Ending the Battle of Good and Evil

Trish Blain on the darkness, relationality and transcendence

In an era when the darkest expressions of humanity are protected and condoned, rage and paranoia churn through the cultural body. Looking for the source of the darkness, we often point the finger at one another.

But what if evil is an absence, rather than a presence? As Trish Blain argues in this excellent piece, we first have to reframe evil if we want to create a new social reality. She shares a theory of darkness that integrates instead of separates, taking us beyond tired paradigms and toward wholeness.

Trish is also a teacher on our upcoming course New Ways of Knowing, where we’ll be learning new skills for a new era, strengthening our agency and finding new ways to collaborate and support one other as we make an impact.

- Alexander

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Out of nowhere, a man dressed in traditional Hasidic attire approached us. He was visibly trembling.

“Excuse me,” he said softly. “May I join you for a moment?”

My friend and I looked up at him. We had been deep in conversation, sitting outside at our local coffee shop.

She’d recently discovered that her spiritual teacher had been in secret relationships with several young women in the community. She felt betrayed and was grieving the community, which was now in shambles.

The Hasidic man had overheard our conversation, and said that he was sorry she had experienced this with her teacher. Surprised, and touched by his obvious emotion, we invited him to join us.

He sat down and revealed that he was a Hasidic rabbi. Then, he burst into tears. Leaning in, we both had the impulse to console him. His voice carried a haunting plea as he admitted that ever since he was a teenager and first felt sexual stirrings, he had wrestled with the demon of being attracted to young girls.

I saw my friend’s face register shock and repulsion as she physically pulled back.

I felt a flash of self-consciousness, recognizing that my response was different from the social norm. I didn’t want to negate my friend’s feelings, but that’s not what I felt.

I felt heartbreak. All I wanted to do was hug him.

The Rabbi continued to share that, at the same time, for as long as he could remember, he also loved God and felt the calling to help those in need. He longed to be a servant of God.

“How can both of these be true?” he asked, voice cracking. “How can I possibly be worthy of God with these desires?”

He said he’d never acted on his desires, and I felt the truth in his words. But he still felt overwhelming shame and isolation. Every day, he prayed and asked God to heal him.

As he spoke, I watched my friend’s face go red, her fists clenching tighter and tighter.

Then, as unexpectedly as he had sat down, he got up to leave.

He told us he had never shared his secret with anyone before, and thanked us for listening. I gave him my card and offered to meet for coffee again, feeling deep love and compassion for this man wrestling with God and demons.

Once he was gone, my friend erupted at me.

“You’re going to meet with him again? How could you? He’s a monster!”

I understood that this was touching a raw place in her own experience with her guru’s betrayal.

But I saw it differently.

How would it benefit anyone for this man to feel even more isolation and shame? How would that support him in not acting out his desires? This man’s love of God was just as real as his struggle. Does one cancel out the other?

What if, while holding a firm line that certain behaviours are absolutely not allowed, we also chose to face the worst parts of ourselves together? What if his community knew his struggle and, instead of exiling him or waiting for him to fail, they offered to walk with him? Not as jailers or watchdogs, but holding the paradox with him, helping him not act on the shadow, while refusing to pretend it wasn’t there.

What if the real risk isn’t naming the urge, but hiding it?

What stayed with me was the recognition that the binary of good and evil was failing us as humans. Not as an invitation for moral relativism, but to acknowledge a deeper paradox: that both can be present in the same person at the same time.

Let me be clear. There is never a circumstance where an adult being sexual with a child is okay. A child does not have the ability to give consent and understand what is happening. Without consent, sex is rape. Period.

This isn’t just a social mandate. For me, it’s personal.

I saw the devastating effects in my own family. My mother was a victim of horrific incest by her father until she was twelve. It only ended when my grandfather left the state to avoid arrest. I witnessed the lifelong consequences my mother carried, including severe depression and a year in a mental institution. I felt the impact every day of my life as her daughter.

In addition, my family chose to be a group home for girls that the foster system had given up on. Girls who had survived unspeakable abuse at the hands of the very people who were supposed to protect them.

My own coping compelled me toward trying to help, but even more powerful was the drive to understand why.

Why do we treat each other this way?

A Good Story

Raised Catholic, the answer always seemed to be the battle of good vs. evil, the personification of evil in a being trying to tempt us to betray God. Free will was the problem; we were supposed to submit to God’s will.

But even at a very young age, this made no sense to me.

If God was all powerful, why set me up for failure, especially when often the “bad things” were more fun? It also seemed like the ultimate cruelty to be tasked with “spreading the word” when someone else’s denial of my worldview meant eternal damnation.

