A Meditation On Evil

I am pleased to report that I recently had the experience of watching (with my daughter) a DVD of the 1986 made-for-TV film, My Little Pony & The End Of Flutter Valley. My daughter loved it - I endured it as well as I could. Just to give you a plot summary, the Ponies are going across the meadow to see their friends The Flutter Ponies -- little tiny ponies with butterfly wings and high squeaky voices) in order to observe the annual Flutter Pony Celebration.

BUT...

There are three witches who hate laughter and joy and flowers and sunshine and rainbows, So they want to RUIN the celebration! And they nearly succeed - but at the last minute, the Ponies recover the Magic Sparkle Gem, which restores the celebration! And the witches end up in a big mud puddle. It's that classic "pony vs. witch" conflict so common in contemporary literature. Practically unwatchable. It is certainly not for the weak.

But those witches now. For those up on their literary criticism, they will recognize the witches as embodiments of the Iago character type, so named by Samuel Taylor Coleridge as a character who acts out of pure malice with no ulterior motivation. Those that have actually read Othello will notice that this actually isn't true -- Iago is wreaking havoc on Othello and Desdemona out of revenge - he was denied a promotion. A little over the top as far as revenge goes -- but even the original Iago is not really the true embodiment of the Iago character type. You only find that kind of malice in a children's story.

Similar characters can be found in other cartoons fromn the 1980's. Take the 1970's - 1980's version of the SuperFriends. You have your Hall of Justice with Superman, Batman, Wonder Woman, Aquaman, etc. And you have your Legion of Doom with Braniac, Bizarro, Solomon Grundy, Lex Luthor, and so forth. And the Legion of Doom is not interested in drugs or money or power. They just do bad things -- they plot to make a volcano erupt and destroy a town. Things like that. Or take the Smurfs - Gargumel is not after the smurfs' land, or their magical secrets or anything. And he is not interested in revenge. He just hates Smurfs and wants to exterminate them.

Exterminate. The "E" word. Echoes of Hitler reverberate when you use the "E" word - and Hitler is among the biggest and baddest embodiments of evil. Was he an example of pure unadulterated malice? Well, no, he wasn't actually. The systematic extermination of twelve million people - six million among them being Jews - is a horrific crime. But as staggering as the Holocaust was, scholars agree that it was only a side project. Or more specifically, a means to an end - that end being world domination. That particular flavor of evil was a lust for power.

A harder case against "pure evil" is to be made of Al-Qaeda and the 9/11 hijackers. They DO seem like a very real Gargumel-like threat. They want to kill us. And near as we can tell, we haven't done anything to deserve it. Osama bin Laden himself has given numerous reasons for his own mission against us. US foreign policy is often given as a reason. Our stance on Israel. Interestingly in one speech, bin Laden cites his antics as revenge for the defeat of the Turks in a battle at the end of the Ottoman Empire. And this event - whatever it was - is so removed from the consciousness of the average American that I can't even find it with the cursory web search I am willing to give it.

But we are talking martyrdom here - and that is a very different kettle of fish. It could be argued that martyrdom like that committed by the 9/11 terrorists is in fact the ultimate in evil since even the perpetrator's own life is insignificant in the commission of murder and destruction. They get nothing out of it. But even leaving aside the promise of an afterlife that would make Hugh Hefner blush, there is another big payoff to martyrdom. It is something I will describe in another post, but for the moment I will say only this: human beings are the only creatures on the planet who are willing the give up their lives for ideas -- be they the service of God, or democracy, or for love, for country, for honor. And I will postulate for the moment that we DO get something out of it when we behave like this¹.

So if I haven't been clear, let me be so now. Pure evil does not exist. Evil acts are performed only as a means to an end. Man kills man for revenge, for power, for prestige, or even - in the case of serial murderers - for the thrill. Evil is the baddest of all side projects, but it is always collateral damage.


^{1. http://forum-network.org/lecture/daniel-dennett-evolution-free-will-and-morality}