Critical Ponerology (WHAT IS “EVIL”?) with Kenneth MacKendrick

Summary

Ologies with Alie Ward

"Critical Ponerology (WHAT IS “EVIL”?) with Kenneth MacKendrick"

Podcast Date: October 22, 2025
Guest: Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick, Professor in the Department of Religion, University of Manitoba
Episode Theme: An exploration of the concept of evil—its origins, definitions, use, and impact across history, cultures, and daily life. Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick shares insights from his academic work, personal background, and years teaching about 'evil' from a critical, nuanced perspective.

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Episode Overview

This episode dives deep into the study of evil—ponerology—with Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick. Alie and Dr. MacKendrick unpack how the label “evil” is defined, used, and weaponized. They explore evil’s place in religion, history, culture, pop culture (think vampires and D&D), and personal interactions, focusing not on “what is evil,” but how and why the concept is evoked, and what it does in the world.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Defining Ponerology and Its Scope

• Ponerology: From the Greek for “evil.” It traditionally means the study of evil, especially in theological contexts.
• Dr. MacKendrick's approach: Moves away from strictly theological definitions. Instead, examines how societies, individuals, and institutions use the concept of evil, especially outside of monotheism.
  • “I'm interested in human beings... how something ordinary gets turned into the extraordinary.” (04:13)

The Problem of Defining Evil

• Most books and discussions focus on atrocities (genocide, torture, etc.), with ritualistic sections on natural evil (disasters), and narrative (villains, pop culture).
• There’s a gap in understanding how we come to call something evil: Why label Dracula an “abomination” to be destroyed, rather than a criminal to be tried?
  • “How did we get to this idea of evil, where we could actually apprehend something as evil?” (05:39)
  • “The characters [in Dracula] scare me more because they've empowered themselves to have no guilt, no shame, no doubt, no hesitation. And those things are actually seen as weaknesses.” (08:28)

Vengeance vs. Justice

• Vengeance and justice are culturally and contextually slippery notions, often defined by whoever controls the narrative or power.
  • “If I call something evil, that gives me a little bit of control over the situation. And if people buy my conception of evil, that gives me a lot of power, right?” (09:32)

The Baggage of “Evil”

• The term is loaded, both in religious and secular contexts.
• Dr. MacKendrick avoids using it in daily life due to its freight, much in the way he avoids using “religion” outside academic contexts.
  • “It comes with so much baggage, it comes with so much freight that to introduce it into conversation is just, it's not really helpful.” (11:04)

Personal and Academic Origins

• Dr. MacKendrick’s background: Grew up in an academic, not overtly religious home; played D&D; later exposed to Pentecostal traditions through his wife’s family.
• His interest in evil partly grew from navigating and reconciling these different worlds.
• Shared family stories highlight how differing worldviews can coexist around the dinner table.
  • “When you focus on what's at hand… a lot of these larger worlds… take a chill pill.” (15:15)

The “Dirt” Analogy: Purity, Danger, and Evil

• Mary Douglas’s concept of dirt as “matter out of place” is critical to understanding how evil is constructed.
• Evil is often associated with impurity, disorder, or things/people that threaten categorical boundaries.
• Example: Classroom potato chip experiment dramatizes emotional reactions to “dirt,” showing cleanliness, purity, and danger underpin moral judgments.
  • “Dirt doesn't get a lawyer. Dirt gets eliminated.” (19:10)
  • “So when you said that, like, this was a dirty thing to do, all of a sudden you were conjuring things like death and poverty… and for me, that's gold.” (22:12)

The Uses and Dangers of the Evil Label

• Evil becomes a tool: To control, vilify, and often justify severe actions (e.g., genocide, colonialism).
• Case study: Canadian residential schools—how authorities labeled indigenous practices “evil” to justify oppression and genocide.
  • “They were being cleaned of their old evil ways in the eyes of those that ran them.” (33:39)
  • “It tries to move things below the threshold of perception so that they can be swept away without people noticing, like cleaning your floor.” (33:39)

Binary vs. Continuum: Good, Evil, and Classification

• Certain cultures emphasize stark binaries (good/evil, clean/unclean), others see more grey.
• Subject/object thinking allows for dehumanization—turning people into objects, a process key to evil’s enactment (in war, medicine, daily life, media).
  • “If you have that subject object model and you really double down on that model, then you're going to be turning subjects into objects all the time.” (34:31)

The Elasticity and Power of Language

• “Evil” is a slippery, extremely useful word—used in casual cultures, political rhetoric, and pop culture to describe everything from vampires to tobacco marketing.
• The word’s pervasiveness makes it an easy moral shortcut, but also obscures nuance and complicates justice.
• Republican politicians use the term “evil” much more in political correspondence than Democrats (89% vs. 11% as of 2025).
  • “We see evil used to apply to people or occupations… institutions… the unseen and the invisible… it's a pretty fun, handy term to be able to use. It denotes almost anything.” (44:17)

Definitions: Can We Pin Down “Evil”?

• MacKendrick’s definition for class: anything “dangerous and aversive” can be labeled evil, underlining how context-dependent it is.
• Admits this is artificial, too broad for practical use, but useful to show the breadth and relativity of the concept.
  • “You have to figure out the definition that you're using, and then you can go ahead and use it as a scholar.” (38:19)

Emotion, Shame, Disgust, and Evil

• Disgust motivates removal of objects; shame motivates withdrawal of the self—both are powerful drivers for labeling things (and people) as evil.
• Guilt is about action, shame about being, which often leads to self-destructive behavior or projection of “evil” onto others.
  • “Shame is when we want ourselves to disappear. Right. It hurts because it is part of who you are.” (24:39)

Evil, Gender, and Power

• Across cultures, femininity/women are disproportionately associated with impurity, danger, and evil.
• This patriarchal association is “extremely common,” though not universal.
  • "The feminine coincides with prevalent notions of evil. If you're looking at like dangerous or harmful or not to be trusted or polluted or profane or contagious, very often the feminine is associated with that." (59:25)

Evil in Pop Culture & Storytelling

• Simplified good vs. evil narratives dominate kids’ media and folktales because humans are cognitively wired for these binaries.
• “Great storytelling makes use of these things”—not because they’re true, but because they’re compelling.
  • “Good and evil, the battles between good and evil. And we really do thrive on the conflict.” (55:16)

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “How did we get to this idea of evil where we could actually apprehend something as evil?” — Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick (05:39)
• “[Evil’s] a tool… If I call something evil, that gives me a little bit of control over the situation.” — Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick (09:32)
• “[In Dracula] The characters scare me more because they've empowered themselves to have no guilt, no shame, no doubt, no hesitation… those things are actually seen as weaknesses.” — Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick (08:28)
• “Dirt doesn't get a lawyer. Dirt gets eliminated.” — Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick (19:10)
• “When you use the term evil, people make lots of assumptions about what that word means and maybe who you are and… what that entails.” — Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick (11:04)
• “We can learn something from dirt… matter out of place… the things that don't fit in, the things that defy our categories.” — Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick (64:26)
• “Who benefits from this [system of classification]? Is it corporations? Is it my parents? Is it the teachers? Is it students?” — Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick (63:56)
• “The actual harmful concept is the binary—is the classification—that's maybe a harm that we should be more aware of.” — Alie Ward (63:44)
• “You see more colors because you've got the language to do that. We are developing new vocabularies all the time… it's really exciting.” — Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick (58:58)

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Timestamps for Important Segments

• 04:05 — Dr. MacKendrick introduces himself and sets boundaries between theological and sociological study of evil
• 05:09 — His teaching experience and perspective on the topic
• 07:24 — The Dracula example: moral labeling and consequences in fiction and reality
• 15:15 — On family and navigating strong ideological differences
• 18:28 — Dirt, purity, and the roots of moral categorization
• 21:54 — Potato chip experiment and “dirt” as a stand-in for evil
• 24:39 — Shame, disgust, guilt: emotions that underpin moral condemnation
• 29:39 — Evil as a tool for oppression: schools, genocide, and colonialism
• 34:31 — Subject-object thinking and dehumanization
• 38:09 — The pitfalls and power of defining evil
• 42:33 — Data: “evil” in US political rhetoric, right vs. left
• 44:17 — “Evil” in Ologies and pop culture: survey and critique
• 53:18–54:45 — Listener questions: age and "evilness," especially in children
• 55:16 — Good vs. evil in children’s media
• 59:25 — Evil, femininity, and patriarchy across cultures
• 64:26 — Favorite villains and why “dirt” is more interesting than the devil

