Think of one lie you once told. Not a big one, just something small. What it did, beyond the words, was open a split. Now there were two versions: what actually happened, and what you said happened. And you had to keep both in mind, not mix them up, hold the gap steady. Something in the system fell a little out of sync. There was more noise.
It’s an interesting angle on a heavy word like “evil.” We usually picture it as a force, something with a presence and a weight. But you can look at it differently: not as a force, but as interference. Not as a thing, but as a mismatch between things that were meant to match.
The angle: morality as the ratio between signal and noise
In the world of information there’s a simple, powerful idea: the ratio between signal and noise. The signal is what carries the meaning, the noise is what disrupts it. The same song can arrive clean, or buried in a crackle that makes it hard to recognize. The song hasn’t changed. What changed is how much noise got in.
Take that image and try a proposal: maybe what we call evil is, in a sense, a rise in noise. A lie widens the gap between reality and the account given of 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 syncs need with response. Justice lines up what’s deserved with what’s given. Not evil as a dark force and good as its opposite, 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 its limit is worth marking 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 deeply wicked orders, beautifully synchronized, in the service of injustice. So the image helps thinking along, but you mustn’t apply it on autopilot. It points at something. It doesn’t replace judgment.
What’s appealing 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, and instead picture one state, coherence, and the disruptions that break it.
What tradition offers
The sense that evil isn’t an independent force but an absence, a distortion, an unrepaired state of the good, is old and shared by many traditions. Philosophers spoke of evil as “the absence of good,” not as a thing in its own right. In the Hebrew phrasing, part of the kabbalistic tradition describes sin as breaking and splitting, and the mitzvah as an act that restores harmony, in the language of “tikkun,” returning something broken to its order. It’s very common to read this as a language of meaning rather than physics. Not a scientific statement, and certainly not information theory. It’s another language entirely, perhaps feeling its way toward the same place: that evil is what fragments a match, and good is what restores it. Whether that resemblance to signal-and-noise says something, or is only beautiful, is yours to weigh.
To close
Think back to that small lie and the split it opened, to the noise it fed into the system. Maybe it’s only a metaphor. Maybe it points at something in the very structure of a moral life. Either way, it offers a way to think about good and evil without dark forces and without sermons: simply as a question of how much signal, and how much noise.
A question to sit with: 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?