The Three Faces of Evil: From the Nursery to the Boardroom to the Ballot Box
By Lucy Hutchings Hunt
Evil is a word we don’t often use comfortably anymore. It sounds archaic, religious, even melodramatic. We prefer softer words: toxic, harmful, problematic. Yet there are times when no other word will do - when cruelty or cowardice takes a shape so recognisable that “evil” feels like the only adequate language.
But evil is rarely one thing. It has many faces, and not all of them are obvious.
What fascinates me is not just the scale of evil - the wars, genocides, dictatorships - but its texture in everyday life. Evil is not confined to history books or faraway regimes; it lives in workplaces, families, schools, and parliaments. It is woven into the fabric of ordinary interactions, often disguised as something else.
Over time, I’ve come to see three recurring “faces” of evil: the overt, the covert, and the passive. These are not neat categories of people, but patterns of behaviour. Archetypes that replay themselves across generations. Recognising them doesn’t make us immune, but it gives us language to name what otherwise slips by unnoticed.
1. The overt face of evil: cruelty unmasked
The overt face of evil is perhaps the easiest to identify. It is the boss who humiliates, the bully who thrives on domination, the tyrant whose power is built on fear.
I once worked for such a person. At first, he was charming, magnetic, full of charisma. But as the months wore on, another side appeared: cold, calculating, sadistic. He enjoyed pitting colleagues against one another, pulling strings, watching the fallout. Once you saw it, you couldn’t unsee it. And oddly, that recognition brought relief. He was bad. Full stop. It was terrifying to witness, but also clarifying: there was no need to excuse or explain.
This kind of evil is strangely reassuring in its obviousness. It lets us create distance. We can say: that person is cruel, but we are not. We can mark them as “other,” a bad apple, a rare aberration.
History is filled with overt evil: the despotic leaders, the warlords, the violent criminals. They shock us, but they also simplify our moral universe. The story has a villain. The danger is visible.
And yet - obvious evil is rarely the most dangerous.
2. The covert face of evil: harm in disguise
More insidious, more destabilising, is the evil that wears a mask of virtue.
The covert face does not storm in with cruelty on display. It arrives cloaked in righteousness, pity, or victimhood. It manipulates not through fear, but through care: drawing sympathy, recruiting allies, positioning itself as the wounded party while sowing division behind the scenes.
I think of Magda Goebbels in Hitler’s bunker, 1945. A mother of seven, she gave her children a final supper before forcing cyanide pills between their lips. She could not imagine them living in a world without the Führer. To her, this was loyalty, even love. To history, it was monstrous.
The covert face appears in quieter ways too. The elderly relative who plays favourites and scapegoats, leaving a trail of resentment across generations. The colleague who insists on their victimhood while sabotaging others in whispers. The politician who insists they are protecting “women and children” while scapegoating migrants and ignoring the epidemic of domestic violence in their own country.
What makes this face terrifying is its plausibility. It invites you to care. It frames itself as fragile, principled, persecuted. It feeds off your empathy while having none of its own. By the time you realise the pattern, you may have invested years of loyalty, compassion, or trust.
If overt evil is theatrical, covert evil is parasitic. It drains slowly, invisibly. And when you finally resist, it casts you as the aggressor: Look at how they’ve turned on me after all I’ve suffered.
We underestimate covert evil at our peril. For it is often here, in the shadows, that cruelty does its deepest work.
3. The passive face of evil: the silence that enables
The third face is not flamboyantly cruel, nor manipulative in its righteousness. It is quieter: the shrug, the silence, the “better not to get involved.”
This is the face of passivity. The ordinary men and women who do not set out to harm, but who allow harm to spread by refusing to speak or act.
These are not necessarily bad people. They may be exhausted, insecure, afraid of exclusion. They may simply long to belong, to align themselves with the loudest voice in the room. But passivity, once it reaches critical mass, becomes the foot-soldier of evil.
Think of 1930s Germany, where neighbours turned a blind eye as Jewish families were scapegoated, excluded, deported. Think of Rwanda, where silence and fear allowed genocide to gather momentum. Think, closer to home, of the Brexit years, when scapegoating Eastern Europeans became a political sport. Today, the rhetoric shifts to asylum seekers, blamed for the collapse of the high street—when the real culprits are austerity, Amazon, and an economy transformed by globalisation.
I live in Perth. Our town centre tells the story of social change: empty shops, visible addiction, stretched services. There is also a hotel housing asylum seekers. The young men I’ve met there have been respectful, polite, eager to contribute. Meanwhile, our health and care systems - my own field - struggle desperately for workers since Brexit cut off a vital pipeline of young European carers. Yet the easy scapegoat remains “immigrants.”
Passivity nods along. It mutters agreement in the pub. It shrugs at the scapegoating because speaking up feels uncomfortable. And in that silence, lies harden into truth.
The thread that binds: fear
What unites these three faces is fear.
The overt thrives on the fear it provokes.
The covert hides its own fear beneath masks of virtue or victimhood.
The passive succumbs to the fear of exclusion, confrontation, or change.
Fear is the common currency, and demagogues know how to spend it. Whether Hitler, Mosley, Trump, or Farage, the trick is the same: redirect fear away from the real, complex causes of anxiety and onto a convenient scapegoat. The Jews. The immigrants. The EU. The “others.”
Fear unsettles us. It corrodes nuance. It makes us long for simple stories, simple enemies. And in that longing, we are vulnerable.
Why naming matters
I don’t write this as a manual, nor as a checklist of what to do when confronted by these faces. Each of us must navigate them in our own contexts - sometimes in our families, sometimes at work, sometimes in our politics.
But I believe naming matters. Once we learn to recognise these faces, the spell begins to break. We stop being lulled by charm, or manipulated by victimhood, or numbed by silence. We notice patterns instead of performances. We hear echoes from history in the present moment.
To name the three faces of evil is not to eliminate them, but to resist their normalisation. To say: this is not new, and it is not innocent.
The ‘Generatively Human’ alternative
Evil is not the whole story, of course. It never is. For every overt cruelty, there are acts of courage. For every covert manipulation, there are voices of clarity. For every wave of passivity, there are small refusals, tiny acts of defiance, whispers of solidarity that grow into movements.
The task is not to imagine a world without evil, but to cultivate a humanity that sees clearly, speaks clearly, and refuses to be ruled by fear.
Because the three faces will always recur. But so can ours. We can meet overt cruelty with integrity. We can meet covert manipulation with clarity. We can meet passivity with the courage to speak.
And perhaps that is one of the most positively generative acts left to us: not to set out to abolish evil, but to refuse its scripts, and to keep writing new ones in the name of humanity.
