as small as a world and as large as alone

7:47pm May 5, 2014

patternsmaybe:

pervocracy:

mikulios:

making HONEST ANTAGONISTS who believe they’re in the right and firmly believe in what they’re doing is SO MUCH MORE INTERESTING than making them “crazy” because of some outside influence. make villains who believe they are the protagonist

Very few people really believe that “what I’m doing is evil and that’s okay by me, mwahaha.”  That’s almost a contradiction in terms.  They either think “what I’m doing is evil and it’s horrible why can’t I stop myself,” or they think “what I’m doing is justified and right.”  Genuinely scary people are more often the latter.

I can understand why this is hard to express in media, especially media that’s trying to tell simpler or emotionally lighter stories.  Not every story needs a scene where the evil overlord explains that he’s taking drastic measures to keep his citizens safe, to keep his family safe, and he doesn’t use a Cartoon Evil Voice and he seems to genuinely believe himself.  But it would be cool if that scene popped up a little more often.

That’s why I think Umbridge is a great character in Harry Potter

(Note that I don’t see things in a simplistic dichotomy of ‘good and evil’, and when I use those terms it’s because I can’t come up with anything that actually describes what I do believe in.)

Totally agreed.

I have met a few people, however, who even if they’re not cartoon villains, they’re more like… how can I describe…

“Morality is for people who are weak and stupid.  I can work outside of their system of morality and get what I want for myself.  This makes me stronger and more deserving of whatever I get from other people.  If they don’t want me taking advantage of them or hurting them, then they wouldn’t fall prey to me.”

Such people are aware that they are doing what other people would call evil, but they don’t care.  In fact, they think that being able to do evil makes them stronger than other people.  They think ethics are a weakness that prevents people getting what they want in life, and that people bound by ethics get what we deserve if bad things happen to us.

And such people are very real, and very scary.  One way that they can get away with what they do, is that most people cannot imagine such people.  Like they literally can’t imagine what it would be like to not care about ethics.  They assume ethics are in play in some manner when they see other people doing things.  And such people often let people assume that, because it makes their task of duping people easier.  

I’ve been very, very frustrated in situations where I am dealing with such people.  Not just frustrated at the people who think ethics don’t apply.  But even more frustrated at the people around them, whose own ethics create a giant blind spot.  A blind spot that the ethics-free people stand in willingly so as not to ever, ever be seen for what they are.

This includes the guy I talked about in a recent post somewhere, where he hurts people, constantly, and then always gets them to believe that he has changed, that he is different now.  And people willingly believe them because they don’t want to see what he really is, because what he really is is a pretty terrifying kind of person.  It’s terrifying to contemplate that some people believe themselves to be outside of ethics altogether.  But they do exist.  (I actually believe that gifted programs can encourage such ideas to form in the heads of people who would otherwise be on the fence, ethically, too, just as an aside.)  And anyway, this guy will give people something they want in exchange to get them to do something for him.  Like at one point he wanted someone to contact me and get information out of me, so he apologized to her for something completely despicable that he’d done ten years ago, something that most people would consider unforgivable.  But he knew that she wanted to forgive him, he knew that she thinks the best of people sometimes, and he knew that if he did apologize, then she would do what he wanted, and that’s how he thinks in general.  In other cases he uses threats to get what he wants, such as blackmail.  Whatever will manipulate people the best.

But he, and people like him, take actual joy in the thought that they are outside of the normal ethical framework and that few people can see what they are doing, for what it is, because most people assume that everyone in the world is operating from within something akin to the standard ethics that they themselves, and most people, have.  (Even if ethics vary by culture, there’s still usually some commonality.)  And one reason he hates me so much is because I can see what he is, and I don’t ever believe he’s changed, because I’ve seen him do it too many times, and because, for whatever reason (I think autism may have something to do with it) I see through the social games he uses to control other people.  So he’s made it his mission in life to hurt me, badly, and to have as much fun doing it as he possibly can.

I’m not trying to take away from the point of the above post.  I believe most people doing evil do believe they’re doing good.  But I want to emphasize that there are people who, while not cartoon villains by any stretch of the imagination, see themselves as outside of good and evil.  "There is no good and evil, only power and those too weak to take it,“ or something like that from Harry Potter sums up the mentality.  And they see our ethics as a weakness.  And they love it when we believe that nobody really does evil knowingly, because that leaves them free to do evil knowingly, under our noses.

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