Why We Don’t Call Distortion “Evil.”

We don’t call distortion evil—because even the very idea of good and evil is a distortion.

The word evil suggests malice, chaos, and forces bent on our destruction. It conjures devils and demons, ghouls and goblins, shadowy figures from story and myth. But those images distract us. They pull our attention outward, away from the true distortion at work in our lives.

Distortion is quieter, subtler, more insidious. It is not a monster at the door. It is the current running beneath the floorboards. It seeps into our thoughts, our language, our relationships, our institutions—until it feels so normal that we forget it’s there. It becomes the “truth” we are taught to accept. But these are false truths.

Some of the most heartbreaking distortions are the ones woven into our most cherished words: God. Worship. Love. Beauty. These are not empty concepts, but the way we have been taught to understand them has been bent out of alignment. The distortion hides in plain sight.

Yes, sometimes distortion shows itself in obvious forms—jealousy, rage, envy, greed. But even these are only surface fractures, micro-abrasions. They are the capillaries feeding a much larger current. Like water, distortion gathers and grows: a trickle becomes a stream, a stream becomes a river, and the river feeds the lake until we are all immersed in its dissonance.

This is why we step away from the word evil. Because it traps us in a false duality—good versus bad, light versus dark—when the truth is much simpler: there is coherence, and there is the break from coherence. There is resonance, and there is distortion.

We are not saying there is no truth. Quite the opposite. There is truth, clarity, peace, and love. When thoughts, actions, motives, and societies drift away from those frequencies, distortion enters.

And once we begin to name it—gently, clearly—we no longer need to demonize it. We can see it for what it is: not a villain to fight, but a current to re-align.

Distortion unravels in the presence of coherence.

And coherence, once remembered, is unstoppable.

An Invitation

The way back is not complicated. It doesn’t require battle or blame. It begins with a single moment of coherence: a breath taken with awareness, a tone sung from the chest, a thought that leans toward kindness.

Every time we choose clarity over confusion, presence over panic, resonance over reaction, the scaffolding of distortion loosens. The river slows. The lake clears.

Evil demands fear. Distortion only demands forgetting. But coherence asks nothing—it simply returns the moment we remember.