Saturday diversion with Murdoch

Reading Iris Murdoch this past week, as I sometimes do, I ran across the following moral assertion:

"As the world runs, evil soon makes tools out of those who don't hate it."  From her novel, The Unofficial Rose.

It's not entirely clear from Murdoch's text if the antecedent is the "world" or "evil" itself.   It's an interesting statement either way, but I choose to interpret it as "evil" that one must hate.  There can be no middle ground.

Ophelia Hybrid Tea rose from Wikimedia Commons.