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Listener Questions & Insights

• Are children/adolescents more evil? Hard to answer without defining “evil”; behavior judged annoying or harmful varies with context and intent. (53:57)
• Why are villains in kids’ shows always evil? Narratives thrive on binaries; clean/dirty and good/evil are cognitively sticky. (55:16)
• Do animals understand evil? Not in the human sense, but definitely have concepts of harm, danger, and aversion. (56:43)
• Is evil linguistically constructed? Yes; language shapes how and what we see. More words = more nuanced classification. (58:08)
• Is evil gendered? Across cultures, “evil” is often tied to women and the feminine, driven by patriarchal social structures. (59:25)
• Evil and genius: “Evil genius” is a powerful, culturally potent archetype—intelligence as a threat. (61:14)

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Conclusion & Reflections

• The central harm may not be “evil” per se, but the binary classifications humans make, and the uses those classifications serve.
• Dr. MacKendrick urges listeners to stay critical, aware of the power and elasticity of the language they use, and to be mindful about wielding labels like “evil.”
• Final takeaway: “Ask critical thinkers confused questions because honestly, without questions there would be no knowledge or thinking. Maybe. So here we are. And thanks for sticking around to get evil with us.” — Alie Ward (65:48)

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Further Resources

• Dr. Kenneth MacKendrick’s book: A Critical Primer
• Charity of choice: North Point Douglas Women’s Center

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Find Alie and Ologies on Instagram and Bluesky. Kid-friendly episodes: search for "Smologies."
Full transcripts, references, and merch at ologiesmerch.com.

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Transcript

[A]

Oh, hey, it's the dog toy under the couch that you won't find for another four months. Alie Ward and it's evil. Let's talk about it with a professor in the Department of Religion at the University of Manitoba who has written the book on it. It's titled A Critical Primer and teaches the course Evil in World Religions. They have a bachelor in Religious Studies, a master's in Critical Theory and Religion and Feminist ethics, and a PhD in critical theory, Ethics, hermeneutics and psychoanalysis. And who will deal with my questions such as what is evil? Who is evil? What do we do about evil? Can we scream over turkey at Grandma's house? We're gonna get into it. But first, thank you so much to patrons who support the show and have from the beginning. And y' all leave your questions. You too can join for a dollar a month at patreon.com ologies thanks to everyone wearing Ologies merch from ologiesmerch.com if you have kids or sensitive ears. We also have versions of ologies that are classroom and kid safe. G rated. Those are in feed. They're called smologies S M O L O G I E S which is linked in the show notes. Thank you to anyone who leaves reviews for the show which help so much and I read all of them and I prove it with a recent one. This One is from Tomatillo22 who wrote that the show makes the interesting extremely interesting and the uninteresting equally as interesting. And also after listening to last week's cockroach episode, the show made them eat bugles for the first time in over a decade. They they say no regerts. Tomatillo22 May the horn be with you. It is also with me. Also thank you to sponsors of the show who make it possible for us to donate to a cause that the ologist chooses each week.

[B]

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[A]

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[B]

My name is Kenneth McKendrick and my pronouns are he, him, they, them. Let me jump right in.

[A]

What's the difference between someone who studies evil and a ponerologist?

[B]

So this is embarrassing. I had to look the word up because I didn't know what the word was. And the definition that I found that you may have found as well was it's sort of a theological discussion about evil. And a theology is basically a faith based position or a belief based position. It tends to be monotheistic. It's very often associated with Christianity and that's not what I do. I'm interested in human beings and what I study is people that talk about demons and who talk about gods and goddesses and deities, but supernatural representation. So I'm super interested in people that talk about comic books and I'm super interested in, you know, games like Dungeons and Dragons. And anytime you find like a supernatural representation like a zombie or vampires or anything like that. I'm in. Right. I find that fascinating because for me the study of religion is about studying how something ordinary gets turned into the extraordinary.

[A]

And now you've been teaching courses in evil for almost two decades, right?

[B]

Yeah, 2002 was the first time I taught it at the University of Manitoba, but I was teaching at the University of Toronto in 1999 while I was still a graduate student. So I've been thinking about the topic for quite a while. It never gets old, never gets tired. I'm more of an expert on, I guess, people talking about evil.

[A]

Well, okay, some semantics for you. So is it more of a question of like, is evil really a thing?

[B]

Okay, so if you sort of look at a lot of the literature and if you just type in evil to a Google search or to a book search or a public library search would be even better than that. You'll find a whole bunch of books on evil. For the most part, you'll find that these books read pretty much the same. So you're going to have a chapter on genocide, you're going to have a chapter maybe on torture. You're going to have a section on natural evil which is like earthquakes and you know, environmental hazards. You're probably going to have a chapter on ecocide and the destruction of the environment. And then almost always you're going to have a chapter on like Darth Vader and sort of representations of evil in literature and in film. Because that's really fun. And these are great, these books are inspiring. They're important because I draw attention to things like atrocity and the dismantling of humanity and colonialism, misogyny and racism. And it's very useful, it's very interesting and very moving. And I was like, there's something missing in all of this. How did we get to evil? Like how did we get to this idea of evil where we could actually apprehend something as evil? I thought a lot about this and I was trying to figure out one. I think if we all know what evil is, there's nothing really else that we can learn about it. Right? Because we know everything there is to know. We just recognize it when we see it. This was really, really unsatisfying. And so a colleague of mine, Darlene Drischka, she in one of the classes she was teaching, she was a novel, Dracula. This is a fantastic novel by Bram Stoker.

[A]

Side note. So for a past Spooktober episode we have a two parter on vampires with Professor Dr. Jeff Holden as well as A teratology episode on monsters in pop culture with Dr. W. Scott Poole. And we have a 2024 episode on genocide, which may be of interest.

[B]

But one of the things that I found to be most striking about the novel Dracula is that all of these good characters come together and they have a job to do, and they have this really weird experience with Count Dracula. Then they decide they're going to kill this guy. So he comes over to England and they just obliterate him. They decide that he's an abomination, and they decide to totally destroy him. And they even go out of their way in order to hide what they're doing from the police and from attorneys and lawyers and stuff like this and other medical professionals. And so I thought, okay, I love the novel, right? And in the context of the novel, Dracula is a demon. There's no doubt he is murdering people. Like, he's horrific. He is an abomination. But thinking about the process of how they went from this is a human being to this is an abomination that we are going to eliminate from the world, I found curious. And so that was sort of the question that I began. This. This sort of journey about thinking about evil is like. And even though it's a novel, it's like, how did these folks get to the point where they realize that something had to be obliterated? And they didn't bring them to court, right? They didn't say, we think that you've done some really bad things. We're going to hold you accountable for your crimes. They just, you're a demon and you must be obliterated. And unfortunately, when you look around the world, do you see this happening? Right? You see people simply being obliterated. You see horrible things happening to people all the time. You know, I'm not a historian of genocide, and I'm not a historian of settlerism and colonialism, but I'm really interested in how we get to the point where we're able to identify something as evil. And that's what I find really scary about the topic of evil, is that Dracula's horrible and horrific. And I love that because it's a horror novel and he's a horrible villain. And that's great. But the characters scare me more because they've empowered themselves to have no guilt, no shame, no doubt, no hesitation. And those things are actually seen as weaknesses. And that I find interesting, compelling, and certainly worth talking about.

[A]

Well, is vengeance considered evil? And where's the line between vengeance and justice?

