Why Evil Seems To Win (& What To Do About It) | (#062) Beyond Success: Psychology & Philosophy for Achievers, with David Tian, Ph.D.

There are moments in our history and in our own lives when goodness feels almost foolish, when the world seems to reward the liar or the tyrant, or the one who inflicts suffering and then smiles for the cameras. You see it in boardrooms and battlefields, in political chambers and private bedrooms—the ones who cheat, exploit or destroy, often walk away, not just unpunished, but celebrated. It’s enough to make you want to harden your heart, to stop caring, to fight cruelty with your own kind of cruelty. But that’s how corruption spreads quietly, contagiously, until good people start acting like the very monsters they once despised. [00:55.4]

So, the question isn’t just how to stay good in a bad world. It’s whether it’s even possible when the cost of compassion can look like defeat and justice feels like a fairy tale for children, because what do you do when you’re surrounded by people who would sell the truth for applause, when the system itself rewards deception, when cruelty becomes a strategy?

In those moments, the temptation to close your heart can feel like strength, but it’s not. That’s when you need the hardest balance there is: heart open, but eyes sharp—to see clearly without becoming cynical or giving into hopelessness, to protect yourself and your loved ones without becoming like the other side yourself, to champion humanity when the world forgets what that means. That is to become hawkish doves or dovish hawks.

I’m David Tian, a Brown University–certified leadership and performance coach, and a certified IFS therapy practitioner. In my former life, I was a university professor of philosophy and a celebrity dating coach. Now I’ve been helping hundreds of thousands of people from over 87 countries find fulfillment, meaning and success in their personal and professional lives. [02:01.1]

Let’s start with a warning. The instinct to call bad people monsters feels righteous. It gives us a sense of moral clarity, a clean line between good and evil, but the moment you label someone pure evil, you stop trying to understand them, and that’s the moment you lose power over them, because evil isn’t like a species. It’s a pattern. It’s fear, shame and desire twisted so tightly that it explodes outward as cruelty.

Genocide doesn’t start with demons. It starts with ordinary people convincing themselves that their violence is justified. The corrupt politician believes he’s protecting order. The abuser thinks he’s teaching someone a lesson. If you see them as inhuman, you blind yourself to how they were made and how you could change or control them, and how you might become like them under pressure. [02:50.0]

Understanding doesn’t excuse. It arms you. It shows you what drives their cruelty, where their leverage lies, and how to meet darkness without feeding it—and that’s the hard truth most people can’t stomach, because it’s easier to hate than to understand. That’s the paradox. The more we rush to divide the world into good guys and bad guys, the more blind we become to how evil actually works.

One of the most cited psychologists ever, Professor Roy Baumeister, spent decades studying cruelty from schoolyard bullies to genocidal regimes, and he found something shocking. Almost no one who does evil thinks they’re the villain. The Nazis didn’t wake up believing they were serving evil. Slave traders thought they were building civilization. The people who ran Epstein’s network told themselves they were powerful and privileged, not depraved. Everyone imagines themselves the hero of their own story.

Roy Baumeister called it the myth of pure evil. It’s the story we tell ourselves to make sense of horror, because if the perpetrators are inhuman, then it’s not complicated. If they’re monsters, we don’t have to see how ordinary their beginnings were, how much they were once like us, but the truth is harder. [04:03.8]

The truth is evil isn’t a foreign virus that infects the few. It’s a human capacity that lives in all of us, waiting for the right mix of fear, humiliation and justification to awaken it. Look anywhere, genocide, apartheid, corporate exploitation that starves entire regions while shareholders toast to record profits, or the police officer who kneels on a man’s neck while believing that he’s upholding law and order and staving off chaos. In their minds, they’re not committing atrocities. They’re restoring balance, defending order, doing what must be done. That’s the really terrifying part. Most Evil is done by people who think they’re in the right.

C. S. Lewis once said that evil isn’t the opposite of good. It’s good bent out of shape like a protector turned paranoid, a desire for order turned tyrannical, a hunger for love twisted into domination. That’s what makes it so terrifying. Evil is not another whole species. It’s what happens when human instincts like justice, loyalty, power, and belonging go blind, when the parts of us that were meant to defend become the parts that destroy. [05:10.5]

What happens to our sense of justice if we stop believing in the myth of pure evil? Does compassion dilute accountability? Does empathy weaken our resolve to fight back? That’s the tension we have to live in. Understanding isn’t forgiveness. It’s the only way to see clearly enough to act wisely.