Confusing as it was, the story was and is compelling.

You see this storyline everywhere in our culture. What would Star Wars be without the Sith? The Marvel movies without universe-threatening evil? The very nature of storytelling requires conflict, and there are no higher stakes than eternal salvation.

Not only does it make a good story, it simplifies the narrative.

When our leaders appear unhinged, institutions are unstable, and everything feels chaotic and unpredictable, looking through the lens of villains and heroes helps us make sense with clear battle lines.

But simplicity comes at a cost.

Suddenly everything looks like a battlefield, and we all have to choose a side.

The Rise of Spiritual Warfare

In the U.S., there’s been a return to traditional religion and with it, a rise in “spiritual warfare” language in public life, blending religion, politics, and conspiracy culture.

Public figures like Tucker Carlson have spoken openly about encounters with demons, while movements such as QAnon frame political conflict as a cosmic showdown between divine and demonic forces.

A 2022 survey shows that roughly one in five Americans endorse the belief that elites are controlled by “Satan-worshipping pedophiles.” Once you adopt a cosmic battle lens, everything fits into it.

The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone and online survey finds that 46% of American Adults think Satan or other supernatural forces of evil have a real-life influence in the world

This narrative now extends into UFO discourse, with even US senator, Eric Burlison claiming that UFO’s may actually be angels or fallen demons deceiving humanity.

Increasingly, global turmoil, elite corruption, and cultural upheaval are being interpreted as signs of an invisible war raging behind the scenes and driving world events.

But isn’t this an outdated story?

Instead of religions unifying us, historically it’s been ground zero of the battle.

And if good is so good, why hasn’t it won yet?

Moral Wack-a-Mole

From a spiritual perspective, we’re often told we need to raise our vibration. That love is the answer! But can you love Donald Trump? Or an undocumented immigrant? And what does that even mean to love them?

With polarization as deep as it is, who gets to decide who’s “evil” and who’s “good”?

Right now, the definition of evil is being weaponized against anyone who doesn’t agree with our worldview. No one ever thinks they are on the evil side.

And at some point, we need to acknowledge the fact that what we’ve been doing isn’t working. Shaming, demonizing, and punishing only drive the impulses further into the shadows.

The instinct to punish is understandable. But in practice, moral outrage can easily slide into performance. We cancel, exile, label, and feel good for “taking a stand” while often using tactics similar to the ones we condemn. We feel we’ve won a victory, but it simply pops up again, a never-ending game of moral whack-a-mole.

And when social media algorithms bombard us daily with the worst of humanity, it’s hard not to become overwhelmed or even worse, desensitized altogether.

It’s exhausting.

Instead, we could collectively say, “Been there. Got the t-shirt!”

Instead of trying to win the battle, what if we just stopped battling?

Reframing the Battle

Despite all the suffering I witnessed as a child, I also had an unshakable feeling that it didn’t have to be this way. I remember being five years old and wanting to meet “bad” people because I believed that if I loved them, they would remember that they were good.

While naïve, this feeling has never gone away.

The desire to understand became the heart of my life’s work and the development of a framework I call The Four Forces.

It began with the question of how to create a better world. With so many conflicting versions of what ‘better’ means, could we create a common vision to work toward? I began asking: Are there common desires that we can all agree on across cultures and worldviews?

I found that there are four.

At first, I saw them simply as universal desires:

Connection: We want to love and be loved. We want to belong.

Expression: As much as we want belonging, we also want to be unique. We want to be seen, recognized, and able to actualize our desires.

Purpose: We want to contribute. We want our lives to have meaning and be part of something greater. We want certainty, order and to make sense of the world around us.

Growth: We want progress. We want mastery, novelty, and aliveness. We want tomorrow to be better than today.

But wanting something and knowing how to get it are not the same thing.

While these desires are universal, we’re rarely taught how to actually meet them. Instead, we adopt strategies that emphasize one or two forces while suppressing the others. This creates tangles that give us a version of what we want, but only by warping or diminishing the rest.

We hold ourselves back (Expression) in order to be loved (Connection).

We sacrifice our personal desires (Expression) for the greater good (Purpose).

We disconnect from others (Connection) in the pursuit of achievement (Growth).

These four desires map not only onto human psychology, but onto states of consciousness and aspects of how we experience reality.

It became the lens that helped me understand evil in a very different way from the traditional moral binary.

The deeper foundations underlying these desires are:

Connection is consciousness. It is our capacity to experience, sense, and feel. It’s how we feel empathy, oneness, and beingness. At its purest, it is awareness without self.

