Evil
Overthink
Ellie Anderson, Ph.D. and David Peña-Guzmán, Ph.D.
4.7 • 549 Ratings
🗓️ 31 March 2026
⏱️ 56 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Are some people born evil, or are we all capable of evil acts? In episode 167 of Overthink, Ellie and David talk about all things evil. They think through the characterization of evil in Disney films, Leibniz’s best of all possible worlds theory, the conflation of evil with badness, and Hannah Arendt’s concept of the banality of evil. How does Manichaeism attempt to resolve the problem of evil? Is evil simply the lack of good in the world? And does the concept of evil still have relevance in an age of secular ethics or is the concept too weighed down by its own theological past? In the Substack bonus segment, your hosts discuss evil people and how we might categorize them.
Works Discussed:
Hannah Arendt, Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil
Hannah Arendt, “Nightmare and Flight”
Hannah Arendt, The Origins of Totalitarianism
Paul Formosa, “The Problems with Evil”
Paul Formosa, “A Conception of Evil”
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz, Theodicy
Gavin Rae, Evil in the Western Philosophical Tradition
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Overthink. |
| 0:19.2 | The podcast, where things are not always beyond good and evil. |
| 0:24.4 | I'm Ellie Anderson. |
| 0:25.9 | And I'm David Pena Guzman. |
| 0:27.5 | As always, for an extended version of this episode, community discussion, and a lot more, |
| 0:32.6 | subscribe to Overthink on Substack. |
| 0:35.8 | Today, we're going to be talking about the heavy topic of evil. But before we |
| 0:42.9 | get into the heaviness of it, David, I have a question for you. As children, we usually encounter |
| 0:48.6 | evil first through villains in our favorite movies, TV shows, other forms of media. Do you have any |
| 0:55.7 | favorite villains or a villainous character that stuck out to you from when you were a kid? |
| 1:01.0 | Yes. So obviously there are the villains from Disney movies, but being a Mexican child, |
| 1:06.7 | my model of villain that I grew up adoring actually came from telenovelas. |
| 1:11.6 | And there is no greater villain in the history of Mexican TV than Soraya Montenegro, |
| 1:18.6 | who was this like evil brunette, who was always going after the good, beautiful protagonist, |
| 1:25.1 | going so far as to try to murder her, murder her family. |
| 1:29.5 | And even though it was a telenovela for adults, it actually played on a lot of the |
| 1:33.3 | tropes of the villain from Disney movies. |
| 1:36.3 | She went so far as to use black magic and was revealed at the end of the telenovela |
| 1:41.6 | to be the daughter of a witch. |
| 1:43.5 | And so, yeah, I grew up |
| 1:45.9 | kind of loving her more than the protagonist like many other people in Latin America did who |
| 1:51.4 | watched that telenovela. So that's your villain origin story. You identified with the villain. |
... |
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