Eradicating Evil from the World with Storytelling

Evil begins when stories go untold. Jung was right: unspoken pain becomes violence. Storytelling isn’t art—it’s repair. Truth told in time can stop harm.

Humans are simple. We’re built to say what we feel.

Not just talk. Not just express ourselves in vague, polite gestures. We’re built to tell. To tell what happened, what hurt, what mattered, what shaped us. If you block that—even subtly—if you tell someone their story is too messy, too inconvenient, too much, the result isn’t silence. It’s distortion. What doesn’t come out straight comes out crooked.

Carl Jung said it plainly: “The reason for evil in the world is that people are not able to tell their stories.”

He wasn’t being poetic. He was giving a psychological diagnosis. Evil doesn’t arise because people are innately bad. It arises because they’re unintegrated—split off from parts of themselves they weren’t allowed to name. Repressed experience doesn’t disappear. It waits. And the longer it waits, the more warped it becomes.

Jung saw evil not as an external force but as something that grows when the unconscious is neglected. What we refuse to face—our shame, our grief, our anger—gets buried. Jung called this the Shadow. And the more we pretend it’s not there, the more control it exerts over us. Eventually, we don’t act out our will—we act out our damage.

And the scary part? We don’t even realize it. That’s the nature of projection: we blame others for what’s unresolved in ourselves. We externalize what we can’t accept. The cruel boss who despises “laziness” is running from his own sense of inadequacy. The demagogue who screams about enemies is just broadcasting the war inside his own psyche. This is how wars start—not just between countries, but between neighbors, between lovers, between parent and child. First, the story gets suppressed. Then, it metastasizes.

But Jung didn’t just name the problem—he pointed to the solution. If evil grows in silence, the cure is speech. If the Shadow gets dangerous when ignored, it becomes human when understood. And the only way to understand it is through storytelling.

That’s what active imagination was for—a method Jung developed where you have a literal conversation with your unconscious. Not abstract talk, but vivid, specific scenes. You write. You draw. You let the images speak. It’s not analysis—it’s encounter. You let the hidden part of you come forward, and you answer it. You don’t edit. You don’t argue. You listen.

The point isn’t just catharsis. The point is integration—to bring the cast-out parts of yourself into the light. That’s what Jung meant by individuation: not becoming perfect, but becoming whole.

We see this in narrative therapy too, though it uses different tools. Someone arrives broken by a story they didn’t choose. “I’m a failure.” “I’m unlovable.” “I’m dangerous.” The therapist doesn’t fight the belief—they help reframe it. “Where did that idea come from?” “What happened to you that made this make sense?” Slowly, the person isn’t just surviving their life—they’re shaping it. The same past becomes a different future.

And it works. We’ve seen it work—in therapy rooms, in reconciliation commissions, in books and films that make millions of people cry at the same scene. Why? Because when someone tells the truth—really tells it—we all recognize ourselves in it. We all feel a piece of our own Shadow getting lighter.

But the work can’t stop at the personal level. Jung was clear: the Shadow isn’t just individual. There’s a collective shadow too—made of everything a society refuses to acknowledge about itself.

You see this in nations that bury their past. In cultures that deny wrongdoing and call it pride. In communities that shun anyone who reminds them of what they’d rather forget. And like the personal Shadow, the collective one doesn’t go away. It erupts—through war, systemic oppression, political extremism. The mechanism is the same: silence → distortion → violence.

That’s why storytelling isn’t just therapy. It’s justice. It’s politics. It’s infrastructure.

Look at South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission. It wasn’t perfect. But it got something fundamentally right: if you want peace, you start by listening. People didn’t need vengeance. They needed to be heard. They needed their suffering named, not erased. That act of telling—not arguing, not defending, just telling—let the poison bleed out before it became something worse.

Or take the rise of platforms like Humans of New York, where people tell their stories in raw, unfiltered language. There’s no grand theory. No ideology. Just fragments of real lives. And people read them like scripture. Why? Because they remind us of what’s true: that behind every person, there’s a struggle. A context. A cause. Evil becomes harder when you’re reminded how much people are carrying.

This is why every time we teach someone that their story is “too much,” we plant seeds of harm. Every time we say “don’t be dramatic” or “get over it,” we’re reinforcing the exact silence that lets darkness grow.

What Jung wanted wasn’t sainthood. It was honesty. A culture that makes room for the full human experience—not just the polished parts. One that knows the difference between confession and collapse. One that values the courage it takes to bring the unspeakable into language.

So if you want to fight evil, stop looking for villains. Start listening for silence.

Help people tell the truth while it’s still a story—before it becomes a scream, or a gun, or a law, or a wall. Ask the hard questions early. Invite the ghosts to speak before they take over the house. Make the space. Hold it open. Let the Shadow talk.

Because when someone tells their story and it lands—when it’s heard, seen, named—something softens. The curse breaks. The loop ends. Not always neatly. Not always finally. But enough. Enough to keep that pain from multiplying. Enough to keep one more person from having to learn cruelty just to survive.

That’s the job. That’s the strategy. That’s how we stop evil before it becomes history.

We don’t destroy the darkness.

We give it a voice.