Kenneth McKendrick

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.

I'm not going to tell you what to do.

But the thing is, evil isn't the only thing we do this.

We do this with basically all of our words.

The terms good and evil have a pretty big resonance across cultures.

Yes and no.

Politically and environmentally, 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.