The 7 levels of Evil

History teaches us an uncomfortable lesson:

you do not get millions of people to participate in atrocities

by letting them think that what they are doing is evil.

People must believe they are doing the right thing

and standing on the right side of history.

Yet, evil does not always work like that.

Some individuals know exactly what they are doing is monstrous,

but their impulses overpower their conscience.

Evil is not a linear ladder you can rank;

it has different motivations, structures,

and psychological faces.

Here are the different manifestations of evil throughout human history.

The First Four Levels of Evil

While the first four levels are simpler to classify,

they highlight how responsibility

and awareness shape moral failure.

• Nonresponsible Evil: This occurs when a terrible event happens, but the person who caused it cannot be held morally responsible due to a lack of conscious agency. For example, a person committing a crime while genuinely sleepwalking.
• Irresponsible Evil: The agent is responsible for the circumstances that produced the harm, even if the harmful act itself was not intentional. A drunk driver who kills a pedestrian did not deliberately choose to kill, but their reckless decision to drink and drive makes them responsible.
• Ignorant Evil: Someone commits an act that is morally wrong but either fails or refuses to recognize its wrongness. The person might genuinely be unaware that what they are doing is deeply harmful or disrespectful.
• Complicit Evil: A person knows that wrongdoing is happening and either participates in it or allows it to happen without intervening. At this point, moral blindness is gone; the person knows better and simply chooses not to act.

Justified Evil

With justified evil, the people committing

the acts believe—however wrongly—that what they are doing

is necessary or even righteous.

A historical example of this is the Nanjing Massacre in 1937.

The violence did not stem from an explicit order to murder civilians;

rather, it emerged from a system where brutality became justified.

Japanese military culture at the time was shaped

by intense nationalism,

a strict hierarchy that normalized violence flowing downward,

and a powerful ideology of superiority.

When soldiers entered a defenseless city exhausted, traumatized,

and angry, group dynamics took over.

Propaganda told them their victims were inferior,

military culture told them obedience was a virtue,

and the chaos of war told them brutality was normal.

When all these forces combine,

people can commit unimaginable atrocities

while believing their actions are right.

Compulsive Evil

Compulsive evil occurs when a perpetrator knows perfectly well

that what they are doing is monstrous,

but they cannot—or will not—control their impulses.

Serial killers often fall into this category.

They hide their actions and commit them in secret precisely

because they understand the moral weight of their behavior.

While horrific, there is often a recognizably

human psychological distortion at play.

Many individuals who commit these acts have deeply

damaged histories involving severe trauma and abuse.

This does not excuse the atrocities,

but it provides a psychological mechanism for understanding

how the conscience is overpowered by impulse.

Meta-Instrumental (Ritualized) Evil

This is arguably the most disturbing psychological structure of evil.

Meta-instrumental evil is when a person deliberately chooses

to participate in an evil act—often in a ritualized manner,

not out of compulsion, ignorance, or a twisted sense of righteousness,

but for the sole purpose of generating kompromat

(compromising material) on themselves and others.

In highly secretive groups, criminal organizations,

or elite networks, trust is paramount.

To truly belong, initiates must perform acts that are

shocking, illegal, or morally grotesque.

These acts function as a form of costly signaling

to prove commitment to the group.

Once completed, everyone involved

has leverage over everyone else.

In this structure:

• The act is deliberate: Participants may be sickened by what they are doing, yet they choose to do it anyway.
• The act requires shared morality: For the kompromat to establish trust, everyone must collectively agree that the act is genuinely evil. If it wasn’t evil, there would be no shared exposure.
• The evil is the glue: The wrongdoing is no longer a side effect of the system or a means to an end; the evil itself becomes the mechanism that holds the system together.

In justified and compulsive evil, the acts grow out of belief,

desperation, or psychological distortion.

But with meta-instrumental evil,

the evil itself is the very foundation of trust.