Reading the news, it would seem that the world is filled with senseless harm and destruction, enormously degrading our quality of life. Is this inevitable, or are we living below our potential? Is it human nature for people to take advantage, exploit, abuse, and wreck each other? Is this normal? Is this who we are? Or are there identifiable influences that foster and encourage such behavior, influences that can be modified, reduced, and eliminated? Is it possible to develop a science of good and evil? For over 4,000 years, people have likened evil to a disease, seeing it as a but none thought the analogy to be anything more than a metaphor. What if evil is a disease? What kind of a disease is it? What causes it? How do we stop it, heal from it, and prevent it?

Psychic illness—evil—is an infectious disease caused by metabolizing, reproducing, disease-causing organism transmitted through social behavior. Hijacking the enormous power of culture, culture-based viruses are far more dangerous than biological viruses. They alter our thinking, emotions, beliefs, and behavior, turning them against us, and we are in a pandemic of infectious misbehavior. This disease is spreading. Its problems are intensifying. It has infiltrated our culture, our institutions, our media, and our minds. This is the issue of our age, and if we don’t come to terms with it, it will destroy us.

Culture and psyche are software, and we are programmable. Evil is not baked into our souls. It is a parasite latched onto us that can be starved and shed. When we recognize evil as an infectious disease, we can use the tools of science to combat it. We can diagnose, research, prevent, and treat many of our oldest and worst problems. The disease model allows us to reveal its operations, disrupt its life cycle, and heal using existing, off-the-shelf epidemiological methods, public health strategies, and psychological treatments. Evil is weaker, and we are more powerful, than we ever dreamed.