[B]

Well, that would require a scale Right. Of what is just and what is unjust. And so where do we find the word justice? Where do we find the word criminal? Like where do those terms come from? And how do they get used? How do they get used to vilify people? Is this a corporate sham or is it something invented by grandma? Or you know, is this deep seated kind of thing that we have in our society and it's been with us for a long time and is that a good thing? Is it a bad thing? So sort of asking questions is one of the things I really try to do. You know, again, I'm not after the existential question of whether these things exist or not. I'm interested in what people do with the word evil. And as a human being, just as a non academic, just in like on the street, in my everyday life, yeah, sure, I may use the word evil when I want to control a situation, right? I mean, if I call something evil, that gives me a little bit of control over the situation. And if people buy my conception of evil, that gives me a lot of power, right? As an academic I have to stand back and say like, so, Dr. Ken, how have you used the word evil?

[A]

So this brings up the big notion that evil is kind of in the eye of the beholder, as is justice and vengeance. So how is all this stuff defined between individuals and then among cultures and even used by leaders to polarize or vilify or categorize acts that actually require concrete action? So does everyone use the word evil about the same amount? They don't.

[B]

I'm actually studying some of my colleagues who use the word evil too. I turn them into my data, whether they like it or not. I'm interested in the people that use those terms and how they get used and what they do with them and how effective they are.

[A]

Okay, be honest. How often do you use the word evil, like casually?

[B]

That's embarrassing. I for sure use it. I mean, I teach it and yeah, I use it, but I don't think I use it really seriously. Like if, you know, I'm having a conversation at the dinner with the family and we're talking about a political decision or transphobia or something like this. And I try not to use the term because it comes with so much baggage, it comes with so much freight that to introduce it into conversation is just, it's not really helpful. It's easier to use less loaded terms like religion is the same way as soon as you use the word religion, people make lots of assumptions about what that word means and maybe who you are and. Or what that entails. That's again, it's a really loaded term.

[A]

So in another Spooktober episode about mummies, mommyology with Dr. Kara Cooney and Dr. Salima Ikram, we discuss religion versus ritual and magic. And also we dive into that in our witchology episode with Feo Parma, who themselves is a practicing witch with roots in Eastern and Western cultures. So the term evil and religion go hand in hand, but the word evil has of course, leaked into secular culture to describe unspeakable cruelty without the religious context. So how does Kedith handle this? At a dinner party, I'm always hesitant.

[B]

Someone says, what do you do? I can say, I study religion, but then I say, but I study the fun stuff. And they said, oh, yeah, what do you do? And I said, I study zombies and I study superheroes and I study imaginary companions and things like Dungeons and Dragons. And then they're like, oh, because now they know they're not going to get a sermon and they know that, like, oh, this is someone that studies popular culture. They're probably harmless and, you know, probably in the arts and stuff and that kind of thing.

[A]

So you're not going to leave with a pamphlet at all?

[B]

You might leave with a book. You probably won't leave with a pamphlet, though.

[A]

Ken published a book in 2023 titled A Critical Primer, which examines academically the way that the word evil is very contextually bound, and it dives into different cultural factors that seek to define it. I like to envision Ken with a smart leather satchel handing out hardcover copies at his wife's work functions, or passing out the volume to a table of friendly strangers at a cousin's wedding. I would be thrilled to be on the receiving end and ask him 1 million questions and leave with a copy, which, to be honest, is what essentially this episode is. Now, did you grow up in a religious household or did you grow up a D and D nerd?

[B]

Or both? Yeah, it's gonna be both. I grew up in an academic household. My dad was a professor at the University of Windsor. He taught English. My mom eventually became a sessional instructor in the Department of Religion at the University of Windsor, and she taught courses on death and women in relig. And I grew up playing D and D. So the basement was filled with horror novels. My room was filled with fantasy novels, and I played D and D. And when we went on vacation, we went to bookstores and cemeteries. And then I fell in love in high school. My partner and I have been together for A very long time. And her family is Pentecostal, and so they're charismatic and speaking in tongues and all of that. And in a sense, you know, me studying religion and making evil part of that. It was trying to make sense of my world. It was trying to make sense of my everyday reality. There was people that seemed to live in very different worlds. And I had some experience of that playing D and D, right? You're in a normal world and then you've got the game mechanics and then you've got this imaginary world that you enter into that is an extension of that real world.

[A]

Ken's family was less religious than his wife's because, you know, being Pentecostal and speaking in tongues, it's a real lifestyle commitment.

[B]

My dad was funny. He died a few years ago, but he was funny because he was. It seemed to me that he was mainly at church because of choir and of the tea and cookies.

[A]

What about fellowship?

[B]

You know, the family that I married into was. Was a very different. Where the Bible is the word of God and it's true and it's literal. And for me, again, that's why it's not a question about what is and isn't real. It's how do people then behave, what do they do with that information. That was how I made sense of these sort of worlds. I was encountering the Pentecostal world, where demons are alive and inside of people. And then this D and D world, which I knew to be completely imagined. And then you get the world of academia too, where we're all scholars and doing scholarly things and scientists and doing these sciencey things.

[A]

Well, do you get along with your in laws? What's that like?

[B]

There's been difficult times, but yeah, it's great. I mean, the thing is, regardless of how you look at the world, when you come to the kitchen table, there's food, right? And there's stories and there's people that are arguing and talking and sharing and laughing. And so when you focus on what's at hand, then a lot of these larger worlds that we occupy, very often they take a chill pill, right? They just sort of calm down. It doesn't have to be these big, you know, we believe that you're going to hell and stuff. It's not relevant to spending an afternoon by the pool or sitting in a canoe and going paddling.

[A]

Okay, I get that. In the genocideology episode, Dr. Dirk Moses said that taking the temperature down on these discussions is what moves things forward. But also, let's say that you have deep, fundamentally different views of what other people ought to be doing with their bodies or lives, or how people should be treating each other or how they might judge each other. Especially if, you know, know that it's simmering right under the surface because it involves people's ideology and their identities. And what if you are pissed when it comes to, like, having a barbecue? How do you not want to hold others accountable? Or how do you have that conversation without it becoming so heated that it does become accusatory or it does invoke, you know, notions of evil on this side or that side? How is that temperature taken down? It feels like we have an obligation in situations of, like, emotional proximity, where it's not just about strangers fighting, strangers with hackles up and fight or flight responses. But, you know, how. How are those situations approached without it being so personal?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, in a certain sense, I guess an academic. I don't really have any advice. We often push others away because we're fear of being rejected ourselves. Like, there's a book called Others in Mind by Philip Rochet. It's beautiful book. It's wonderful book, but it talks a lot about that. We push other people away when we're afraid that they're going to push us away, so we do it first. And that seems like this is what's happening in, you know, politics today, is that people are pushing other people away because they're afraid of being rejected. Like, this matrix of purification is really based on, I think, a lot of anxiety, a lot of fears, a lot of fragility, because, you know, if you're really robust, you'd sit down at the table with anybody and talk to anybody about anything. Theory goes one way, practice goes another, but ultimately we have to sit around the table to resolve these things. We're going to have to come to consensus. It's not going to happen in an academic journal where it doesn't matter how true the theory is.

[A]

Is your partner still Pentecostal or just raised in it?

[B]

Raised in it, yeah. Yeah, it was an interesting journey, you know, moving out of that. It's still part of who we are. Like, who I am in the classroom is different than who I am on the podcast and who I am going to be at the dinner table tonight. Like, we adopt different Personas and ways of being in the world based on context and that kind of thing.

[A]

So back to evil. Who defines it and what it means and where the notion of it came from? This is so interesting historically and culturally.

