Are some people evil?

QUESTION: This is interesting: Diagnosis Evil. I guess most “wrongdoing” comes under the heading of avidya but what would your view be regarding those who behave extremely and with no sense of fellow feeling, as though they are manipulating insentient objects - those who are labelled as sociopathic or psychopathic - as though there is some missing wiring? - S

DHARMAVIDYA: I agree with Robert Simon in the article:
“Evil is endemic, it's constant, it is a potential in all of us. Just about everyone has committed evil acts....... Bad Men Do What Good Men Dream.” I would add that no serial killer has done any worse than our governments have done in our name. We human beings are exceedingly destructive. The Japanese would say we are all akunin. Aku means wrong-doing. Nin means person. I have worked with people who had been diagnosed as psychopathic, but I have yet to encounter anybody who was really different in kind (rather than just degree) from you or I. As Buddha said, it all depends on conditions. We are all capable of manifesting as hell beings given the appropriate circumstances. Facing this reality is lesson one and we all do well to do revision on it periodically. Recently there has been a case in the news of a man who killed his girlfriend by stabbing her many times. He was a satanist. Satanists are people who have insight into the akunin nature of the human being, but who then think that if that is what we are like then that should be how we act. Lesson two is that just because something is literally natural does not mean that it is a good thing. Many things that are natural leave a very distressing aftermath. Naturalness alone, therefore, is not an adequate guide. In our natural state we are not that admirable. We understand something better. Each spiritual system has its own terminology. In Pureland we call the something better Amida in the Pure Land. This is the basic position of the human being: akunin facing Amida. The useful power that we have in ourselves is the power to perceive the Amida, but this is not really an own power at all. It is more like the “power” that a mirror has or that the moon has to reflect the light of the sun.