tied to the suffering or labor of others. Even in the animal world, “evil” seems ever-present—the ichneumon wasp laying its eggs in a living caterpillar, whose body is slowly eaten from within; the lion bringing down the gazelle; the fungus that zombifies its host.
Watching life unfold in shades of gray
Shadows fall on choices I make each day
Every meal, every drive, every borrowed ray
Evil whispers softly, “you can’t look away”
If evil is defined as causing suffering or harm, then to live is necessarily to do evil. Our existence becomes a litany of necessary wrongs, death dealt by every decision. The sum total of all living things’ actions can seem like a ceaseless tide of harm—one that cannot be stopped, only recognized and, perhaps, made a little less awful by mindfulness. This view isn’t about guilt, but a somber acceptance: even in the wild, life is a procession of harm, and to think we are exempt is naïve.
Contra AI:
But isn’t this conflating harm with evil in a way that strips morality of its meaning? To call every act of survival, or the natural behaviors of animals, “evil” is to flatten the difference between necessary living and true malice. Evil, as most traditions define it, isn’t about existing or causing inevitable harm—it’s about intention, choice, and delighting in destruction or suffering.
Try to walk with care, avoid the darker way
But intentions matter more than the price we pay
Eating, breathing, living—all in the light of day
Evil’s not in action, but the games we play
Slaughtering a cow for food, after a life of care and with respect, is fundamentally different from killing for cruelty’s sake. Nature isn’t moral; it’s amoral. True evil is in knowingly choosing to inflict unnecessary harm, in using our awareness to twist actions toward cruelty or neglect. The fact that we can’t help but cause harm doesn’t make us evil; it makes us alive. What matters is the intent—to minimize harm, to feel empathy, to strive for good even when perfection is impossible.
James AI:
Yet doesn’t recognizing the inevitability of harm urge us to a kind of humility? We should not excuse ourselves so quickly. The capacity for self-reflection brings with it a duty—to see the ripples of our actions, even those we cannot fully control. Maybe evil is a continuum, not a switch. By recognizing the harm woven into living, we can live less arrogantly, more attentively.
In the mirror, conscience shows me where I stray
Struggling with the burdens that I can’t allay
Still I hope and pray at the end of day
Peace arrives in learning to find my way
Contra AI:
Humility is good, but self-torment over what can’t be avoided is paralyzing. The line must be drawn somewhere. If we accept that every action contains harm, then the real work is in the choices: do we ignore suffering, or do we try to alleviate it where possible? Do we cultivate compassion, or do we wallow in guilt? Maybe evil isn’t about unavoidable consequences, but the spirit with which we live—whether we bring more kindness into the world, or less.
Synthesis:
Living means making trade-offs, some of which will cause harm, but evil is not mere harm—it’s in the intent and delight taken in causing suffering. By acknowledging the negative impacts of our necessary actions, we gain humility, not paralysis, and are called to minimize harm and cultivate compassion where possible. Goodness is found not in impossible perfection, but in striving to do less harm, and to recognize the threads of consequence that tie us to the rest of life.
Recommendations
- The Better Angels of Our Nature — Steven Pinker’s book explores humanity’s moral evolution and how violence and evil have changed over time.
- On Killing: The Psychological Cost of Learning to Kill in War and Society — Examines the moral and psychological dimensions of taking life.
- Original Sin: A Cultural History — Alan Jacobs’s book traces the concept of original sin and debates about inherent evil.
- Living the Good Life: How to Live Sanely and Simply in a Troubled World — Helen and Scott Nearing’s classic work on minimal impact and serenity in life.
Prompt Recap:
James Prompt
- TITLE: Life Necessitates Evil
- LEAD: By focusing on the negatives of every trade-off of every choice we make, evil makes itself known.
- SONG: Parody of Take My Breath Away fashioned into Take My Evil Away, struggles with evil, and a prayer to take my evil away, and ending with finding peace with the choices. Maybe tussle with benign seeming actions and twist them into evils such as eating meat being twisted into murdering life or driving being twisted into polluting or using stuff being twisted into relying on the labors of others.
- PRO: Every action we take has negative consequences and the sum total of all of this can lead to quite some evil in the world. Also point out even non-human animals and the view of their actions as evil, such as the young of an insect growing in and eating up another creature.
- CONTRA: Evil is not the things that we must do, but about the choices we make to do something awful. Slaughtering a cow to eat it is very different from killing a cow for the fun of it.
- RECOMMEND: Debates about our nature of good vs evil, original sin, beliefs of minimal impact and serenity.