[B]

My hunch is that we took this basic idea of Clean and dirty. And we grafted evil sort of into that concept and sort of blended them together in order to be able to make the idea of evil thinkable. And for me, that's really, really fascinating is what are the things that make evil thinkable? Like, as a concept, when something is, you know, diabolical or atrocious or, you know, demonic, what are all the things that went into you being able to think that? And I think dirt is one of them. There's a book by Mary Douglas called Purity and Danger. And for me, it was a bit of a revelation because she basically said, look, when you look out at the world, you classify everything that you see at the borders of your system of classification, at the borders of your language, at the borders of the way you look at the world, there's going to be sort of blurry areas. And that blurry area, that's dirt. And so dirt appears whenever things aren't orderly. And so you have. I've got my water glass here and I've got the mic and I've got my phone and a computer. Everything is in its proper place. But there's a knowing thing on my desk. The plant is actually leaking over, over top of my phone. And this is the thing. It's like, I'll move the plant off the table, I'll move the leaf of the plants without even thinking about it. Like, it's not evil, but there's no way it gets to stay there. And then all of a sudden, wait a second. When we're thinking about evil, it's like the things that we don't even register, the things that simply get swept away, that just are discarded with a brush of my hand. Right? Like, I'm not even going to register it as evil. At least, you know, very often if you're identified as evil or an immoral person, you'll get a trial. Very often we're willing to do that with people that we think are immoral or evil or people that we call criminal. We'll give them lawyers. But dirt doesn't get a lawyer. Dirt gets eliminated.

[A]

So a few years back, I got a chance to interview Dr. Lydia Jennings for an indigenous pedology episode all about soil science and the intersections with tribal lands. And I asked her if she could help me with some definitions. Here's an excerpt from that interview. And what is the difference between soil and dirt?

[B]

So it depends on who you ask.

[A]

The way I like to think about.

[B]

It is like, so dirt is displaced soil. Soil is naturally occurring in the ecosystem. It's really full of life and microbes and, you know, helps filter water. And dirt has kind of been removed from its home and I think often it gets degraded as being called dirt, as opposed to recognizing the life force it is in part because of the removal from its home.

[A]

Oh, that's such a good answer. I wasn't sure if it was like, it's got to have a certain percentage of rock or a certain percentage of dust. But it's really more philosophical.

[B]

Yeah, removing it from its surface. And so that's like. I think the easiest place is to call it like removed. Removed dirt. Soil. I think there are so many, like soil microbiologists will also think about the.

[A]

Microbes associated with soil.

[B]

You often hear people say soil is alive, dirt is dead, which I don't think is really true, especially as someone who studied mining issues. Like, there's a lot of questions about, like, if a reclaimed soil system or a mined soil is full of life. And so I think dirt is displaced soil.

[A]

I never thought that talking about evil, which is a concept so staggering that a scholar can write a whole book talking about talking about talking about it, and it would all come down to dirt. And how often in your classes do people ask you questions like, is this political party evil? Was Hitler evil? Whose evil? That requires, from a moral standpoint, some sort of group smothering. You know, like, it's funny, I don't.

[B]

Know if I've, you know, in 20 years, I don't know if I've ever been asked, is this person evil? Just me then. But I start the very first day. I say, okay, so if you read a book by someone that talks about evil, they're going to list these people as being evil. And so you have, you know, Attila the Hun and you have Hitler and you have all of these people as evil. And I said, this is not what we're talking about. We're not talking about the bad things that human beings do. We're going to talk about dirt. We're going to talk about something that we generally avoid and generally think is kind of dangerous. One of the things I used to do is on the very first day of class, I would put a potato chip on the floor of the classroom and then I would have everyone do a five second count to make sure the five second rule was like totally done and over. I'd pause, dramatic effect, and then I would eat the chip. And invariably everybody just went. You had this collective gasp, right? And it's like, so now what do you think's gonna happen? And people like, you're gonna get sick. That's dirty. That's like, you should be ashamed. And some people would inevitably just walk out of the classroom like, I'm this lunatic. I am not staying around for all of this. But it sort of makes a point. It's like we have this notion of clean and dirty. So what are all the associations? I've done something that is potentially unhygienic or is unhygienic, whatever, that's potentially dangerous. So what are the associations that you have with dirt? And they're like, I associate dirt with, like, poverty, and I assert dirt with death, and, you know, all of these other things. And then you start fleshing out. So when you said that, like, this was a dirty thing to do, all of a sudden you were conjuring things like death and poverty. And they had a bunch of sort of associations with that word. And for me, that was. That's gold. Because then all of a sudden, you know, they're starting to see. It triggers lots of different things. Clean, dirty, polluted, you know, not polluted. Sacred, profane. All of these concepts get lumped in. So it's a really, really loaded kind of idea. And so looking at, you know, evil in this way is. It's kind of fun. I'm not a historian of genocide. It's kind of fun to do that. And I have to say, I stopped eating potato chip off the floor.

[A]

What do you eat now? Like, something goopier, like something wetter.

[B]

Well, I was thinking, like, if I poured a cup of coffee onto the floor and then slurped that up. But that was like, there's no way I'm going to do that because, like, that just triggers everything in me. Right? Like, I rationalized it really well. The potato chip is, like, it's bent. So only a little fraction of the potato chip is going to touch the floor. Like, so I fell into my own theory. I freaked myself out. But they cleaned up the lecture hall with asbestos one day. Like, it had asbestos. And they all tidied it up. And I said, there's some powder on the floor. And I said, I eat a potato chip up the floor in this class. And they're like, yeah, you're not going to want to do that.

[A]

And if those last details made you feel some kind of way, we have an excellent episode on environmental toxicology. We also have a bleach episode called Disinfectiology with a chemist and an OCD episode which also talks about moral scrupulosity obsessions. Also, we got a disgustology episode with a psychologist who has devoted his career to it. We'll link him in the show notes.

[B]

So with disgust, we want objects to be removed. Shame is really difficult. Shame is when we want ourselves to disappear. Right. It hurts because it is part of who you are. Right. Like it's a self condemnation. And this is why I think there's a bit of a difference between guilt and shame. And I know that guilt gets a lot of press, but I've always thought that guilt has a little bit of pride in it.

[A]

So the American Psychological association published this interview with Professor Dr. June Tangney, who explained that quote, in a nutshell. When we feel shame, we feel bad about ourselves. We are fundamentally flawed because we did something. It reflects who we are as a person. I'm a bad person for having done that. Guilt, in contrast, she says, focuses on a behavior somewhat separate from the self. You can be a good person but. But do a bad thing. And so when people feel guilt, they feel typically bad about something that they've done something specific or not done that they should have done. So essentially, guilt is like, oh, shit, I'm sorry. And then you move on. And shame is like, I fucked up because I'm the fucking worst. I hate myself. So, fun game. Which one are you? It can determine the course of your life and mental wellness and the fate of everyone on the planet.

[B]

Shame is just really, really, really painful. And these are great emotions to focus on because they are so deeply aversive. Right. And so anything that might cause us shame or that disgusts us, those are prime candidates for us targeting those things to be evil. So if a professor says, you know, you can do better on your exam, I think if someone experiences shame, they may then say, well, that professor is causing me so much pain. So they're the evil ones. Or if something is disgusting, we say, it's disgusting, it's evil.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so it's kind of a slippery slope in many respects.

[A]

Well, yeah, I think that's one thing that really surprised me because, you know, as a religious scholar with someone who has kind of a background socially around really hyper religious things, and yet also comes from an academic family. When I think of the word evil, I think abuse of power to oppress people. And then when you're looking at it, a religious context, maybe evil could mean someone who's trying to undermine the will of God or someone who's going against something divine, some kind of indoctrination. So it's like those the same word for really different things.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

But like, so Frustrating.