When you stop calling people evil, you don’t let them off the hook. You take them off the pedestal of myth, and instead, put them back into the realm of psychology, history and choice. You make them human again, which means you can study them, anticipate them, and defend against them, because justice without understanding becomes vengeance, and vengeance without understanding just breeds more of what we hate.

So, the real question isn’t whether evil exists, it’s whether you’re brave enough to face the parts of ourselves that could, under the right pressure, commit it? Because most cruelty doesn’t come from people who wake up wanting to destroy the world. It comes from people trying, clumsily, desperately, to protect themselves from pain. [06:12.0]

Dr. Richard Schwartz, the founder of IFS therapy, Internal Family Systems therapy, calls these “protectors.” These are parts of us that were wounded long ago and decided that the only way to stay safe was to fight or hide, manipulate, dominate, whatever it took to never feel that helpless again. Even wrath or pride or greed started as survival strategies. The dictator’s hunger for control may have begun as a child’s terror of chaos, the liar’s charm as a shield against rejection, or the cheater’s arrogance as an armor over shame.

The Joker movie, the 2019 film, isn’t born a villain as a joker. He’s built. You watch him get beaten, humiliated, discarded by every system meant to protect him, and his laughter, his madness, isn’t evil. It’s armor, a grotesque defense against unbearable pain. His rage isn’t pure malice. It’s the only language he has left to say, “I exist.” [07:08.6]

The same psychology plays out closer to home. The narcissistic ex who cheats and gaslights isn’t a master manipulator in some stylish, simplistic Bond movie. They’re a terrified child in an adult’s body, terrified of being abandoned again. They lie, seduce and destroy to prove that they’re not worthless. It doesn’t make their betrayal less real, but it does make it more comprehensible.

C. S. Lewis once wrote, “The tragedy of vice is not that it is powerful, but that it aims too low.” Every vice began as a misplaced virtue, Courage without conscience becomes cruelty. Love without self-respect becomes neediness. Desire without empathy becomes exploitation. In other words, most assholes aren’t plotting evil. They’re run by fear. They’re ruled by pain that they have never faced fully—and here’s perhaps the most uncomfortable part: that same machinery lives in us, too. [08:02.1]

Under the right conditions or pressure, the same wounds can twist our love into rage, our ambition into domination. Seeing that does not excuse anyone. It keeps us honest, because once you realize that cruelty is often a form of self-protection, you start to understand what true strength looks like, not the armor of arrogance or revenge, but the courage to face your own wounded parts before they turn you into the very thing you despise. That’s where moral wisdom is found, with compassion that’s not naive, and awareness that’s not cynical.

So, what usually happens when good people get burned? It generally starts the same way. You trust. You extend empathy, maybe even forgiveness. You believe people mean well if you just give them enough time or understanding, and then one day, they use that trust against you. They lie, exploit and betray, and when you call it out, somehow you become the problem. That’s when the bottom drops out on you. [09:03.7]

First comes disbelief, then the disillusionment, and if you’re not careful, bitterness moves in and sets up camp. It whispers that only suckers play fair, that only fools show kindness, that the world belongs to the ruthless, and this is where the pure dove dies, because in a world that’s full of hawks, the doves don’t inherit the earth. They get eaten.

Game theory makes this brutally clear. If everyone plays nice, the first cheater dominates, but if everyone cheats, then everyone loses. But if you’re surrounded by people willing to exploit, staying purely gentle is not moral. It’s suicidal. History proves it.

The colonial empires justified conquest in the name of civilization, exploiting entire countries that could barely fight back. The result is that generations of trauma are dressed up as progress. In today’s world, the same dynamics repeat, just with better PR. Corporations strip mine countries for profit. Politicians twist truth into policy and society calls it strategy. [10:10.4]

You see it in offices, too. The colleague who takes credit for your work gets promoted while you stay quiet to keep the peace, or in relationships where the one who cares less, controls more. All is fair in love and war, they say. These are the words that someone who is already cheating would say to themselves.

