Darkness is not the same as evil

A hurricane can’t be evil, nor can the universe

Darkness is the opposite of light, but it is more than an absence. Darkness is a force in our universe. It causes distress and pain. It destroys all, eventually. Even so, darkness is not the same as evil. Darkness is a part of life and a part of you.

To be precise, darkness is the realm that’s unreached by knowledge, structure, and harmony. Where confusion, struggle, and conflict happen. This is also known as chaos. The word may evoke “pandemonium” but it comes from old Greek meaning “vast, formless void.” It’s closer to the atonal warmup of the strings in the orchestra, than the clatter of a knocked over drum.

Chaos is distinguished from order, the climb of every plant toward sunlight. It is the civilizations-long process of sensemaking the Earth. All the meta we make to sustain human activity. Order is challenged by chaos. Humans need only imagine chaos and we run to our fires, wielding the light like a sword. We arm ourselves with structure, process, laws, little doorbell cameras, passive-aggressive notes, guns, facts, and meta and thrust it into the darkness and call it evil.

But it isn’t evil. It is merely the opposite of order.

When you confuse darkness for evil, you ascribe malice to the dark energy upon which the entire universe floats. A hurricane can’t be evil, nor can the universe. When you slander the universe, you recast the troughs of an infinite wave into a being with intention, and worse, you name Her as the problem. (But the problem cannot be other people.)

All people, even you, contain darkness. If we did not contain darkness, we could not understand any stories with an antagonist. Nor could we understand jokes, each one a twist of chaos and order together in a candy wrapper. Without darkness, we would not feel the friction required for growth or change. Without darkness, we would not know the meaning of the light.

Darkness is chaos, mother of the earth. Order is light, our daddy in the sky. Like night and day, they alternate in their domains. But they meet every day, at twilight and dusk. They may be adversaries, but they must also share the sky.