[B]

I'm gonna have to. I have to call you Ona. You said a person that's trying to. Right? You said a person that's trying to. That's the modern idea. Like that evil is associated with your will, the ritual understanding or evil is impurity. It's not about your intention. Like, you can intend harm or you can intend love or wonder or whatever. It doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what you intend. It's contact that determines the impurity. If you touch a corpse or if you come into contact with blood, if you come into contact with a forbidden material like what's prohibited, if then you carry that with you because it transfers that chaos, that disorder, that dirt or whatever that impurity transfers over to you. It doesn't matter what you intend. So it's not someone that's trying to undermine sacred rules is that they have come into contact with chaos and now you can't tolerate them unless they become ritually pure. And so they're just dangerous. They're a threat to themselves, they're a threat to the community, and they're a threat to the cosmos. The danger of impurity is precisely that if we don't fix this, the entire universe could come to an end. We have to fix that. But recognizing that that's what's going on, I think will help you change your toolbox a little bit. You may approach that a little bit differently and say, this is a purity crusade. This isn't about, you know, argumentation. It's not about right and wrong as we understand it morally. If you're, you know, a fan of contemporary, you know, moral theory, then you'd be like, we have to get this to a point of human rights and justice, and we have to move it out of just, you know, obliterating people that are different than us or that. That we define as dirt. You know, that matter out of place that Mary Douglas talks about.

[A]

Yeah, that potato chip on the floor. Whatever's on the potato chip on the floor. So going back in time, we have a medieval codicology episode about weird old manuscript art in Memes and Snails with Evan Pridmore. And it involves more nuns harvesting dongs from trees, as you probably expect. We also discuss depictions of snails to represent some dark antisemitic sentiment and some old timey harmful propaganda. So let's talk a little bit about that history.

[B]

You might say demons are evil in the medieval period in Europe. But then after, nobody believes in demons, then saying that demons are evil doesn't really hold any weight. Right. And so you could say, ah, we're going to call the rich evil now, or we're going to call the monarchies evil. And again, I'm not into it, like, is it true or is it not true? It's just like, how did you get there? How did you get to that point where you were able to say that evil? Like, who benefits? It was the school teachers and principals that were using the word evil in the residential school system. They were using that word in order to enact and carry out genocide. But we use words in all kinds of different ways. Right? That was a particularly malicious way.

[A]

Ken points out that we of course can call people who commit acts of atrocity evil, but they often use notions of impurity or evil to oppress their victims.

[B]

I don't know if it's cynical, but I'm thinking how convenient it is for both of those groups to have this word at hand to use how they want in order to push their agenda. You know, we start noticing parts of our behavior that are almost on automatic pilot. Like, you know, the residential school system in Canada and the ongoing, you know, finding of corpses in schools. Right? This was going on up until like the early 90s. And this was made public information, you know, in, you know, around 1910. So people knew about this and nothing was done about it. Some people knew exactly what was going on. The indigenous communities knew what was going on, but many people chose not to look at it.

[A]

In his 2019 memoir, From Bare Rock, the Life and Times of a Dene Residential School Survivor, author Antoine Mountain writes that the churches saw to it that anyone who still had anything in the way of traditional medicine ways was shunned with their savage and evil ways. Quote. And Ken referenced the residential schools in Canada. And for a little more background, Canada, specifically their residential school system began in the late 1800s with 150,000 estimated First nations children removed from their homes and family to attend Christian run schools that would supposedly civilize them and change their clothing and keep them from learning their native languages and ways of life. And up to a third third of these children may have died. And a mass amount of unmarked graves are still being found. And the last residential school in Canada closed in the late 1990s, not 1890s, 1990s. They were operating up until the late 1990s. So for more on this, including survivors testimonies, you can see the 2015 paper honoring the Reconciling for the future summary of the final report of the Truth and Reconciliation Commission of Canada. And we talked to Dr. Dirk Moses about this in the genocideology episode. And here's a clip of that now. The last residential school finally closed in 1996. And in 2022, the Canadian government finally recognized these acts as genocide, which is historical progress, like, finally an admission of a genocide. It took 200 years for that. Bidouville too misty about this kind of meager act. Our lead editor, Mercedes Maitland, helped produce and research and encourage this episode. For the last few months we've been working on it. And she notes that as a Canadian, for her, it's very frustrating to see because very few of Canada's National Truth and Reconciliation Commission's calls to action in regard to child welfare and education and health, justice, language and actual reconciliation have actually happened. And mostly it's just acknowledging or appointing someone to think, think about a problem. But there have been virtually no material or policy changes. So that's a government acknowledging a genocide, which is different from a conviction. Now, the victims and survivors of the Canadian residential school system are recognized on September 30th every year in Canada for Orange Shirt Day. And it's a tradition coined from the story of this one survivor, Phyllis Jack Webstad's account of having this bright brand new shirt that was orange that her grandmother gave to her right before she left for the residential school. And it was stripped from her wardrobe. It was replaced with a uniform. All ties to her real life felt severed, she said, and this system existed for over a hundred years under the noses of modernity, when you may have been alive because the victims and survivors were being cleaned of their old evil ways in the eyes of those that ran them.

[B]

And it's because it was sort of below the love, the threshold of perception in a way. And that's what like a system like colonialism does. It tries to move things below the love perception so that they can be swept away without people noticing, like cleaning your floor. I mean, it's an awful analogy because what we're talking about is murder. From my perspective. I don't see a lot of people thinking about it that way. Think about, like, what goes into thinking about evil? Like, how do we get to the point where we can call something evil?

[A]

Right. Well, I'm wondering too, which cultures tend to work on a really stark dichotomy with good and bad and sinning, atoning and this really, like, bifurcated kind of philosophical concepts or categorizations of behavior. And then which ones tend to think of it on a grayscale more? Which cultures tend to do that big splitting?

[B]

Well, I think it Happens in a lot of different places. If we look at it in terms of subject object, right? You have a subject which is a person and an object sort of which is a thing. If your culture, society, your friends, your peers, your boss tells you to look at things in a subject object kind of view. So if I look outside my window and there's a bunch of trees there and I can look at that and ooh, that's $50 of lumber or something like that, as opposed to seeing the trees, treating it like an object or as a commodity. So if you have that subject object model and you really double down on that model, then you're going to be turning subjects into objects all the time.

[A]

This can certainly happen in terms of casualties and war. And pay attention to who is humanized and who isn't. And again, we talk a lot about dehumanization and the language of transgression. In the Genocideology episode, who is portrayed as an animal or an object and who is considered a fellow human? And in our victimology episode with Dr. Callie Renison, she explains how certain homicide victim cases are followed close by the press and pop culture, usually white people, usually women, when in actuality the largest demographic of homicide victims in the US is black men. So who is the subject and who is the object? On a day to day level, when do we look at ourselves as objects versus subjects? Which isn't possibly positive though, right?

[B]

This might be good in medicine where you don't really want the doctor doing surgery and then crying, you know, and weeping with the pain that they're causing your body. Really, you do want them to take up an object evading perspective. You want them to treat you like an object. If you're about to get hit by a car, you want someone to treat you as an object and just push you out of the way, like, okay, so this is how much you weigh. This is the kind of force that's going to be applied to get you out of the way.

[A]

Right?

[B]

But there's other ways in which we're treated like objects. You know, maybe by an employer or maybe by peers or students or anybody. Right? Or subjectivity is no longer seen or recognized. And being treated as an object, as a thing and not as a person is very, very painful. You know, in terms of evil. I'm interested in how subjects get turned into objects. And sometimes it can come across as kind of loony. But we're really, really good at animating things all the time. Like our stuffies, all of the stuff around us. I mean, it makes a Lot of sense to me. I think we would probably live better if we lived treating the world alive.

[A]

So we might take better care of the planet or at risk species or livestock or our couch if we imbued this greater sense of humanity to if it were a subject and not an object.

[B]

And so evil is part of that. Because, you know, when someone talks about good and evil, they're saying, okay, well, healthy is the good stuff and the harmful is the bad stuff. Then they really get to set the pace for what is and isn't real as well. You know, then they get to decide what counts as a real woman and what gets to count as a real man or what gets to count as property and like, all of that kind of stuff. So that's another curiosity is that very, very few people are willing to say, ah, no, there's no such thing as evil. It's all relative. We can just sort of get rid of it. You may say that, but you still use the word in the sentence.

[A]

Well, I'm wondering if it's a matter of treating subjects like objects. You know, then if you look at, like, billionaires, are they evil? If they are taking a lot of resources and taking advantage of other people's situations or livelihoods? Like, at what point does an entity become evil because it's doing kind of more harm than good? And like, what do you think of Google having their mission statement just be, don't be evil, and then changing it along the way?