When the world rewards aggression, kindness starts to look like weakness, and when you’ve been betrayed enough times, it’s easy to believe that the only way to survive is to become cruel yourself—but that’s the trap. The moment you trade compassion for cynicism, you’ve already lost. Evil has won, because cruelty is not courage. It’s giving in. Still, pretending everyone’s good is not wisdom either. In a jungle full of predators, naiveté gets you killed. So, what’s the answer? [10:59.2]

Sometimes success comes with a hidden cost. You might have built a career, a business, or life you thought you wanted, but inside, maybe you feel burned out or unfulfilled. Or maybe it shows up in your relationships with your partner, your family or your team, where no matter how hard you try, the same painful patterns keep repeating.

If this resonates, I’ve got something you might be interested in. It’s a free 2-minute assessment that helps you uncover the No.1 block that’s been holding you back in love, in leadership or in life—and once you take it, you’ll get a masterclass tailored specifically to your results so you’ll know exactly where to focus to move forward!

It’s quick, it’s practical, and it can change the way you see yourself and your path ahead. Take the first step right now at DTPhD.com/quiz. That’s “dtphd.com/quiz.”

If being too kind makes you prey, what do you do? Do you turn into a predator or is there a better way to be both gentle and strong, compassionate and cunning? That’s the tension, and that’s what we’re going to explore next, how to become what I call a hawkish dove, wise enough to see through the dark, but never lose your heart to it. [12:17.8]

So, if being too kind makes you prey, do you turn into a predator? That’s the moral riddle that we’re looking at, and it’s not just about personal relationships or politics. It’s about survival in a world that punishes innocence and rewards aggression. Yet history shows that becoming a predator only leads to mutual destruction.

So, what is the solution? Game theory offers a clue. In the classic hawk-dove game theory model, there are two basic strategies for conflict. Hawks fight and doves retreat. When a hawk meets a dove, the hawk wins every time. When a dove meets a dove, they share and coexist peacefully, but when a hawk meets a hawk, they tear each other apart and both suffer. [13:00.0]

The math tells a simple story. In a world of pure doves, hawks rise fast, but when the hawks take over, their infighting collapses the system and everyone suffers. There’s no sustainable peace, only alternating cycles of exploitation and collapse.

Now, the first instinct might be to say, “Fine, I’ll be a hawk, but a smarter one,” but that’s still playing the same destructive game. The real solution comes from something called “generous tit for tat,” a strategy that emerged from Robert Axelrod’s famous simulated tournaments on cooperation.

Here’s how it works. You start by cooperating. You open with peace, but if the other side attacks, you retaliate once, just once, to show that you won’t be exploited. Then you go reopen with cooperation, giving them a chance to reset, but if they continue to betray, you keep mirroring their actions and retaliate. But if they ever return to cooperation, so do you, immediately. [13:57.0]

This is firm but forgiving. It punishes betrayal, but never becomes vengeful. It remembers kindness, not just harm, and this is how civilizations can survive without collapsing into cynicism. It’s how peace can hold, how communities can rebuild after genocide, how trust fragile as glass can be restored after it’s shattered.

Philosophically, this flips the old idea of morality on its head. Morality is not blind virtue. Instead, it’s adaptive intelligence. It’s the wisdom to know when to draw the sword and when to sheath it. It’s strategy guided by conscience, because kindness without boundaries is self-betrayal.

Compassion doesn’t mean letting people walk all over you. It means seeing clearly enough to know who deserves your softness and who deserves your distance, and this is where wisdom lives, in the fusion of strength and compassion, because being purely kind is not enough. Pure kindness without discernment gets devoured. But strength without compassion also destroys your own happiness and fulfillment from within. [15:07.0]

There’s an old line from the Gospel of Matthew in the Bible that captures this paradox perfectly. It’s “Be wise as serpents and gentle as doves.” On the surface, that sounds poetic, but psychologically, it’s one of the most profound insights into human moral development. The serpent represents cunning, discernment, the ability to see through deceit. The dove represents innocence, trust and peace. The call is not to choose between them, but to integrate them both. This isn’t about becoming half good and half ruthless. It’s about evolving beyond that split entirely.

