The face of “evil” is always the face of total need.

Burroughs’s line frames “evil” not as a metaphysical force but as a condition of absolute lack—an all-consuming hunger that overrides ordinary limits. Read this way, the “face” of evil is recognizable in compulsions that cannot be satisfied: addiction, domination, or any drive that reduces others to instruments for feeding an inner void. The quotation also suggests a reversal of moral melodrama: what appears monstrous may be rooted in need so total it becomes predatory. In Burroughs’s broader preoccupations, such need aligns with systems of control—cravings and dependencies that can be exploited, reproduced, and weaponized—making “evil” less a personality trait than a mechanism.