[B]

Okay, so this is the point in the program. We really need to talk about definitions.

[A]

Yes, let's define finally. Can we. We can try. Well, Kenneth can.

[B]

And so, you know, what do you mean by evil? And first of all, there's a number of ways of defining something. And so when I say, what is the definition of evil? Let's talk about the definition of definition first. I hate that meta thing. But okay, we should talk about. So when you're using the word evil, first of all, you have to figure out what kind of definition are you using? So if we're going to say that billionaires are evil, is a billion dollars the criteria? And okay, so is that personal wealth? Is it capital wealth, or is it like a metaphor for social capital? So does that mean like a billion dollars worth of political power or like a billion dollars worth of friends? You know, you have to figure out the definition that you're using, and then you can go ahead and use it as a scholar. You know, that's super important because if I'm going to study something, I have to start out by defining it. And when I define evil, I've got this insanely big definition. You know, dangers and aversions. Anything that we decide to be dangerous or that we avoid, that's evil. Oh, when I do it, my class is it for the purpose of this class, we're going to define evil as dangerous and aversions. And so anything that you decide is dangerous, anything that you've avoided, that's going to be evil. So if somebody calls you and you don't answer the call, they've avoided the call, then that person is evil, you know? Or if somebody doesn't listen to your podcast, they're avoiding your podcast. That person is evil.

[A]

Listen, this Booktober 2025, I'm gonna admit it goes too hard. Usually our spooktobers are like candy and bats. But in the context of a very fucked up 2025, diving into homicidal clowns and cockroaches, giving live birth and the nature of all that is evil, it's like a lot. Listen, we work on these months in advance. We didn't know. But if you're hearing this and you're not avoiding it, you're not evil in my eyes.

[B]

Obviously this is an artificial definition. Right? Like, we're not saying you're evil and demonic. What I like to do is then start looking at, okay, what do we avoid today? You know, what do we deem to be dangerous? And then when you start looking at it that way, like issues of sexuality and corpses and stories about stuff, all of these things, all of a sudden we find out like, wow, we avoid a lot of things. And there's a lot of things we decide are dangerous.

[A]

And then once you have that definition, how do you even begin to apply that? Because anything that you avoid or is dangerous, like is a wasp evil? Is an assignment evil.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, it's too big, right? It compasses a lot of different things. It's too much.

[A]

And me as a non academic, as a non scholar, as someone who's just like, my horrified face is lit up by the news on my screen, you know, I can't help but want to apply these to things I see happening around me. And I look at things like an AI video of Trump's Gaza comes out with this. The rubble of what is now Gaza, Palestine being cleared away to make a Riviera of gambling. And I'm seeing things like a Fox News commentator who retained his job saying that people who are unhoused should be subject to involuntary lethal injection or involuntary.

[B]

Lethal injection or something. Just kill them.

[A]

And I see things like that. My brain wants to say people who say that are evil. Obviously what we're talking about, though, is the crusade for purity, to clean up this area and make it a glittering Western front of commerce. The idea of cleaning up the streets by mass murder of unhoused people, it's like it doesn't even seem political at that point. And right now I'm just ranting. But Mercedes, our lead editor, sent me a really interesting piece of data about how often the term evil comes up in official congressional papers on the right versus the left. And this was from a September 2025 piece by Lindsey Cormack, which showed that in congressional emails to constituents over the last 15 years, the word evil has occurred 2,490 times. And this was from a few weeks ago, so maybe it's more. But 89% of all the mentions the word evil came from Republicans, 11% from Democrats. So when you hear someone in a powerful position use the word evil, just listen closely to the context. The right uses it much more than the left.

[B]

I think when you saying, like, these people are evil, I think you are also trying to paint them as corrupt, like an impure. And I think you also want to apply a moral standard. Right. That these people are behaving immorally as well. And so I do think you're probably pivoting the word in precisely the way that I think it probably shouldn't be. If we're going to study something better.

[A]

So evil, we all use it, but maybe incorrectly. Maybe when better, more realistic adjectives could be used, like homicidal or detrimentally callous or in violation of humanitarian laws. We could say greedily deceitful, felonious, sexually predatory. But isn't language elastic? So all these labels, so many adjectives, so many facts obscured when this vague notion of evil crops up.

[B]

Instead, from a practical political perspective, it's about who gets to control the discourse and evil. I've actually gone through several of your podcasts, and I've tracked a little bit of the term evil as it's come up in the podcast. Right. So vampires are evil. Okay, that comes up. Evil spirits, evil spells.

[A]

Yep.

[B]

Evil demons. You know, everyone sort of gets that. Evil spiders.

[A]

Yes.

[B]

People have asked about that. Evil landlords.

[A]

Okay, yeah.

[B]

Tracks, evil babies. But I think that was a question. It's like, are babies evil?

[A]

It's a good question.

[B]

Everybody's got to ask that question at least once, right?

[A]

I mean, aren't they kind of vampires taking blood in gestation? And aren't vampires evil? So thus can a baby be a.

[B]

Vampire needs a good lawyer is what they need. Somebody needs to come to their defense, Right?

[A]

Vampires are like, I never said I was vegan, so it's on you. But back to all the times I've called something evil. Well, let's hear it.

[B]

The evils of capitalism. Algorithms. Evil. Algorithms. The evil of tobacco, marketing. Evil. Stepsisters doing. What was it? Evil with the written word. Accomplishing evil with the written word. That might be a bit of a paraphrase. And then Nazis, right? And so there was maybe 20, 30 uses in all for me. This is interesting, right? Some of the contexts are sort of joking around, others are serious. So there was other comments that evil has to be remedied, evil has to be confronted, evil has to be fixed, and it's a force to be stopped. All of these are coming from different contexts, right? So I'm not pretending that this isn't just sort of like a fun little game to play. It is a kind of a fun game to play to see how we use the word in the ologies world in so many different ways, right? But we see evil used to apply to people or occupations. We also see it to apply to institutions, but we also see it applied to the unseen and the invisible, and it's used in the singular and the plural. And so when we take this sort of ologies discourse on evil as a package, you can see it's a pretty fun, handy term to be able to use. You know, it denotes almost anything, right? So we could apply it to billionaires, we could apply it to parents. Like it's wide open. In other words, it's really useful. And that, for me, is one of the more interesting parts about discourses on evil.

[A]

Does that mean I have to stop using the term evil casually when talking about tobacco marketing and stuff?

[B]

I'm not going to tell you what to do, okay?

[A]

I'll try to be more conscious. Malicious, perhaps, or I guess there's such a spectrum between, like, selfish or malicious or deceptive or deceitful or I suppose there are so many adjectives we could use.

[B]

But the thing is like, evil isn't like the only thing. We do this. We do this with basically all of our words. Yeah, the terms good and evil have a pretty big resonance across cultures.

[A]

Well, you know, I'm wondering because potato chips and asbestos didn't always exist in lecture halls and, you know, we didn't know about bacteria and we didn't know about traumatic brain injury or calcium channels or Lead and all of these things that might biologically or sociologically, cause someone to do harm to another. So as we learn more about behavior and choices and systems in place, are we looking at evil a little bit differently because it's not quite so mystical?

[B]

Yes. No. Politically and environmentally like, we're in a really complicated place as a species. We're witnessing the unmaking of the environment as we know it very, very quickly. And we're seeing some responses to that catastrophe, which is unfolding, that are very unpleasant in many kinds of ways. Right. We're seeing certain kinds of politics that are emerging that are very divisive and not really interested at all in communication and that kind of stuff. So philosophically and scientifically, we know more about how we use words and how the brain is constructed and how social worlds are constructed. We know a lot more about that. But even when we know about those things, that doesn't necessarily release us from the temptation of making use of that information in ways. Like, one of the things my evil course is really good for, for example, is business advertising. Because as soon as you heard the we are clean and dirty, you're just like, as an advertiser, if I can sell purity, yeah, I'm going to be able to sell anything. So if I can describe someone in terms that someone will recognize as disgusting and have them stick, we can get rid of that person.