In internal family systems therapy, after parts let go of their traumatic burdens, the protector parts, the hawks, no longer need to be hypervigilant or cruel. They become healthy guardians. They still protect, but now from a place of purpose and clarity and courage. The previously exiled wounded parts, the doves, can finally feel safe and rest and reconnect to the world and with others through love, curiosity and creativity. [16:13.6]

In that state, the Self leads, the True Self. The True Self embodies both the hawk and the dove, fierce when needed, gentle by nature. That’s what integration looks like and this integration is not abstract. You see it in the greatest moral leaders, the ones who refuse to choose between truth and love.

Nelson Mandela who forgave his oppressors without excusing them, Gandhi who stood firm against an empire without raising a sword, Martin Luther King, Jr., who called out injustice with courage, but still spoke of love for the oppressor soul. None of them were naive. They saw the darkness up close, yet chose to stay fully human anyway. [16:53.4]

C. S. Lewis once wrote that courage is not the absence of fear, but the form of every virtue at its testing point. True courage is disciplined love, being able to stay open-hearted while you stand your ground. That’s the essence of being wise as serpents and gentle as doves, to see clearly without becoming cynical, to protect fiercely, without losing compassion, to fight for good, without becoming consumed by hatred, because if you fight monsters long enough, as Nietzsche warned, you risk becoming one.

The only safeguard is consciousness. It’s staying aware, staying fully connected, staying led by the part of you or the core of you that’s higher and bigger than fear or vengeance. That’s what this world needs most now, not more hawks, not more doves, but people who can hold both energies in harmony.

But there’s a danger even in becoming a hawkish dove, because the line between protector and persecutor can blur faster than we’d like to admit. A people long-oppressed can become oppressors themselves when trauma runs the show. You see it throughout history, a nation brutalized for generations finally gains power, and in its unhealed pain, it uses that power to inflict onto others what was once inflicted on itself. [18:13.8]

When your protector loses touch with compassion, you become the villain that you once feared. The same dynamic unfolds inside individuals. The person betrayed in love can become obsessed with never being hurt again, but by doing so, they start hurting others first. The cheated-on lover who vows “never again” may join the chorus of cynics and grifters teaching others that vulnerability is weakness, that domination is safety, that empathy is for losers. That’s the emotional logic that fuels much of the modern manosphere and red pill and incels, the wounded, immature protector trying to armor itself against intimacy. Underneath the bravado is fear and pain. [18:55.5]

The same thing happens to the idealist who once believed in goodness, but after too many betrayals, start seeing corruption everywhere. Every politician is a liar. Every cause is a scam. Every person is self-centered and selfish and will get you, and their clarity curdles into contempt. What began as moral sensitivity ends up becoming moral blindness.

That’s what happens when we mistake trauma for wisdom. We confuse vigilance for insight. We build a moral framework out of fear, and it always ends up turning against us, because moral injury, when it’s left unexamined, metastasizes into moral blindness. The pain of being wronged becomes the lens through which you see the world. It narrows your empathy, not just for others, but for yourself. You start believing that being ruthless is the only way to stay safe—and the greater tragedy is this actually works for a while, and then revenge feels like strength and detachment feels like control, but over time, it hollows you out. The protector becomes a tyrant, the shield becomes a prison. [19:59.3]

This is why healing is not optional. It’s strategic. Psychotherapy, IFS work, trauma processing, these aren’t indulgences for the soft-hearted. They’re the only way to keep your strength from turning into cruelty—so, the challenge isn’t just to fight evil in the world. It’s to make sure that in fighting it, you don’t let it take root in you.

So, how do we actually live this way, heart open, but eyes sharp? How do we do this when the world keeps giving us reasons to close both? It starts with wisdom in action, not just what to believe, but how to be. Okay, I’ll give you some practical steps.

Step 1: discern motive from behavior. Understanding someone’s motive doesn’t mean excusing their actions. It means seeing the architecture of their behavior clearly enough to respond intelligently instead of just being triggered and lashing out emotionally. The abuser who harms out of fear is still responsible for their harm, but if you understand the fear driving them, you won’t get pulled into reacting from your own fear. [21:02.1]

I’ll give you an example. One of my clients, he’s a co-founder, he came to me shattered after discovering that his business partner had siphoned off the company funds and manipulated contracts for years. His first impulse was revenge, vengeance, expose him and ruin him, scorch the earth, but underneath that rage was actually humiliation. He’s asking himself, “How did I not see it? How could I have been so trusting?”

