So I'm about done with this essay. Phew. What a magnum opus. Jk, it's really not, but it is something. Six pages of something that isn't total crap. (Hopefully)
This is where I need help!
Unsurprisingly, if you've read this blog long enough, you know I abuse grammar the way an old person beats the crap out of any proper usage of hip terms.
So yeah, HELPS.
Grammar Nazis, this is your time to shine! Come on board and help me sort through the crapfest that is my essay! Comment below and rag all you like on the stylistic/grammar nitty bits, and any comments you have in general about it.
Thanks :)
Evil Incarnate
I was always interested in the villains.
They had always fascinated (and admittedly, horrified) me in how they didn’t
care for anyone but themselves, but then were still able to fool themselves
into thinking that they were the heroes. That seemed ridiculous to me, but also
kind of impressive. Of course, I didn’t understand what evil really meant. I
thought evil was when an unconscious Faustian Contract; that the poor victim
would choose a path of evil in the pursuit of some worldly thing. This
perspective was by no means unaided by my favorite books and movies, or rather,
I wouldn’t have liked those books and movies so much if it weren’t for that
perspective. To me, evil was never intentional. It was a tragic accident.
That changed when my sister convinced me
to start watching Criminal Minds with her between episodes of Hannah Montana
and Suite Life of Zach and Cody. Each episode followed the same stylistic arc
that never seemed to bore me: The BAU (Behavioral Analysis Unit) would examine
the evidence of a recent crime, and then use it to profile what kind of person
the “unsub” could be. The BAU would then catch the culprit with less than a
minute to spare. Criminal Mind’s main problem isn’t that it isn’t
good-hardly-but that it’s too simplistic in its designation of villain. For a
long time, I thought evil was psychopathy. I didn’t think villains were anymore
than the cumulative result of years of maliciousness. People didn’t transform
into beasts; they were beasts from the beginning.
That’s a rather easy way of looking at
life, but it isn’t true. In the 1971 Stanford Experiment, “good, normal,
intelligent college students” were selected out of a pool of applicants, and
placed into a faux basement prison. Dr. Philip Zimbardo created the experiment
to observe how participants would embody their assigned roles as either
prisoner or prison guard. The experiment, in that regard, was a terrifying
success.
On the first day of the experiment, the
prison guards were stripping rebellious prisoners of their clothing and their
mattresses as punishment. Before okaying the experiment, the Human Subject
Research Committee demanded the presence of a fire extinguisher in the
faux-prison “in case of an emergency.” The guards soon found a use for it. The
guards whacked the fire extinguisher against cell bars in order to subdue
rebellious prisoners, and then sprayed inmates with frigid CO2 inside the
extinguisher to order to end the insurrection. This was the second day. (Zimbardo)
The experiment was ended on the sixth day, after a graduate student pleaded to
Dr. Zimbardo about the dehumanization of the prisoners by the guards, and
implored that he was responsible for it. The experiment was meant to last two
weeks. (“Psychologist Investigates The Origins Of Evil.") This is what
happened to ordinary Americans after a week of being in a fake prison.
These were the kids meant to represent
“middle-class, educated youth.” And yet, it only six days for them to become
the villains we so revile and despise in the media. The participants were
“transformed into either brutal, sadistic guards or emotionally broken
prisoners.” To the creator of the experiment, the lesson to be learned is that
“powerful situations corrupt most people.”
I don’t say that to suggest that we’re all
psychopaths waiting for our moment to shine. It’s just, how could one claim to
be morally just or good when they haven’t been through such a corruptive
situation? Who are we to be so arrogant to think we’re good when, clearly, we
could so clearly be made not so within less than week? Are we so weak against,
pardon my cliché, the forces of evil?
In the film The Dark Knight, Harvey Dent
is sitting around with his fiancé Rachel and the elusive Bruce Wayne when the
topic of the morality of power comes into play. They discuss, enjoying
themselves at a leisurely dinner before Dent has his life ripped apart by the
musings of the Joker In the discussion, Dent delivers this oft-quoted line-“You
either die a hero, or live long enough to see yourself become a villain.” (The Dark Knight) This
question seemed uninteresting to me at the time of the movie’s release because
to me, that sort of defeatist attitude was the exact thing that permitted evil
to win, as it did later in Harvey Dent. Even so, I still wonder now whether
there’s any credibility to that quote, whether anybody really is incorruptible.