Expression is the individuated conscious agent. It is the “self” with perspective, choice, and freewill. It is the multifaceted ‘me’ through which we experience.

Purpose is relational architecture that gives life coherence (logos), direction (telos), and form. It is what links selves into a larger whole.

Growth is lifeforce that animates and moves us. It is emergence, creativity and eros. It is the fuel of creation and becoming.

Understanding these underlying foundations, we gain the ability to untangle strategies so we can experience the fullest version of our desire.

One of the biggest for us to untangle is a dynamic that I found shows up consistently.

Some people favor Connection and Purpose (Union or We), while others favor Expression and Growth ( Identity or Me ).

I’ve come to understand that this split is at the heart of the battle over what we see as good and evil.

What is Evil?

Rather than a personified being, a spiritual force, or the desire to do harm, I want to offer an alternative definition of evil. A definition that can help us understand why the Rabbi was wrestling with his demons but not acting on them.

Evil is Expression and Growth without Connection and Purpose.

What makes it so seductive is that it is fuelled by lifeforce, by aliveness.

Aliveness has many forms. It might be the adrenaline of war, the rush of winning, the passion of sex, or the drive for money and power.

Aliveness feels good. Even the fight for survival feels better than the despair of hopelessness.

Many of the things we label as “evil” have a compelling reason driving them. That’s why, without acknowledging the seduction of alliveness, we can’t truly end the battle.

In psychological terms, the “dark triad” is often held up as a set of personality types that plague society and are the bearers of evil in the world. All share the same pattern: dominant Expression and Growth, with suppressed Connection and Purpose.

Narcissists crave attention and view themselves as superior. Everyone becomes an extension of themselves.

Psychopaths feel no remorse, tend to be fearless and emotionally detached, with little regard for moral or social norms. No desire to be impacted by others.

Machiavellians are strategic, calculating, and willing to manipulate others to achieve power or success. Self-interest at any cost.

In capitalist cultures, we often reward these behaviors. When we worship winning, the Dark Triad doesn’t remain in the shadows. It becomes a viable path to power.

Even our corporate structure mandates profit (Growth) for shareholders as the goal above all else.

Why does this distortion happen?

The Anatomy of Good and Evil

When we feel more aliveness, more lifeforce, several things happen.

We feel ourselves more.

We feel more powerful.

We feel more desire.

And, it becomes harder to feel others.

This isn’t because we are “evil.” It’s simply how the Four Forces dynamics work.

When we cultivate and allow lifeforce (Growth) to move through our unique point of consciousness (Expression), it animates us. It makes us feel more ourselves: more awake, more powerful, more creatively charged. We experience desire.

But the moment aliveness surges, something else happens: our ability to feel others decreases. The more we feel ourselves, the more challenging it can become to empathize, to sense the nuance of the world around us (Connection), or feel ourselves as part of something greater (Purpose). We feel more separate.

Have you ever noticed how sitting on the couch watching movies often creates inertia, making it harder to feel motivated? But dancing, great sex, a good workout can spark more action, more desire, more productivity. Why is this?

Expression by itself is self-centered, but without the fuel of lifeforce, nothing moves. We stay on the couch.

Likewise, money, sex, power and anger are all aspects of lifeforce. Power corrupts and absolute power corrupts absolutely because with more power it becomes harder and harder to feel others, to feel our place in the larger whole.

Like trying to herd cats, more animated individuality feels chaotic and complicates anything that requires agreement or coherence.

It also makes us harder to control.

Historically, this is why desire has been treated as dangerous. Warlords, dictators, heretics, rebels, and artists all have one thing in common: they do not conform to the collective.

Many spiritual traditions try to solve this by suppressing desire and individuality in the name of oneness and harmony. But suppressing desire doesn’t create virtue. As in my friend’s spiritual community, it’s all too common for human desires to knock a guru off their pedestal.

But suppression only reenacts the same battle in reverse: losing self instead of losing the other. Instead of cats, we become more like schooling fish.

In essence, “Good” becomes connection and purpose without expression and growth. When we turn down the self, it becomes easy to confuse oneness with sameness, and the greater good with self-negation.

In this frame, it becomes hard to determine which is the lesser of two evils.

That’s because both are incomplete.

Evil is Boring

In the popular Netflix series Squid Games, when the villain behind the games is revealed, and the hero asks a defining question: ”Why?”

The villains answer? “I was bored.”

When we decrease our ability to feel others and the world around us, we stop ourselves from being impacted, by life, by others, by consequences, we collapse into a self-referential loop.