When he could finally see the betrayal, not as proof of his stupidity, but as evidence of that partner’s fear and greed driven by his deep insecurity, he stopped reacting like prey, and instead was able to act strategically, understanding the motive, freedom from being defined by the betrayal.

Okay, Step 2: set clean boundaries. Clarity is not cruelty. A clean no said calmly is kinder than a resentful yes. Forgiveness without boundaries is just permission for someone to hurt you again. So, that same client eventually confronted his former partner, but he was able to do it without malice. He froze the accounts, filed the reports, and then walked away, no shouting, no revenge fantasies, just clean, firm action. He told me later, “For the first time, I felt powerful without being angry.” [22:14.3]

Okay, Step 3: stay curious. Every enemy is an unwilling teacher. They show you what happens when certain fears or desires run unchecked. They also expose your own unhealed parts, the ones that got hooked. When someone betrays you, ask, “Why did that hit me so hard?” Was it just the loss or did it reopen an older, unexamined, unhealed wound, maybe from childhood, maybe from another relationship? Curiosity keeps you from turning bitterness into an identity.

Step 4: ground in compassion. Compassion is not softness. It’s strength under control. Forgive internally even if you never reconcile externally, not because they deserve it, but because resentment is just poison. It eats away at your moral compass and your contentment until you start mirroring the behavior you despised. [23:05.5]

When that client reached the point of forgiveness, it wasn’t sentimental. He didn’t excuse the theft, but he could finally see the thief as an insecure, wounded little boy acting out, a man ruled by scarcity and shame, and in that seeing, his own heart unshackled itself from hate.

Okay, Step 5: act from conscious awareness, not compulsion. Reacting immediately is easy. It’s the nervous system’s default. Responding from conscious awareness takes courage. It requires you to pause, breathe deeply, and choose a proportional response, rather than a revenge fantasy. Justice is not the same as retaliation. Sometimes justice looks like a courtroom. Sometimes it looks like silence. Sometimes it’s just refusing to let someone else’s darkness dictate your future. [23:54.0]

In that same case, the client chose not to try to destroy his partner’s reputation publicly, though he easily could have. Instead, he let the evidence speak for itself and allowed the legal process to unfold. This wasn’t weakness. It was rising above the dirt. He didn’t need to win the moral theater. He’d already won the inner one, and that’s what it means to live, heart open, but eyes sharp, to discern without excusing, to protect without dehumanizing, to forgive without forgetting, to fight without hatred, because the ultimate tragedy is to unwittingly become the very thing that did you in in the first place, thus enabling evil to win in the end by consuming you.

So much of what we call evil is just pain, unexamined, unhealed and unleashed on others. We have seen how it works, the myth of pure evil blinds us to the humanity in our enemies and the wounded protector turns cruelty into armor. We have seen how the hawk-dove game plays out, how the naive get devoured and the ruthless destroy themselves, and we’ve seen that the only sustainable way forward is neither blind kindness nor hardened cynicism, but, in fact, the integration of both—strength guided by compassion, compassion strengthened by clarity. [25:13.3]

The wise don’t divide the world into saints and sinners. They see wounded doves in hawk’s clothing, people whose goodness was never lost, only buried. They know the real battlefield isn’t out there, but first and foremost, inside. The true struggle isn’t between good and evil people, but between the parts of each of us that cling desperately to protection, and the parts that are still starving for connection and love.

C. S. Lewis once wrote that the heart’s greatest war is the one to stay soft without breaking, to stay brave without turning cold. That’s the lifelong work of a good life, not to conquer evil, but to integrate what evil has taught us. [25:56.0]

So, don’t harden your heart in the face of cruelty, and don’t close your eyes to it either. See it clearly, respond firmly, but stay centered in compassion, not vengeance. That is the true mark of maturity, not the absence of anger, but the refusal to let anger dictate your path—and in the end, the task is simple, but never easy. Remember, heart open, but eyes sharp.Stay open to compassion, but with clarity, courage and confidence, not defenselessness, not detached, but aware. That’s how you stay good in a world that rewards the bad. That’s how you protect what’s sacred without becoming what you hate. [26:36.5]