The Golden Mask
“I think a servant of the enemy would look fairer and feel fouler.” — Frodo Baggins, The Lord of the Rings
They say the Devil is capable of appearing as an angel of light. That is certainly true of the high enemy of Frodo, the Lord of the Rings himself; the Dark Lord Sauron of Tolkien’s mythos wrought his havoc on the world by appearing to the elves as the wise and beautiful Annatar. Catholic saints such as Padre Pio have reported the Devil to have even appeared in the guise of the Lord or the Blessed Virgin, though the darkness of his advice gives him away. The same is true enough of any number of revolutionaries: Robespierre, Napoleon, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Hitler, Mussolini, and Kim Il-Sung all had a darkness underlying their politics, overlooked by those taken in by their promises of utopia.
As is often said of Aragorn (who Frodo speaks of in the above quote), “all that is gold does not glitter,” much as all that glitters is not gold. What is good does not always look it, and what looks it is not always good. It should be obvious that this does not mean what does not look good should be favored over what does; such a reversal would end up being quite foolish, and probably only encourage wickedness to be done more openly. The point is also not simply that appearances can be deceiving. The point is that, in my view, evil must necessarily always wear a golden mask.
What I mean by the “golden mask” is that evil is seldom done by openly appealing to evil inclinations. Indeed, evil lacks its own being, in some sense; as Augustine and Aquinas noted, evil is only that which is not good. Evil is defined by negating an absolute, transcendent standard. This does not mean that evil does not exist; its lack in transcendent substance does not mean it must also lack willpower. After all, how can a person of evil will be better defined than as willing what they want strongly, but without goodness? So evil, like a parasite, must take over good things and twist them to its own purposes. Evil does not look good by itself, so it must put up some kind of front that does.
Think of how many characters in The Lord of the Rings sought to use the evil power of the One Ring to do, in their minds, “good.” Think of how many Jews in biblical times were deceived by the Pharisees into killing Christ and His faithful as “heretics.” Think of how many people supported Jacobinism, socialism, communism, or Nazism because they really thought their society had to be burned to the roots to save it from an existential internal threat. Think of how many people today so suddenly turned from strident defense of freedom against that “literal Hitler” Trump to calling for his supporters to be attainted and tracked like sex offenders, consigned to menial labor, and have their children taken from them to be reeducated. This program may remind you of a certain diabolical someone’s ideas for certain groups of people.
There are some real lessons here. The first is one covered by Robert Greene in his book The Laws of Human Nature: people rarely look beneath the surface, behind the mask. They take people at their word, never questioning the real underlying motives that they may hint at. Of course, there are some political commentators who are quite sensitive to supposed “dog whistle” phrases, but only because a) it provides them a way to easily pretend to be right about whatever they have accused their opponents of, and b) they apparently miss the fact that it is only dogs who hear dog whistles, making them… Anyways, another point, latent in Jonathan Haidt’s The Righteous Mind, is the way emotion can manipulate our moral intuitions about care, fairness, loyalty, authority, and sanctity, the five moral foundations. With the right sleight of hand, any of these legitimate moral instincts can be subverted. Look at how Nazism was couched in terms of cleansing impurity, communism in correcting unfairness, and now “antifascist” neo-fascism in terms of preventing harm.
The last lesson is based on the interplay of two concepts. The first is projection. As Carl Jung remarked, what we hate in others is likely to be something we know is in ourselves, and so we distance ourselves from it by attaching it to another person so they can be persecuted in our place. The other is self-deception, which is identified by philosopher J. Budziszewski (“J. Bud”) as the root of most of our moral transgressions. We do indeed have moral intuitions, some sense of the natural law etched on our hearts, but our capacity for self-deception allows us to think we are justified in doing wrong. Put these two together, and you have a dangerous cocktail. Imagine a black man who hates white people for being white; he projects his hatred onto them, imagines they must all hate him for being black; he concocts a theory that society is based on anti-black racism, and he convinces himself that anything — even discrimination — must be employed to end it; he feels justified in his hatred of other people for what he is guilty of, and in acting it out by any means available, and he calls his project “critical race theory.”
The reason I call this conceit of evil a golden mask, and not just a glittering mask, is that there is often a kernel of moral truth at the center of an evil lie. To hate someone for their race, to defraud one’s employees, to betray one’s country, and to deceive one’s voters (among many other things) are all evil, but we must look behind the face value of noble sentiments. What is this crusader hiding behind his proclamations? Have our emotions, our compassion, led us down the wrong road? Are we forgetting that we may be doing evil as we try to do good? Renouncing Satan is not just to renounce sorrow and sadism, but also to renounce pride and empty promises, to remember that no end justifies all means. Therefore, we must always be cautiously vigilant against evil’s Golden Mask, both on false prophets and in the mirror.
Further reading
The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt
The Laws of Human Nature by Robert Greene
Ten Books That Screwed Up the World by Benjamin Wiker
Others by Jordan B. Peterson and James Lindsay