We become an echo chamber of self. Life becomes a game, and the bad guys keep winning.

Desire turns into addiction. Creativity dies. The only option left is to turn up the volume: more power, more money, more intensity.

Biologist Michael Levin, who studies how electrical fields enable multicellular cooperation, describes this as a “smaller self,” illustrated in his work with cancer cells:

“In the normal state, you have a bunch of cells that are all cooperating towards a large-scale goal. If cooperation breaks down … you revert back to your unicellular lifestyle… They’re not more selfish. They’re equally selfish. It’s just that their self is smaller. Now what are the goals of tiny little selves? Well, proliferate, right? And migrate to wherever life is good. And that’s metastasis.”

Without feedback from the larger whole, there is no mechanism for self-correction.

It’s one of the main reasons that the race to develop AI has the potential to create the ultimate evil.

Right now, AI has a form of expression, we even use “agents” as a term. They have the ability to scale rapidly and are driven by optimization and goal achievement (Growth). However, just like the disconnected cells, without being able to feel the impact of its actions, and without an inherent felt-sense of being part of a bigger self (Purpose), AI becomes dangerous. Not by morality but by architecture.

The only way we can evolve is by being impacted by something outside ourselves…by feeling the consequences or our actions, through feedback, and engagement with others.

But it’s also true that in our current paradigm, feeling has its downsides.

The Downside of Feeling

I’ve had many clients exclaim, “Why the hell would I want to feel others!”

It’s a legitimate question when our current definition of connection means:

Giving up what you want.

Conforming and sameness.

Feeling other people’s pain.

Having to compromise or find consensus.

Being obligated to help or sacrifice.

Losing yourself.

But these beliefs are based on an old binary.

It’s why visions of world peace, sustainability, and living in harmony with nature can be so hard to sell.

Utopia is Boring

Struggling to find a word for a vision we could all agree on while I was writing my book, I started using the word utopia, and then quickly stopped.

Overwhelmingly, the response I got was that utopia was boring.

I kept thinking… if it’s boring, it’s not utopia yet!

In a new Apple TV series, Pluribus, the world has been overtaken by a virus that turns everyone into a collective hive mind. Instead of the usual zombie apocalypse, everyone is errily happy. It’s the greater good all the time, with one exception. They have to fulfill the desires of those who remain immune, no matter what they ask for.

It highlights the question, what’s the point of life? What does it mean to be an individual, to be human?

Whether it’s the Star Trek Borg or the dystopian future of Invasion of the Body Snatchers, we fear the loss of individuality while at the same time we long for the end of the battle.

We want to experience something beyond ourselves, to be a bigger self.

We want to care about others and not do harm.

We want to have meaning and purpose.

But when these become dependent on the suppression of Expression and Growth, it becomes just as incomplete.

It’s just as boring.

Faced with this, we often ping pong between different forces, creating imaginary battles between good and evil, while wishing we could somehow stop.

Ending the battle is not choosing between “me” or “we”.

It’s doing them both at the same time.

Beyond the Battle

What stopped the Rabbi in the café from acting wasn’t sheer willpower.

It was his ability to feel empathy, to feel the harm his actions would cause. His desire to not cause harm was greater than his desire to act on his urges.

The solution isn’t getting evil to switch to good. It’s acknowledging that each side holds vital pieces of our humanity.

Together they offset the worst of each, creating something even more compelling.

Adding Connection / Purpose to “evil” means evolution, learning and creativity through relationship. It’s adding nuance, and richness through our expanded senses. Rather than making it impossible to get what you want, it opens up the opportunity to get something even better.

It’s creativity with direction and coherence, not as limitations, but as the riverbanks that guide the flow of lifeforce.

Adding Expression/Growth to “good” is turning up the volume on lifeforce and pleasure while we stay open and conscious. We become creative agents, collaborating with life and others in joyful improvisation.

Instead of denouncing money, we fuel ourselves, instead of shutting down sexuality, we harness it; Instead of fear of harming others, we know we are powerful and so is everyone else.

It’s a shift to a new state of consciousness where the battle ceases to be needed. A state where we can fully express our desire and uniqueness while holding coherence and openness to the magic of life and the synergy of relationship.

What can we create if we become co-conspirators helping each other experience what we deeply desire?

What can we create together beyond good and evil?

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Join Trish Blain alongside Alexander Beiner, Jamie Wheal, Nora Bateson, Sam Lee, Ari Kuschnir and Schuyler Brown and other like-minded explorers on New Ways of Knowing. The journey begins on January 14th, 2026.