Varieties of Evil

A couple of years ago, in my role as fact-checker, I had to read some of the manifesto of the Buffalo shooter, who’d murdered 10 Black people for being Black. Not many got to do this, as the document was pulled off internet servers soon after the shooting. But I was copyediting and fact-checking an opinion article by geneticists complaining the shooter had misappropriated their work, and so I requested and received from those scientists a copy of the manifesto and confirmed that it did cite their legitimate research, distorted by the shooter. One might think it could be interesting to see the world from the perspective of a murderous fanatic, but this document wasn’t worth reading.

Hannah Arendt wrote about “the banality of evil” after observing the trial of Adolf Eichmann. She was struck by the mediocrity of the bureaucrat who’d played a central role in organizing the Holocaust. Arendt’s insight that massive evil can be propagated by undistinguished functionaries is a valid one, but it reveals only one aspect of the malevolent. The Buffalo shooter, whose name I forgot, is an example of another malign type that’s gained prevalence in our time: the young person (usually male) who doesn’t have much of an in-person social life but finds camaraderie online with some group that espouses a hate-filled ideology and takes a sadistic thrill in violence.

The Washington Post, Wired and other journalistic outlets recently released articles in tandem reporting on the sickening activities of a group called 764 (named for part of a zip code) that preys on children via online platforms, extorting victims into sexual abuse and self-harm including suicide. The coverage emphasizes the group’s sadism, but mostly misses that it has an ideological connection too. According to the Global Network on Extremism & Technology, an academic research initiative, 764 is “adjacent to” the Order of Nine Angles, or O9A, a fascistic movement hostile to Judaism, Christianity, communism, capitalism and democracy, all seen as impediments to Aryan supremacy. O9A sees crimes such as those of 764, as well as Islamic jihadism, as helpful for undermining current social structures. The movement also has affinities for occultism and Satanism.

It shouldn’t be a surprise that people who delight in forcing a girl to carve a name into her thigh or to kill her own pet hamster, say, collaborate with people who think they’re setting up a new civilizational order; nor that in some cases they may be the same people. Varieties of evil tend to work together, including enthusiasts of mayhem alongside reactionaries who want a law-and-order crackdown on a decadent society. Political extremes of left and right often have found common cause, at least for a time, as in the Nazi-Soviet pact. Similarly, O9A are not the first White supremacists to embrace Muslim militants; precedents include Hitler’s agreement with Hajj Amin al-Husayni on keeping Jews out of Palestine.

In an article several years ago, I noted divergent ideological tendencies within the current American right, and suggested these might become politically debilitating: “If one’s determined to force through politics a broad societal embrace of a set of values, one will have to identify at some point what those values are. If they’re a combination of aggressive Christianity and aggressive post- or anti-Christianity, the tension between those can’t be papered over forever.” I’m less sure about that now. It’s possible that people who reject Christianity on Nietzschean or even Satanic grounds, and people who want Christians to seize control of the “Seven Mountains of Societal Influence,” can be allies based on shared antagonism toward liberalism and rationalism, or shared affinities for conspiracy theories.

The founder of the 764 group is a 17-year-old Texan who was recently sentenced to 80 years in prison, an indicator of how grotesque some of the group’s activities have been. Asked how the youth had responded to investigation by law enforcement, a police lieutenant said: “He couldn’t have cared less.”

I’ve long had an interest in supervillains from fiction and fantasy, such as Doctor Doom in Marvel Comics or the Night King from Game of Thrones. In the real world, though, a lot of evil is done by figures that don’t have an impressively malign appearance: a colorless bureaucrat, for example, or a pudgy kid. The challenges of confronting evil include recognizing how deep it can run, and how bland it can look.

—Follow Kenneth Silber on Threads: @kennethsilber