Culture teaches us to symbolize our dread instead of exercising it upon the bodies and minds of fellow human beings. Education, here, is an act of sublimation. Given that the impulse to evil is omnipresent, there is no acceptable alternative to its cultural containment. Alford suggests that culture can fail in its task of containing evil in one of two ways. First, a perverse culture can intensify rather than contain evil.
Radical evil is the result.
Rather than dissipate the impulse to malevolent destruction through symbolization, a perverse culture may focus these impulses on scapegoats. Such a culture gives the name of duty to the evildoing of destroying others. It transfers one's own sense of doom onto another by way of his or her demonization. Such is the radical evil of pogroms and genocide. Alford argues that culture fails to contain evil not only when it fortifies radical evil.