“I worship at the altar of the win-win” said he. But continued to demonise his opponent. When you see your opponent as “evil” instead of just someone who disagrees, win-win solutions vanish. Worse, this mindset carries a lifetime cost for two reasons.
The moment your opponent becomes “evil” in your mind, something closes. And this “something” is beyond negotiation or your working relationship. Something closes in you. What is more, it doesn’t close once. You carry this pattern into your next tough colleague, competitor, or partnership that goes wrong. This is exactly why the cost isn’t limited to this one conflict. It compounds across your career.
I want to make the case against that internal closing. Before you disagree, let me tell you this: I’m not advocating spiritual bypassing. And this isn’t a plea for niceness. I’ve built this case from research and my observations of skilled, caring professionals. Those are the ones who feel conflict the hardest.
Do you ever call someone “evil” to understand a tough colleague, a rival, or a mentor who has become your opponent? Or maybe you know someone who does? Here are two main reasons to stop using that label.
Reason one: an opponent painted as evil leaves no room to negotiate
When you paint an opponent as evil, you lose your own room to manoeuvre. Negotiation research has shown this for decades. Roger Fisher and William Ury’s work on principled negotiation, which popularised the term “win-win,” recommends separating the person from the problem. Consider this: Recognising that an opponent is causing harm is not the same as believing they are the embodiment of harm. One can concede a point in an agreement without feeling like they’re conceding their integrity.
Political psychologist Linda Skitka’s research on moral conviction backs this up, and not in a small way. Across studies, people who framed a position as a matter of core moral belief (rather than a preference or a strategic stance) became
- significantly less willing to compromise on it,
- more likely to oppose negotiators who tried, and
- more resistant to trade-offs even when offered material incentives to soften.
In one finding, people wouldn’t give up a moralised position even in exchange for money. Once you code an issue as good versus evil, the part of you that would normally weigh costs and benefits simply switches off.
International relations scholars have documented the same mechanism at a civilisational scale. The “enemy image” concept, created by Ralph White and Herbert Kelman, explains how long-term adversaries view each other. Instead of seeing themselves as rivals with different goals, they see each other as evil. Once that image takes hold, it reinforces itself. Ambiguous actions seem hostile, and olive branches look like tricks. This is key: the options for “acceptable negotiation” shrink to nearly zero. Negotiating with an enemy feels like betrayal instead of strategy. Negotiations during the Cold War stalled for years. This was partly because the enemy images made concessions seem like weakness, not wisdom.
Behavioural economist Philip Tetlock names the mechanism of “sacred values” in decision-making. Tetlock and his team discovered that when groups view something as sacred and non-negotiable, they often respond with moral outrage. This reaction replaces careful thinking. Higher offers only increase their resistance. Demonising your opponent changes the whole negotiation. It shifts the focus from cost-benefit analysis to a moral viewpoint. In this space, any concession isn’t just a loss; it’s a moral failure.
But cast a colleague, a competitor, or a boardroom rival as evil, and every inch of ground you give them stops being a negotiating position. It becomes a moral compromise. You’re no longer trading — you’re capitulating. Compromise with an opponent you’ve coded as bad doesn’t feel like strategy. It feels like betrayal of the good.
This is why the most intractable professional conflicts share a signature. Imagine a negotiation that drags on for a year. Or a partnership breakup that needs mediation. Or a departmental feud with a forgotten start. At some point, the other side stops being wrong and turns into the enemy. And you can’t reason with a “bad” opponent, so nobody tries. Once that happens, the established narrative dictates every future interaction.
Reason two: an opponent cast as evil is an opponent you can no longer predict
The second cost is quieter but can be more dangerous. It seems rational, like a professional necessity. But it’s actually a strategic blind spot.
Perspective-taking means truly understanding what your opponent sees, wants, and fears. It is a strong predictor of success in negotiation and conflict. This idea comes from Turkish-American social psychologist Muzafer Sherif’s classic studies on intergroup conflict. It also connects to recent research by Adam Galinsky and his team on power and perspective-taking. To predict what an opponent will do next in a negotiation, pitch, or boardroom standoff, you must briefly embrace their logic. You have to ask: given what they believe, what they’re afraid of losing, what they think is at stake — what would I do, in their seat?