[A]

Oh, wow. Yeah.

[B]

Like, if we can convince someone that so and so is evil, then we don't have to take them seriously anymore. We just can ignore them or we can wipe them away. Right. And it's horrible when we see ourselves doing it, and it's horrible when we see other people doing it to us, when we see sort of populations vilified in these kinds of ways and described in these kinds of ways. And unfortunately, we're seeing a lot of it. And so, fortunately for me, it keeps me in business because people are super interested in the topic of evil because it's confronted them on a daily basis. And it doesn't seem to matter how much more we know about cognitive processes and development and evolution and all of these kinds of things. It's still getting used. It's used in marketing. It's used by political parties. It's used by family members. Like, siblings are really excellent wielders of caustic terms and harmful terms and that kind of stuff. And I get these stories about how kids really stick it to their siblings and family members. Like, yeah, we've really developed a knack for hurting the ones we love. And in part because we're aware of our own vulnerabilities, we're aware of our fragility and we can make use of that. And that's things like racism, misogyny, homophobia and transphobia. Like all of these things, this is why it's so difficult, because you can see the manipulation at work. You can say, ah, they're triggering disgust here. They're engaging in a ritual. So it reduces my options to their response. Right. Like they're pushing me into a tunnel. So the only thing I can be is angry. And I can't say, wait a second, you're triggering my disgust mechanism because you're triggered. Right.

[A]

Well, I have questions from listeners. May I ask them?

[B]

Yes.

[A]

But before we answer your questions, patrons, let's donate to a charity of Kenneth's Choice, which is the North Point Douglas women's Center, developed 25 years ago as a hub where women and gender diverse folks and their families can gather in a safe and welcoming space, building friendships and providing access to needed resources and programs to help restore what has been lost through violence, racism and poverty. And to find out more about them, go to npdwc.org and thanks to sponsors of the show for making that donation possible. Oh, the days are getting shorter. The sweaters are getting softer. I love layers that last in quince. It's your go to for quality essentials that feel cozy, they won't blow your budget and they look refined. Think $50 Mongolian cashmere. They have premium denim, fits like a dream. They have have great outerwear. My underpants are even from quince. That's how much quince is in my wardrobe. Quint is the kind of wardrobe upgrade that feels smart and stylish and effortless. And I know that these are essentials that I can keep wearing and are made by Quince partners that use top tier ethical factories. They cut out the middlemen and they deliver luxury quality pieces at half the price of similar brands. You need a wool coat. They look designer level. They cost a fraction of the price. I have a couple of sleeveless cashmere shirts that I wear from Quint. Watch me layer those up, baby. I got fall, I got winter, I got softness. Big fan. So find your fall staples at quint. Go to quint.com ologies for free shipping on your order and 365 day returns now available in Canada too. That's Q-U-I-N-C-E.com ologies to get free shipping and 365 day returns. Quint.com ologies hey neighbor. Save up to 20% on classic furniture and decor during Birch Lane's biggest sale on the block October 26 through 29. Update your space with made to last dining tables, chairs and more. It's classic style for joyful living. Shop the biggest sale on the block [e-mail] Morning Zoe.

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[A]

You too can submit questions for the ologists ahead of time by joining Our Patreon for one hot dollar a month at patreon.com Ologies like L. Wink did. But on the topic of siblings and age, L. Wink Wanted to know, is there a correlation between the age of the person and the evilness of an act? Who is eviler? Kids, teens, young adults, 18 to 25, middle aged? Are the elderly evil? I have a feeling this is gonna be a difficult question to ask, but if you are something like, let's say a dirty diaper, some people might avoid that. Is there anything to do with age and evil?

[B]

Okay, so what do you mean by evil?

[A]

Yeah, exactly.

[B]

What do you mean by the term evil? Like we all have our wonderful moments where we are totally, utterly, unbelievably annoying, right? Like, do babies treat like everything as an object that they miss or something like that? I doubt it. I mean the brain is so social, like so thoroughly social that you know, again, we have others in mind and that that persists. There are times at which subject, subject imagining that can be really, really difficult. Right. With certain kinds of brain injuries and that imagining the viewpoint from another person can be stifled or very, very difficult. So it's a. I don't really have a real answer to the question. Like we'd say, are adolescents really more evil? What are you trying to do with that information? What are you trying to do with that question? What do you hope to accomplish by that?

[A]

Perhaps justifying grounding a child or taking away certain Internet privileges. Right. I have an 11 year old daughter and we have managed to raise her entirely without screens. But a large part of that philosophically is that she's a poodle and that I am simply too lazy to raise human children. Average pie wants to know, why are all the bad guys in kids TV shows evil? What does that teach the kids? And Christine Pikestein said, how can we explain evil to children? We're Jewish and I am dreading this.

[B]

Sorry, I'm going to be a broken record. It depends on what you mean by evil. Right? Like good and evil, the battles between good and evil. And we really do thrive on the conflict. And clean and dirty are always going to be with us, right? Because it's attached to how we think about things. That's just how I think cognition and very often social relations work. So it's always going to be with us. When you can put a narrative behind that and then some visuals behind that, it can be really great. Great storytelling makes use of these things. Like it just, it incorporates these elements. It incorporates like shame or disgust or anger. That sounds fun. So all of these things are mechanisms that we have at our disposal for accomplishing certain kinds of things. And that might be to get more viewers, but it might Be to tell a good story to friends at a bonfire or something.

[A]

I'm wondering if you've ever seen the account Nature is Metal, which is just a lot of really graphic depictions of animals doing unkind things to each other. Megan Lynch, German Sil Celia labont, Kristen Ikuta, Scott Sheldon, Evan Monroe and some random frog want to know, do other animals have concepts like evil? Celia asked, is there a way to measure evil in animals? Thinking about dolphins specifically. And Kristin's daughter Emelia wants to know why certain animals are perceived as evil, like her black cat. So do you think animals ever think about, like, that's a good antelope, that's a bad one, that guy's a dick. Do you think that even comes into their minds?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, yes and no. What do you mean by evil?

[A]

Right, yeah, I know exactly.

[B]

I'll stop it. I'm pretty sure animals have a notion of health and harm to some degree. Maybe not. Like, there's some pretty dumb animals that just get squished pretty easily. Right. Like, I think dangerous aversions register for animals. Sentient creatures of all sorts, I think, have a sense of dangers and they have a sense of things that they avoid and things that they're attracted to. Like it's something that we can infer in animal behavior that they have some sense of healthiness and of maybe toxicity and they have some sense of harm and they have some sense of well being. You know, when we look at studies on play in animals, we see that animals play and learn and that kind of thing, and human beings do the same thing. So there's a massive amount of overlap between, you know, human beings and animals. I wouldn't say there's good and evil in the animal world, but I would say that there's things that animals avoid and, you know, they learn to avoid them. But there's probably also a pretty wide range of instinctual, sort of hardwired, you know, mapping systems which dictate to the mind or the animals how to behave right away almost right from birth. We've got a few of those processes too.

[A]

Well, Stacey Pinkowicz, first time question asker, wants to know, can you speak on the connection between the concept of evil and the role of language? Do you think that it's really just when we have enough words to look into this, we really start to try to classify things almost too much.

[B]

You can never have too much classification, can you?

[A]

That's a good point.

[B]

Yeah. I mean, one of the really exciting things about being an academic is that we're Constantly trying to find new ways of describing the world around us. And sometimes that involves inventing new words and new ways of thinking, thinking about things. Adolescents are great at this. They invent words all the time or they use words in novel ways all the time.

[A]

Skippity toilet, 6, 7 type shit.

[B]

And poetry does this and amazing lyricists do this as well. And these offer us new ways of approaching something. Like if you think about language and color, for example, just to move it outside of the topic of evil, if you don't have the color orange, like the word orange, you're never going to see orange. You see the colors that you have names for because you have no other way of communicating apart from those words, right?

