What Is Evil?
The heart is deceitful above all things and beyond cure. Who can understand it?
Jeremiah 17:9
As a human being who doesn’t want to be a horrible person in general and someone who writes in particular, I have become unbelievable fascinated with the idea of evil…mostly because I seem to have a much easier time writing characters who are more on the “chaotic” and “evil” side than the righteous ones.
Like it personally doesn’t matter how hard I try I aways end up exploring the villain and everything they had to have gone through to et to where they are whenever I make the protagonist meet them. After thinking about it I realised that it is because the pure evil villains are always having fun (which is kind of messed up when you think about it).
Moving on, what does it mean to be evil?
Well according to my research (as in I just asked my sister and got an answer) you are evil when you dress in all black, have a smug grin and oppose the protagonist. I didn’t like that answer so I dug deeper (as in I did actual research…by going over every fictional character I know that fits the evil category) and found that there are 2 types of evil: the hyper human (and more likely to have real world counterparts) and the inhuman (and less probable but still possible) evil.
The hyper human evil is the villains people tend to like. These are the guys that are just a little too far off the deep end. The things that make these villains truly evil instead of being tragic or something else is that they are aware of their evil, their monstrousness, and embrace it, feed it. I’m not talking about the off his rocker ideologist who thinks they are the hero, I’m talking about the guys who know they are evil and run with it like Emperor Palpatine, Darkseid and DIO (not Jostar not Brando just DIO). Although I mostly used fiction characters there are those in reality that were just as twisted as these fictional monsters. They can’t be reasoned with because they don’t want to be reasoned with (mainly because more often than not the suffering of others is a plus for them).
These people, for lack of a better explanation, let the one of the seven deadly sins (mostly pride, greed and wrath) be their guide and then direct those horrible impulses onto the world. When you steal to help your family you are sympathetic and you stole but for a reason, but when you steal simply because you want something or don’t want someone to have that things, that is when you are evil.
If you do horrible things for the sake of doing horrible things or to further your own personal goals, then that is evil. We might have fun watching them on the screen but when that evil crosses to real life, there would be nothing but tragedy.
And then there is the inhuman evil, things so disconnected from humanity that when they act, they end up harming us. Like killer AIs, aliens, and murderous psychopaths. We don’t understand them or know why they are doing what they are doing and even if we wanted to, we can’t reason with them, so we endure them. These are evil people and that act more like forces that should be stopped.
Or I could be completely wrong about all of this, let me know your thoughts about all of this.
In the end evil, according to me, is when you let your pride, lust greed etc. overpower you and guide you even when you are corrected. Purposefully feeding into your own worse impulses because you want to and no other reason.