That question becomes almost impossible to ask about an opponent you’ve already decided is evil. To model their reasoning would mean, for a moment, identifying with it. And identifying with evil feels like becoming complicit in it. So you stop modelling. You stop predicting. You remain one step behind. You’re surprised repeatedly by moves you could have predicted. If you had looked at the board from the other side, you might have seen them coming.
This is the irony at the centre of moral certainty in professional conflict: The story that feels like it’s protecting you is often the one costing you the agreement, the promotion, or the win.
Albert Bandura’s work on moral disengagement explores how people justify causing harm. This includes mental tricks, like dehumanising the other side. It’s usually discussed as something aggressors do to justify cruelty. But the same issue affects professionals who don’t see themselves as aggressors. Think of a founder in a dispute with a co-founder, an executive whose top employee just left for a rival, or a consultant who sees the opponent as toxic. Dehumanising an opponent doesn’t require malice. It only requires certainty.
Why this becomes a lifetime cost, not a one-off
Here’s what makes this pattern so costly: it is rarely limited to a single conflict. When you see “evil” as the reason for a tough opponent, it shapes your view. This happens again and again. Next time with a competitor, a new hire who fails, or a stalled deal partner. Each time, the same two costs repeat. Each time, you have diminished room to negotiate and a reduced ability to predict.
Over a decade or two, that’s not one bad negotiation. That’s a career’s worth of wins left on the table. Because you dehumanised your opponent, you couldn’t possibly put yourself in their shoes. Now you face moves you didn’t expect.
Why “empathic” professionals might turn their opponent into a villain
If you’re an empath, healer, coach, or creative, you likely feel things deeply. This caring nature makes you more exposed to this pattern at work, not less. Not because you’re less…wise. Perhaps because you feel the conflict in your body, not only in your head. When your nervous system feels threatened, it seeks the simplest story. “Good and evil” is simple. Two flawed, motivated, frightened parties negotiating for what they each need is not.
Here’s the reframe to which I keep coming back: it is not strength to see the world in black and white. You’re strong if you’re able to sit in the grey. You’re strong if you’re able to hold multitudes. You’re strong if you can say both at once, without one negating the other:
This person has hurt me”, or “this person has always opposed me”, and “they’re still a full, complicated human running their own survival logic”.
Bravery, in this sense, isn’t the certainty of the righteous fight. It’s the discipline of staying in the room with complexity when your nervous system wants you to simplify.
Where the two threads meet
Sufi teaching has long held that the line between light and shadow doesn’t run between people — it runs through each of us. Rumi’s frame of the “guest house,” welcoming even the difficult visitors, isn’t really about passivity. It’s about refusing the fiction that any of us are made of one substance. Ayurveda works from a related premise: imbalance isn’t evil; it’s information. A dosha out of balance isn’t corrupted. It’s a pattern trying to find its way back to equilibrium, and the intervention is to understand the pattern, not condemn it.
Put the research and the older wisdom side by side, and they say the same thing from different centuries: your opponent is not the enemy. The story that they are pure, uncomplicated harm? That is the real obstacle. And left unexamined, it’s one you’ll keep paying for, opponent after opponent, for the rest of your working life.
This pattern is standing between you and a better outcome at the table. It’s standing between you and the version of yourself that stayed whole along the way.
Next time you think, “they’re just evil,” ask yourself this: What would I fear losing if I were them?
You don’t have to like the answer. You just have to let yourself ask it.
Do you remember the person I mentioned at the beginning of this blog post? I didn’t tell him what I’m going to tell you now: If this is a pattern you recognise in yourself (the reflex to reach for “evil” or “toxic” the moment conflict gets close, especially in your own business or client work), I have an offer for you. Because that’s exactly the terrain The Wounded Healer was built for. It’s where the nervous system literacy and boundary work live, so the next difficult opponent doesn’t get to write the story for you. Tap here to start rewriting the pattern.
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