The Business of Fighting Evil.

Addiction to fighting evil

It is the middle of the night. A firefighter quietly closes the door behind him, drives to the edge of town and pours flammable liquid inside an abandoned warehouse. A few minutes later, a pillar of fire cuts through the darkness. An hour after that, the same man appears in full gear, heroically extinguishing the blaze in front of local television cameras. A hero “fighting evil” that he himself released only moments earlier.

The firefighter-arsonist lives from fire and for fire. When there are too few fires, he creates them himself. In his world, there can be no heroism without catastrophe, and no identity without heroism.

The same mechanism — though in a far more sophisticated form — can now be seen in the world of institutions that claim to “stand guard over the good.” If someone’s business model and moral identity depend on fighting hatred, terrorism or disinformation, evil stops being merely an enemy. It also becomes a resource. The problem, in this case, lies in a market where grants, donations, clicks and votes are sold. The greater the threat, the larger the budgets and the higher the status of those who declare themselves engaged in “fighting evil.”

Cultivating one’s own enemy

Recently, the Southern Poverty Law Center, a foundation long regarded as an iconic organisation monitoring right-wing extremism, was accused of supporting… the Ku Klux Klan. According to federal prosecutors, the foundation allegedly channelled more than 3 million dollars to people associated with the Ku Klux Klan, Aryan Nations and other extremist groups. The FBI and prosecutors allege that instead of “demonstrating effectiveness in dismantling extremism,” the organisation in practice “funded it.” In doing so, they claim, it turned the activity of its enemies into evidence for its own purposes and into media-ready reports for donors.

The foundation did not eliminate evil. According to this accusation, it preserved it. Without a living, dangerous enemy, its business model — grants, donations, media attention — would simply collapse. In this light, a press conference at which the FBI director speaks of a fund “that was meant to eliminate hatred but in reality sponsored it” sounds like a description of a firefighter-arsonist in a suit. Formally, the goal remains the fight against evil. Yet the structure of incentives encourages evil not to disappear too quickly. If it did, the institution’s own reason for existing would disappear with it.

Why do we need an enemy?

Psychologically, this mechanism is deeply human. Carl Gustav Jung warned against the “projection of the shadow” onto others. In his understanding, the shadow is that part of ourselves we do not want to see: aggression, pride, the desire to dominate, contempt. Instead of admitting that these feelings also live in us, we transfer them onto others: onto “racists,” “communists,” “fascists,” “traitors to the nation,” “the woke left” or “the backward masses.”

Jung noted that when we locate all evil on “the other side,” we begin — paradoxically — to do things that strengthen that enemy, unconsciously helping our own adversary. We can see this precisely in the situation of an organisation that lives from “fighting evil”: it needs a strong opponent in order to feel morally grand and necessary. When the enemy weakens, its own identity weakens too. So, consciously or unconsciously, it makes sure the threat never truly disappears.

When fighting evil becomes a business model

At the social level, this psychology merges with hard economics. Modern NGOs, think-tanks, media outlets, parties and foundations operate within a logic in which a highly publicised problem becomes their main source of funding and the justification for their existence. They live from stories about how gravely the world is threatened by climate catastrophe, fascism, racism, “gender ideology,” refugees or global capitalism. The more dramatic the problem, the easier it becomes to secure grants, donations, advertising, subscriptions or polarising headlines.

In such an ecosystem, a real solution to the problem can become unwelcome, because it would amount to institutional suicide. Instead of solving problems, some organisations preserve them in a state of “controlled threat”: dangerous enough to mobilise people, but never sufficiently contained for anyone to say, “our fight against evil has succeeded; we are dissolving ourselves.”

True goodness does not need cameras

Erich Fromm warned that a person can love humanity in the abstract while hating particular human beings. This is what happens when the good becomes an ideology rather than a living relationship with another person. Under those conditions, goodness easily deforms in several ways.

Instrumentalised goodness appears when “the fight for the good” becomes, above all, a tool for acquiring power, money, status or a sense of moral superiority. Simulated goodness is morality for display, where the spectacle of “fighting evil” matters most, because it translates into likes, reach and influence. Cynical simulation, in turn, means consciously “keeping the fire alive” while insisting that one’s only purpose is to put it out.

At the opposite pole stands true goodness — quiet, needing neither an enemy nor cameras. The goodness of St Francis, who disarmed violence with peace, or Mother Teresa, who did not build her model of action on the number of the poor, but simply remained with them — even when no one was watching and no one was paying. This is goodness that does not need to define itself through “fighting evil.” It exists in itself, because it is rooted in truth, not in a script of conflict.

Can we be good without an enemy?

When we devote ourselves to “fighting evil,” we should ask whether our “goodness” is authentic, or whether it is only a reactive pose against an evil we need in order to feel like someone. Can we be good when there is no longer anyone left to fight?

The firefighter-arsonist offers an extreme but remarkably clear image of the artificial threat as a source of identity and income. Without fire, this man would have to face his own emptiness, fear and “shadow.” With fire, he can become a hero — even if, deep down, he knows that the role rests on a lie. In the end, both images — the firefighter with a can of gasoline and the institutions that feed the enemies they denounce — tell us the same story: how easily fighting evil can become an addiction to evil’s continued existence.

Read this article in Polish: Finansowali wroga, by móc go zwalczać. Biznes „walki ze złem”