Critique of “Searching for the Root of All Evil”: An Archetypal Inquiry Lacking Sociological Depth

Mike Sosteric

Chapter 16 of Power, Politics, and Paranoia (Sullivan et al., 2014) attempts to address the perennial question of why people are drawn to narratives of good versus evil, particularly in political life, and the consequences that these narratives have. The authors argue that binary moralizing frameworks are rooted in existential dread. In their view, the tendency to divide the world into heroes and villains, good and evil, stems not from deliberate ideological design but from deep psychological needs for control, predictability, and meaning in the face of uncertainty and mortality.

At first glance, this seems reasonable. Existential psychology has long posited that human beings seek psychological defenses against the terror of meaninglessness. However, this chapter’s reduction of the good-versus-evil dichotomy to a cognitive coping mechanism fundamentally misses the sociological point. It overlooks a critical question: who benefits from the widespread uptake of this archetypal binary, and how is it intentionally constructed and maintained?

Pop Psychology in Place of Critical Sociology

​ In their article, Sullivan et al. situate the good-versus-evil narrative in the same category as superstition and conspiracy thinking, positioning it as a heuristic gone awry—an irrational but understandable response to existential insecurity. This argument functions within a broader behaviourist frame common to mainstream psychology, which prioritizes internal cognitive causes over structural or systemic forces. The implicit message is that the archetype’s ubiquity is simply a consequence of our evolutionary coding, an argument similar to that put forward by psychologist C. G. Jung. Yet such claims are analytically shallow and not sociological at all. It is pop psychology masquerading as social science. It fails to interrogate how elite institutions—religious, educational, governmental, and cultural—strategically propagate this archetype through symbol factories and ideological institutions. By failing to “follow the power,” this approach obscures the functional role of the archetype in legitimizing authority, rallying mass violence, scapegoating victims, and securing consent for exploitative systems. This is what a proper sociological analysis would seek to uncover.

​ To cite one example, the construction of Indigenous peoples as “savages” during colonial conquests was not simply an unfortunate psychological projection; it was a deliberate symbolic strategy used to justify genocide, expropriation, and enslavement. The good-versus-evil frame was engineered. Its purpose was not psychological comfort but political and colonial domination.

The Real Root: Symbolic Domination

​ Where Sullivan et al. see misfiring pattern recognition and projection, critical theorists like Bourdieu and Althuser see symbolic power (Bourdieu & Passeron, 1990) and state manipulation of consciousness (Althusser, 1971). Bourdieu’s concept of symbolic violence captures precisely how dominant groups impose archetypal frameworks that cause dominated groups to misrecognize their position in the social order as natural, deserved, or divinely ordained (false consciousness). The good-versus-evil binary is one such symbolic imposition. It cloaks structural violence in moral absolutes, rendering elite interests invisible behind a veil of spiritual battle. This symbolic operation is further theorized in System Justification Theory (Jost & Banaji, 1994) which demonstrates how people internalize ideologies that explain and justify existing social arrangements, even when those arrangements disadvantage them. While Sullivan et al suggest that the “enemy” is not an elite manipulating symbols but an inner fear of chaos, system justification theory points in the direction of the weaponization of meaning through ideological narratives to serve the status quo.

A Missed Opportunity

​ By pathologizing the population’s use of archetypal thinking, the authors miss the real insight: archetypes are not simply “in the mind,” they are cultivated, circulated, and sustained in material and institutional contexts. This turns archetypes like good-versus-evil from coping mechanisms into tools of control. Moreover, the authors offer no historical depth. They do not examine how the good-versus-evil narrative emerged in the Zoroastrian dualism that influenced Western monotheism (Boyce, 1996; Sosteric, 2024), or how it was institutionalized in colonial discourse, nationalist rhetoric, and modern entertainment industries. They show no awareness of the feedback loops between narrative, affect, policy, and profit. In the end, “Searching for the Root of All Evil” doesn’t search far enough. It confines itself to the neural grooves of individual minds and ignores the well-worn institutional trails along which ideology is carried.

References

Althusser, Louis. “Ideology and Ideological State Apparatuses.” In Lenin and Philosophy and Other Essays. Monthly Review Press, 1971. https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/althusser/1970/ideology.htm

Bourdieu, Pierre, and Jean-Claude Passeron. Reproduction in Education, Society and Culture. 2nd ed. Sage, 1990.

Boyce, Mary. A History of Zoroastrianism: Volume One — The Early Period. E. J. Brill, 1996.

Jost, John T., and Mahzarin R. Banaji. “The Role of Stereotyping in System Justification and the Production of False Consciousness.” British Journal of Social Psychology 33 (1994): 1–27. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.2044-8309.1994.tb01008.x

Sosteric, Mike. “From Zoroaster to Star Wars, Jesus to Marx: The Art, Science, and Technology of Mass Human Manipulation.” Athens Journal of Philosophy 3, no. 4 (2024). https://doi.org/10.30958/ajphil.3-4-1

Sullivan, Daniel, Mark J. Landau, Zachary K. Rothschild, and Lucas A. Keefer. “Searching for the Root of All Evil: An Existential-Sociological Perspective on Political Enemyship and Scapegoating.” In Power, Politics, and Paranoia: Why People Are Suspicious of Their Leaders, edited by Jan-Willem van Prooijen and Paul A. M. van Lange, 292–311. Cambridge UP, 2014.