Book Chat reflection: Recognizing and combating evil

What does it really mean to “combat evil” in daily life? How do we recognize it, resist it, and rally others to stand with us? We have a lot of questions!

Chapters 5 and 6 of The Preparation deal with the idea of young men developing a personal code.

In chapter 6,

Maxim Benjamin Smith

shares his own personal rules of conduct, which include this precept:

“I will not allow evil to continue within my presence, and will combat it as necessary.”

It’s a bold and seriously admirable declaration — and one that invites us to ask hard questions of ourselves and of the world around us. What does it mean, in practice, to recognize evil? How do you combat it when you see it? And what do you do when the scale of it overwhelms an individual’s capacity to respond?

Have a look at some of the questions that came up for us, and join us on the livestream next Thursday at 11am ET to discuss your thoughts on the subject.

How to recognize evil in everyday life

For better or worse, evil rarely shows up wearing horns and carrying a pitchfork. (That would be far easier to deal with!) More often than not, it is clothed in convenience, consensus, small compromises, or bureaucracy, all of which may seem relatively harmless in the moment.

Recognizing evil requires discernment. Don’t just listen to what someone is saying, watch how they behave. Remember: “You will know them by their fruits.” Even if someone looks and sounds polished and sincere, what matters is whether their actions bring harm, deception, corruption, cruelty, or exploitation.

When something shows up as a violation of your own moral code and goes against what you know to be just and true, how do you respond if that action is presented as “normal”? How do you push back on a cultural norm when you know it to be corrosive? Are you willing to put everything on the line to combat it, including the possibility that you might have to give up your livelihood?

How to combat evil — without becoming it

The instinct when facing evil might be to fight fire with fire. But most battles are moral or cultural rather than physical. Combatting evil might look like refusing to give consent, speaking truth even when it’s the most uncomfortable thing to do, or stepping in as a shield for someone who is vulnerable and under attack.

At other times, it might mean building a completely different path — a community, a practice, a way of living — that makes the machinery of evil less relevant and powerful in your life and in your environment.

Still, it begs the question: how do we discern when the wisest response is resistance, subversion, or building something new?

Degrees of evil and the limits of the individual

There are, certainly, degrees of evil. A petty cruelty in daily life may be something you can challenge face to face. But what about when you’re faced with the slow grind of institutionalized corruption or the overwhelming machinery of empire or war? Or worse, mandated evil that requires compliance under penalty of persecution?

We cannot fight all battles in the same way. If limits exist, what does resistance look like when you can’t dismantle the whole structure?

We also cannot fight all battles on our own. Evil thrives in isolation and to battle it, we need to align with others and turn individual weakness into collective strength. Courage is contagious and sometimes even borrowed: one person standing up often gives ten others permission to do the same.

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We know this is a lot of questions — and we apologize. Ultimately, if we are to grapple with the pervasive evil that appears to be expanding daily in this world, we need to take time to answer at least some of these questions.

They’re hard. And not all of them will have clear-cut responses. Nevertheless, in sharing his personal vows in The Preparation, Maxim has presented a challenge to us all.

The next time we encounter evil, will we walk past, muttering that it’s too big, too entrenched, too risky to oppose? The justifications for doing so will be plentiful. Or, will we sharpen our vision, refuse complicity, and fight — however we can, wherever we are, and with whoever will stand with us?

The man often recognized as bringing down the Soviet system, Russian writer and Nobel Prize laureate Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, is often recognized as saying “The battleline between good and evil runs through the heart of every man." So it behooves each of us to starve the evil within, and feed the goodness we need to renew this world.

Join

Susan Harley

of

Courageous Conversations

and

Zahra Sethna

of

Collapse Life

each week for a lively discussion sparked by the ideas laid out in

The Preparation

. We meet on Substack Live every Thursday at 11am ET and you’re invited! You don’t need to read the book to be part of the conversation. See you there!