Dent’s
not the first one to make philosophical notions about evil. Almost every
society has blamed at least something for evil. The Greeks blamed the folly of
flesh for interfering with the perfect human soul, while the Old Testament
ragged on the soul’s imperfect pride for corrupting humanity. (Ladd) The Salem
Witch Trials chased imaginary witches in the pursuit of evil, and the Spanish
Inquisition hunted down whatever Jews and Muslims remained in 16th
century Spain to find it. The Abrahamic religions, through a shallow lens, seem
to blame Satan for all evil, but we’re the ones held accountable on Judgment
Day for falling to “The Whisperer.” Mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.
Science pins the blame of evil on four
major factors, at least according to social psychologist Baumeister: “a desire
for material gain, threatened egotism, idealism, and a sadistic pursuit of
pleasure.” (Scimecca) Birgit and Daniel Katkin dissect evil into two major categories
in their analysis of Heart of Darkness:
banal evil and primeval evil.
Primeval evil is the sadistic, “monstrous, spectacular” evil that we’re
used to seeing in our favorite fantasy novels and in our horror films. Banal
evil, on the other hand, is the subtler, nuanced evil that’s “comfortable” and
easy, as simple as someone who “sees but cannot act.” (Maier-Katkin, Birgit,
and Daniel Maier-Katkin ) Banal evil is, in essence, conforming to something
terrible.
I can’t help but be biased when I claim
that I don’t remember ever committing banal evil, at least at the forefront of
my mind. I do remember reading about how the town of Dachau adapted and flourished
even when Jews were dying by the thousands in a concentration camp little than
a mile from where they lived. (Zimbardo) I also remember hearing about how
children in Syria were being shot and tortured while Bashar Assad’s wife
ordered Harry Potter DVDs for her children. I remember hearing about the
catastrophe in Syria, feeling horrified, and then not doing much else except
continuing to feel horrified.
The
strange thing about these evils, literary or scientific or social-is that they
share a common root: pride. They all depend on an unwillingness to sacrifice a
selfish interest for a selfless one. Whatever events lead to one’s Fall, no
matter how skewed in justification, a villain’s conversion to evil was not complete
without an assumption that they were entitled something, and should be allowed
to commit whatever crime they did to obtain it. The main difference between the
books and real life is that the pride in books was an absolute constant without
a mingling of guilt. Voldemort felt no empathy from birth, and Valentine
Morgenstern was a charismatic jerk that stepped on people while justifying
himself as God’s servant. Steve Leonard of the Saga of Darren Shan series
justified his entire life quest to destroy the main character’s life (and that
of his mentor’s) through the simple hatred of the fact that the mentor, who
Leonard had once idolized, “called
me evil!” (Allies of the Night) Warped in a sense of entitlement and
self-justification, classical villains are trapped in the suffocating prison of
themselves. Dr. Zimbardo labeled this kind of all-consuming, self-obsessed
pride as the “sins of the Wolf” and mentions that in Dante’s Inferno, the lowest circle of Hell is
dedicated to committers of this grievous blasphemy. (Zimbardo)
Most
of us don’t commit sins of the wolf, nor do we spend our lives slaving after a delusional
goal. So what do we do? In this regard, we’re, ironically, the opposite of
Satan: We can do evil things, but we aren’t evil. On a day-to-day basis, most
of us are flawed human beings trying to figure out how to live and be happy.
Undoubtedly, most of conflate our goals with our desire for happiness, and thus
find it less or more easy to sacrifice certain values in exchange for them. But
there’s rarely the absolute sacrifice of all that is good in exchange for evil.
Most of the kids in the Stanford Experiment returned to civilian life. One of
the worst guards in the faux-prison is now “a happily married mortgage-broker,”
() People can change.
I
guess the moral of all this can be summarized in a stanza taken from
Nobel-prize winning poet Czeslaw Milosz’s poem Unde Malum. It was written in response to a fellow poet’s agonized
piece written in despair of human futility.
“Without witness/evil disappears from the world/ and
consciousness with it /Of course, dear Tadeusz/ evil (and good) comes from
man.”
