On the subject of evil

It is the divine hope of men that all evil should be banished.
what then can be said of the evil within men? should we suffer its intrusion into our hearts? demand its imminent absence from our selves? or should we simply accept evil, not as a malevolent force within us all, but as a necessity borne from the desire to survive?
Once I heard a quote that claimed "evil was evolution at its finest!" and in many regards, that holds true, for do we not define evil as an existence of base survival at the expense of all the good in the world? is not evil the impulse that commands you to take what is not yours for your own needs and desires? is not wickedness and malevolence a bevy of emotional states that suffer the light of day, that they might shadow potential opportunities to better give you the realization that an opportunity has thus presented itself to you, despite the fact that it costs someone else something?
if evil, as we have defined it, is the dogs attacking one another over a vital morsel of meat to keep themselves alive, then perhaps evil is not some cold machination of the devils within the hearts of men, but our animal selves, demanding that we thrive when the world of light demands our deaths.
perhaps then it can be said, that good men go to their deaths by execution, for do they not submit to the law when they do so? do they often resist in those final moments? no, they accept their fates, holding still much of the time, or so the popular image would have us believe, and so it is entirely reasonable to presume that in those moments, they gave up their evil desire to survive in order to submit and feel the emptiness of good, and emptiness that would not fill their bellies or give them the warm smiles of their loved ones, but instead an emptiness of resignation borne from good, the absence of evil.
what of good then? so ephemeral this device, so hard to ascertain its practical applications in the world.
but good works on another front, one we have proven exists, yet one that, even to this day we refuse to recognize, for to recognize the presence of one's heart would be to acknowledge that we do not need to survive, and as a result, that we are evil.
perhaps then, no matter the scale of evil, the hunger of wickedness that drives us away from extinction has been misrepresented, and that evil and good are a simple, humble balance, evil only being justifiable when it aids us in living, good only justifiable when it is little more than a luxury, afforded when we have filled the void of hunger that evil commands us to fill.
is evil survival at its pinnacle? is good the desire to step aside, that the wicked might prevail in their own survival? or is it simply an absence of good, a primal side of ourselves that we demonized for many, many years, denying the evil until the good became distorted into something we no longer wished for?
I fear that we, as men, have fallen out of balance and misdefined our true states entirely, and that good and evil are simply faces we planted on these states of being in our confusion, and that nothing I have said is true, for it is an illusion, a wrapping, a misrepresentation of the ultimate truth and a pale shadow of what I intended to get across when first my thoughts wove themselves onto this forum.
so perhaps evil is survival at its most extreme, then perhaps good is the collective will to something far greater than survival, a will that transcends the wickedness of need.