Evil rarely satisfies. This is partly because we end up being pressured to disguise it as good. We wrap it in moral language, call it necessity or justice or reason, and in doing so we drain it of its force. We feel cowardly. We end up subconsciously and/or consciously resenting how we conceal and letting ourselves be forced to render excuses to others. We will hate others for this.
Another way this concealment creates a tension is this. We want the act to be evil, to have evil within to produce it, but we refuse to let it stand openly as such. The result is a kind of incompletion, a near-reach that never quite touches what we desire. Rationalizations make evil feel small and embarrassed, as if it must apologize for itself. Excuses weaken it. What we secretly want is not this timid, self-justifying version, but a grand, unapologetic evil—one that does not flinch or explain, one that is strong precisely because it is unashamed.
This dissatisfaction can lead to a kind of conceptual inflation. Because our ordinary acts never feel fully evil—dulled as they are by excuses and moral cover—we compensate by enlarging the idea of evil itself. The word begins to swell, stretched to cover more and more behavior, as if magnitude could make up for authenticity. What once named something rare and terrifying becomes a catch-all accusation, louder but thinner. In inflating the concept, we hope to recover the intensity we lost through rationalization, but the effect is the opposite: evil becomes abstract, theatrical, and overused. Like currency printed too freely, the word loses its weight, and the more we invoke it, the less real it feels.
Society says we will not find evil anything other than disappointing. When we obtain our evil goals, they will seem to mean little - even after all the effort! Religion tells you the same thing for largely different, for spiritual, reasons. If this expected disappointment is happening as a self-fulfilling prophecy? If we program ourselves to cause it or deepen it? Then what? Evil should disappoint because it is evil - not because of our psychology. It would be abuse to make a person suffer from their own evil for the wrong reasons.
Some people argue that a moral law must include punishment, because without consequences it has no real force and people would have little reason to obey it. From this view, punishment reinforces the seriousness of moral rules and helps maintain order by discouraging wrongdoing. Others claim that punishment is unnecessary because doing evil already harms the person who commits it: by acting immorally, individuals damage their character, lose inner peace, or weaken trust with others. According to this perspective, the natural consequences of immoral actions—such as guilt, shame, or a corrupted sense of self—are themselves a sufficient “punishment,” making external penalties less essential for a moral law to have meaning.
Conceptual inflation is at work there. Everybody struggles with inner peace a lot and weakened trust. And there is no direct connection between the murder you committed and the harm outlined. It may be down to other evils you have done - not the main one, the murder. Punishing is about justice If punishing could take away inner peace that is one thing. But for the loss to happen naturally and for you to say that is good is disgraceful. That is just passive-aggressive revenge for there is no regulation or clear link with what specific evil you have done.
Faith assumes that God does not have to punish everybody - meaning that if you are not punished then the sin or evil harms you anyway.
We have no measure for evil so we will inevitably subconsciously and instinctively exaggerate it for safety and survival purposes.
The result of enlarging the idea of evil and the word evil?
We may masochistically make ourselves feel terribly guilty - that is a way of making the evil more important than what it is. It is like how a person suffers worrying about how others may think negatively of him - that is a form of reverse narcissism for he forgets he is not that important to those people.
We may think that sin deserves eternal exclusion from God's presence. Or that it may deserve eternal suffering or even torture.
We may think that all sin - or mortal sin only - cuts you off God in this life and is thus very serious. We think it does grave spiritual harm.
We may think that the most powerful evil being in the universe, Satan, and his whole host, is interested in our evil.
We may think there must be a God of total goodness and power to whom evil is in contrast. If we say there is no good without evil or evil without good we risk giving evil great importance.
We may think our sin murdered Jesus Christ - he supposedly died to atone for sins on the cross.
We may expect to return in a future life to be murdered or stolen from if we have done those things in this life.
We may think that some kind of magic or near-magic lives in our evil and will ripple on unseen - maybe forever.
Part of us reacts to evil and may suspect that evil is not just a lack of good but an actual energy - a substance. It is inevitable that we enlarge evil.
Doing little against evil itself can be a way of enlarging it - you think it is so great there is no point.
We may start thinking that God gives forgiveness instantly - though real forgiveness is not an act but a process and takes time - as if sin is so terrible that God has to cut corners to get rid of it.
Inflating evil has psychological influence - it will make people more inclined to go along with it. The very thought that evil is so great would do that alone- we absorb what we perceive or think we perceive. And it leads to fear of evil which results in going along with it more. Faith may make evil look better. It may be the pot that slowly gets warmer and warmer and the frog does not realise until it is too late. It ends up boiled.