by ButterflyEffect

If we are to believe in evil—evil as a substance, as nonhuman dark matter that sometimes comes to rest in human bodies, as something as intangible yet identifiable as a soul—then what happens when the person who possesses it dies? The people who clustered outside Florida State Prison on the morning of Bundy’s execution seemed to believe that it would simply dissipate, and would perhaps descend to hell just as a soul ascends to heaven. Yet this is a fiction that perpetuates the same blind spot that allowed Bundy to seem above suspicion for so long. If “evil” is an unknown quantity, a supernatural presence in an otherwise normal human body, then we will fail to suspect the seemingly normal humans surrounding us—let alone a handsome, successful, intelligent young man—of harboring “evil” impulses. Bundy, unable to acknowledge the enormity of his crimes until it was clear that doing so was his only hope at survival, comforted himself with the same fiction by describing “the entity” and “the personality”—two separate beings coexisting within the same body. But there was no entity. There was no pure evil or “special kind of malevolence.” Bundy wasn’t possessed, nor was he a larger-than-life monster. Though psychologically atypical, he was in all other ways a normal, flesh-and-blood member of the human race, and his death was the same as anyone else’s. No great evil departed the world at the moment he died. No one was safer. No one’s life was measurably improved. The human capacity for evil actions remained unaltered: greater in some, but present in every man, woman, and child on earth.