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

And so you see more colors because you've got the language to do that. We are developing new vocabularies all the time to talk about our feelings, to talk about how the world works and that kind of thing. And that's really exciting.

[A]

Jasmine Liu wants to know, do all cultures associate evil with female identifying individuals? Do women tend to get categorized that way for some reason? Or do you find that in your reading and your research?

[B]

Yes, like an almost an unequivocal yes. It's not across the board, but very, very often the feminine coincides with prevalent notions of evil. If you're looking at like dangerous or harmful or not to be trusted or polluted or profane or contagious, very often the feminine is associated with that. And it tends to be fairly cross cultural. It's not universal. I wouldn't say we find this everywhere all the time. We do find exceptions where there are cultures and places that which, you know, women are not viewed as polluted or dangerous. But time and time again, and there's, there's a lot of reasons for this. You know, go to a women and gender studies department and they've, you know, every single person there will be able to, you know, sort of talk about this thing all day long. Like there are so many reasons and so many possible explanations for why this is the case. But it's extremely common, very cross cultural finding, you know, that men are pure and women are impure. And if a woman is menstruating, she's not allowed into the sacred sites and they have to be kept aside. This is just crap. But it's remarkably durable. Randy Warren has an excellent chapter on this in a book called the Guide for the Study of Religion where she talks about all of the different strategies that patriarchs and Indocentric thinkers have used in order to either justify, rationalize or force women into these positions and how their voices have been marginalized and completely ignored.

[A]

So we'll link Willy Braun's guide to the study of religion on our website, which is linked in the show notes. Well, I'm wondering, Katie Murray, and maybe this is also making me think about women being seen as equal, even going back to apples and gardens and stuff. But Katie Murray wants to know, why is evil so often linked with genius? But why is evil linked with genius?

[B]

That's true.

[A]

Yeah, you're right.

[B]

Evil genius. So genius and madness. I think there's an overlap between these two notions.

[A]

At least before we had brain scans and, like, doctors.

[B]

So, you know, and when you have things coming from God, they could also come from the other direction as well, you know, from the devil. And then it could also be madness. When you've got that cauldron all swirling around, it's exciting and it's interesting, and it will attract our attention.

[A]

To call someone an evil genius, well, they're scarier. I suppose if you would have really slapped stick, tired, groggy chess opponent, you'd be like, whatever. But if you had a really sharp chess opponent, they would be so much scarier. And so it's a much bigger threat of outsmarting you. Right.

[B]

And one of the really, you know, fun villains that we have now is. Are villains that are more like machines, right? Because machines are really smart and they have so much powerful calculation and, you know, having a machine inside a human being, that's really scary. Like the Terminator kind of thing.

[A]

Right.

[B]

It's just a very. It's a scary sort of compelling villain in many ways. So, yeah, it's got a lot of. It's got a lot of mileage on it.

[A]

We do have an episode, a recent one on AI and Ethics, which is wonderful, and it addresses the question, will AI kill you? It's a fun one. And it's made entirely by breathing, thinking, eating, crying, shitting humans, which is rare in this day and age. The last questions I always ask are, I guess, do you have a least favorite depiction of evil? Do you have, like a flim flam or something that just really pisses you off about the notion of evil? That makes your job hard?

[B]

Well, you know something, the idea that women are evil looms pretty large. Like, if, you know, I'm in a boardroom and woman talks, and then Alderman Ed pretend that she didn't say anything.

[A]

Flames on the side of my face.

[B]

But, like, in the classroom, it's the devil. Like, it just. The devil just comes Up. Right. It doesn't piss me off. It's sort of expected. But the, the devil is a pretty common sort of go to kind of thing. It's not that it really bothers me, it's just that that's one of the things I really want to get away from. I want to get away from like, you know, God is good and the devil is evil. You know, let's look at dirt. Let's look at the things that you consider to be polluted. Like what are things that you're willing to put in your mouth and what are the things that you're willing to go near? And what are the things that you're not willing to go near? So getting away from that, just really that binary of like, this is good and this is evil. I really like to be able to do that. To look at other ways in which we divide up the world.

[A]

Well, I think that's interesting that the actual harmful concept is the binary is the classification that that's maybe a harm that we should be more aware of.

[B]

Yeah, like, we're always classifying to what use are we putting that schema and who does it serve? Who benefits from this? Is it corporations? Is it my parents? Is it the teachers? Is it students? And that kind of thing? Like, what system does this serve? Is a good question to ask.

[A]

Well, on that note, last question. I usually ask, what's your favorite thing about your job, Kate? Munker Mushroom SCREAMS I want to know who is your favorite villain? What's your favorite evil movie or book? Do you have a villain that you're just like, That's a good one.

[B]

The thing is that I find most interesting is dirt. Like, that's the thing I'm continually drawn to. And dirt defined by Mary Douglas is matter out of place. Place. And like, it's the things that don't fit in. It's the things that defy our categories. It's the things that fall in between the crevices of how we view the world. And Right. And so, you know, Dracula in a sense is dirt, matter out of place. He doesn't belong anywhere, so they try to destroy him. But the other thing is, like, sometimes the dirt is something. It's like, wait a second, I can learn something from that. And so in that sense, you know, it's a villain that isn't very villainous. I find that completely fascinating. I find the permutations on, you know, matter out of place to be never ending. Right. Because we all have limits. We all have a horizon that we can't see beyond. And other people have different horizons. Right. And we can share those horizons. But then at the edges, you know, there'd be monsters. It's, it's dirt. It's the stuff that doesn't fit how we see the world. It's like, oh, red apples, huh? Yeah. Okay, so red and green apples. I can groove to that.

[A]

I'm so appreciative that you can help my brain try to understand your brain when you start to look at something through that different lens and you have more context for the world around you. And, and so, yeah, the work you're doing, I think.

[B]

Thank you.

[A]

I think, is endlessly fascinating.

[B]

Thank you for being here. Thank you.

[A]

So ask critical thinkers confused questions because honestly, without questions there would be no knowledge or thinking. Maybe. So here we are. And thanks for sticking around to get evil with us. And for more on Ken and his work, you can find his book A Critical Primer linked in the show notes and we'll also link to his cause of choice, the Northpoint Douglas Women's Center. Dr. McKendrick, thank you so much for all that you do. You are a gem. We are at Ologies on Bluesky and Instagram. I'm alieward on both. We have shorter kid friendly episodes of Ologies Classics in their own separate fee. They're called smologies S M O L O G I whatever. Something like that. It's linked in the show notes. You can search for that wherever you get podcasts or check the link in the show notes. S M O L O G I E S Long day. Thank you to patrons who submitted so many great questions. You can join them for as little as a dollar a month. Ologies merch is available at ologiesmerch.com thank you to Aaron Talbert for adminning the Ologies podcast. Facebook group Avileen Malik makes our professional transcript. Kelly R. Dwyer works on the website. Noelle Dilworth is our kind scheduling director. Susan Hale is our benevolent but powerful managing director. And the two angels at the editing decks are Jake Chaffee and lead editor Mercedes Maitland of Maitland Audio. Nick Thorburn wrote the theme music and if you stick around until the very end, I give you a little nugget of a secret. This week it's a little behind the scenes. We actually recorded portions of this episode in October 2023 and although it was fascinating, Dr. McKendrick is the best and craz. We have held onto it because so many terrible bummer things were happening in the world and we've been putting out more topical episodes to address them. And I just had a hard time throwing evil at you as well, especially when it wasn't Spooktober. And then a month or so ago we re recorded an updated interview and it all came together beautifully and I think that it hatched at just the right time. So there's some background of how much our guests put into being on the show and how much our editors also put into stitching all the pieces together. So thanks for everyone who made this evil episode a reality. I'm so happy it's finally up and now you can discuss evil amongst yourselves. Okay, bye bye. Pachydermatology Cryptozoology Litology Nanotechnology Meteorology Olfactology Maplology Serology Selenology.

[B]

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