Try to think of one lie you once told. Not the big one, just a small one. What it did, beyond the words, was create a split. Now there are two versions: what really happened, and what you said happened. And you have to remember both, and not mix them up, and maintain the gap. Something in the system became less synchronized. There’s more noise.
This is an interesting angle on a heavy word like “evil.” Usually we picture it as a force, as something with a presence. But you can look differently: not as a force, but as interference. Not as a thing, but as a mismatch between things that are supposed to be matched.
The angle: morality as the ratio between signal and noise
In the world of information there’s a simple, powerful concept: the ratio between signal and noise. The signal is what carries meaning, the noise is what disrupts it. The same song can arrive clear, or full of crackle that makes it hard to recognize. The song hasn’t changed, what changed is how much noise got in.
You can take this image and propose: maybe what we call evil is, in a sense, a rise in noise. A lie widens the gap between reality and what’s told about it. Exploitation breaks the match between what a person needs and what’s done to them. Cruelty severs the link between what someone feels and how they’re treated. And in the other direction, what we call good restores the match. Truth narrows the gap. Kindness synchronizes need with response. Justice aligns what’s deserved with what’s given. Not evil as a dark force and good as an opposing one, but noise against signal, fragmentation against coherence.
Where it leaps into philosophy, and the limit of the image
This is an angle, not an answer, and it’s worth marking its limit right away. The image doesn’t explain why a particular noise hurts, or why a particular act stirs moral outrage. It gives a language for describing a structure, not a source. And the reverse caution is needed too: not every mismatch is bad, and not every order is good. There are very wicked orders, beautifully synchronized, of injustice. So the image helps thinking, but you mustn’t apply it automatically. It points at something, it doesn’t replace judgment.
What is nice about it is that it doesn’t require believing in evil as an entity. You can take the distinction between good and evil seriously without imagining two forces at war, but rather one state, coherence, and its disruptions.
What tradition offers
The intuition that evil isn’t an independent force but an absence, a distortion or an unrepaired state of the good is ancient and shared by many traditions. Philosophers spoke of evil as “the absence of good,” not as a thing in itself. In the Jewish phrasing, part of the Kabbalistic tradition describes sin as breaking and splitting, and the mitzvah as an act that restores harmony, using the language of “tikkun,” returning something broken to its order. It’s very common to read this as a language of meaning, not as physics. Not a scientific statement, and obviously not information theory. It’s an entirely different language that maybe feels out the same place: that evil is what fragments a match, and good is what restores it. We point at the resemblance between that image and the signal-to-noise ratio, and leave it to you to decide whether it says something, or is only beautiful.
To close
Go back to that small lie and to the split it created, to the noise added to the system. Maybe it’s only a metaphor, and maybe it points at something in the structure of a moral life. Either way, it offers a way to think about good and evil without dark forces and without preaching: simply as a question of how much signal, and how much noise.
So, to close, a question: if every act of yours adds either signal or noise to the system, which of the two are you leaving behind, without noticing, on an ordinary day?