Vignettes of Evil

Evil is the term used to characterize insurmountable otherness and incorrigibly problematic behavior. The different ways we imagine evil affects the way we imagine other people our fears and our politics. What follows are some sketches and responses to evil drawn from pundits and literature and elsewhere. Hopefully this will be useful to anyone thinking about the different ways of thinking about evil and all its varieties.

From the movie Adaptation:

[At a seminar, Charlie Kaufman has asked McKee for advice on his new screenplay in which 'nothing much happens']
Robert McKee: Nothing happens in the world? Are you out of your fucking mind? People are murdered every day. There's genocide, war, corruption. Every fucking day, somewhere in the world, somebody sacrifices his life to save someone else. Every fucking day, someone, somewhere makes a conscious decision to destroy someone else. People find love, people lose it. For Christ's sake, a child watches her mother beaten to death on the steps of a church. Someone goes hungry. Somebody else betrays his best friend for a woman. If you can't find that stuff in life, then you, my friend, don't know crap about life. And why the FUCK are you wasting my two precious hours with your movie? I don't have any use for it. I don't have any bloody use for it.
Charlie Kaufman: Ok, thank you.

“...evil has no positive nature; but the loss of good has received the name 'evil.'” - St. Augustine, City of God

From Voltaire's satirical Candide, ou l'Optimisme:

"It is demonstrable," said he [Master Pangloss], "that things cannot be otherwise than they are; for as all things have been created for some end, they must necessarily be created for the best end. Observe, for instance, the nose is formed for spectacles; therefore we wear spectacles. The legs are visibly designed for stockings; accordingly we wear stockings. Stones were made to be hewn and to construct castles; therefore my lord has a magnificent castle; for the greatest baron in the province ought to be the best lodged. Swine were intended to be eaten; therefore we eat pork all year round. And they who assert that everything is right, do not express themselves correctly; they should say that everything is best."

In Paradise Lost Milton introduces his devil thus:

...Hail horrours, hail
Infernal world, and thou profoundest Hell
Receive thy new Possessor: One who brings
A mind not to be chang'd by Place or Time.
The mind is its own place, and in it self
Can make a Heav'n of Hell, a Hell of Heav'n.
What matter where, if I be still the same,
And what I should be, all but less then he
Whom Thunder hath made greater? Here at least
We shall be free; th' Almighty hath not built
Here for his envy, will not drive us hence:
Here we may reign secure, and in my choyce
To reign is worth ambition though in Hell:
Better to reign in Hell, then serve in Heav'n.


Frollo from The Hunchback of Notre Dame is a priest obsessed with the gypsy girl Esmeralda and will stop at nothing to possess her. Interestingly, Frollo is also an archdeacon and a deeply religious man. His decision to burn down Paris in the hunt for Esmeralda comes with the awareness that he is rebelling against God. Compare this portrayal to the significantly more tame antagonists in Pixar movies.

It's not my fault / Mea culpa [Through my fault] / If in God's plan / Mea culpa / He made the devil so much stronger than a man



We are living in times that I believe God will judge each of us for what we do and do not do. And if it's not God, it will at least be historians. I will go back to say what I said at the beginning of the year: There is great and powerful evil but there is great and powerful light as well. Get into the light and stand in it because evil is growing rapidly (Glenn Beck, Fox News, 2011-03-14. "Beck: "Evil Is Growing Rapidly"", Media Matters for America, 2011-03-14).


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