Is anyone born evil?

People who commit violent crimes are branded by the media as pure evil

The media feeds off the idea that some people are born evil. The creation of monsters sells and, more fundamentally, it obscures the real causes of violence in our society.

The idea of “evil” is amplified by politicians who are terrified of being pilloried by the right wing press for being soft on criminals. It is the alibi which excuses the institutionalised violence inherent in capitalist society and places all the blame on individuals. 

No one is born evil. We are all shaped by the environment we grow up in, our interactions with our families and wider society. 

All those complex interactions take place in the context of a capitalist society. 

Everyone living in a capitalist society exists in conditions of alienation, that distorts and blights all our lives. 

Capitalism takes away our control over the way we work or what we produce.

Our relationships with other human beings are shaped by competition, commodification and oppression. These are not part of our human nature—they arise because of the capitalist way of organising production. 

For some individuals this general lack of control over how we live is intensified by experiences of cruelty, by social isolation and by a sense of failure. Many people who are violent have experienced violence and abuse themselves. 

We grow up surrounded by unattainable dreams of success, of perfect bodies and popularity and competing ideas of what it means to live a good life. We are told we can make it if we are competitive, ruthless, determined. 

Reform UK’s Nigel Farage is exploiting the murders of three girls at Southport last year for political gain. But misogyny is baked into the DNA of the far right. 

Tommy Robinson warns women against becoming “lonely, evil, barren misandrists”. Andrew Tate has made a career out of violence against women.

The hate they spew poisons vulnerable young men. 

Racism, sexism and poverty blight people’s lives and shape how they interact with others. 

Mental distress is still stigmatised, and vital support services are being cut. Desperate cries for help go unanswered. 

The creation of inexplicably evil individuals hides the violence which is part of all our lives. For the last year pictures of dead women and children in Gaza have flooded our social media feeds.

An average of two women a week are murdered in Britain by partners or ex-partners. This violence is normalised. 

The evil we confront everyday is the evil of a system based on the ruthless pursuit of profit and the violence it breeds. 

Frederick Engels, one of the founders of Marxism, wrote over 150 years ago, “Present day society, which breeds hostility between the individual and everyone else, produces a social war of all against all, which inevitably in individual cases assumes a brutal form—crime.”

The horror of the Southport attack demands a response. But demonising a teenager as “evil” will do nothing to stop similar tragedies in the future. 

That would mean funding mental health care. It would mean supporting children who are struggling rather than branding them as failures. It would mean challenging the corrosive racism and sexism trumpeted by the far right. 

Explaining violence is not the same as justifying it. But it does mean calling out the violence endemic to capitalist society.