For Evil 's sake

How many times in a book or a movie have you seen the main villain get into a monologue describing how truly vile and dark their current plan is? Don't they often start cackling with glee over the sheer evilness of their plan? They revel in the pain and suffering that they are causing.  They are evil just for the sake of being evil.

Those who make a living entertaining us and engaging our minds in flights of fantasy like to make things clear. They want it cut and dried so as to polarize the reactions that we give them. We are subconsciously left with the impression that there are only two possibilities.

You as the viewer are vile and despicable because you agree with the cackling maniacal fiend. Or you are a decent human being that wants to see the bad guy fail and the hero prevail. In books and movies, it is just that simple.

When most of us think about evil the images from those stories are what come to mind. But in real life, things are seldom that way. That is not to say that there are not people in this world who commit some of the same horrendous acts as the villains in the stories. But their motivations are often a lot more complex.

The things they do may hurt a great many people but that is usually not the reason why they are doing those terrible things. Many of them are lashing out at authority figures in the hopes of forcing grand change to the whole system. Others are trying to get even or to right past wrongs that have been done to them.

We have a tendency to think of people that do things that hurt us as bad or evil people. And while their actions are certainly not good they are not really evil in the movie villain sort of way either. I tend to look at things as either good, evil, or selfish.

If a person is doing something to improve the situation of another person or group of people and is doing what they can to avoid hurting others than I see it as a good act. If someone is doing something solely for the intention of hurting a person or a group of people and no other reason, it is an evil act. If a thing is being done for any other reason, I see it as selfish. Being, selfish is kind of a neutral, sorta grey area with both light and dark tendencies.

When being selfish a person is thinking of the benefit doing a thing will bring them. There is often no thought for how it affects others. Most of the things that other people do to hurt us are not done specifically because they hurt us. And even the very few that are, often are done in an attempt to balance the scales. You or another person hurt me in this way, so I am going to do that thing to you, to make it fair.

Many political campaigns, war supporters and even religious debates attempt to vilify the other side. They attempt to make it a clear cut situation of good versus evil. It really only takes a little common sense and an open mind to see that things are very seldom that simple. All of these things are driven by selfish desires for the world to be seen a specific way and to bludgeon you into agreeing so as not to be forced to see yourself as the villain in the story.

The world is not full of evil. It's full of selfish. And selfish can be good and it can be evil but more often than not is simply self serving with no knowledge or care of whether it is one or the other.