On Recognizing Evil: Lessons from Mythology and The Good Place
Question from a reader who would like to go by the name Yumi:
99% of the time, evil does not do evil for evil’s sake. It’s for the good.
Hitler believed that the world without Jews, is a better world. In his eyes he was a good man, he was even a vegetarian.
If one reads any letters from evil people, one will see that in their eyes they are doing good.
So how does one know which side is good if both claim they are fighting the good fight? I might not have the ultimate answer, but I did pick up a common theme of how evil operates.
Falsehood wil always lose against the truth. On an even playing field, the truth will knock falsehood out of the park every time. So for evil to win, it has to uneven the playing field.
And the way evil does it is by
A. Silencing truth. banning, calling the opposition all the names in the book/not debating the message, debating the messenger.
B. Centralization. Evil loves centralization. This way it has the power to silence the truth.
C. One system for all. One centralized school system, healthcare, scientific body, etc.
The point is, not letting the truth come forward because it gives a means for the truth to be heard, falsehood will lose.
So, anytime I am not sure which side is wrong, I look for who is doing the silencing.
I would love to read your take on how one can know which side is the good side.
Is there a way for laymen to know which side is the good side when both sides claim they are fighting for the side of good?
Yumi,
Thanks for this prompt. While what you are saying seems obvious to me, I think a lot of people haven’t realized this yet and have an inaccurate mental caricature of evil.
Perhaps growing up on cartoons misled us. They portrayed the bad guy as a nasty-looking, cruel, sinister supervillain, plotting to destroy our hero out of sheer jealousy or senseless, capricious hatred. Think The Wizard of Oz’s Wicked Witch of the West, The Little Mermaid’s Ursula, and the supervillains from a whole bunch of comic book based films I’ve never seen. I mean, just look at these guys. Their whole appearance screams danger. It’s like, thanks for the heads up! I’m gonna run now.
Religious images of overtly demonic, torture-hungry devils did this too. Once again, just look at this evil mofo.
What we ought to have paid better attention to were fables such as these, which portray the manner in which evil uses deception and exploits our personal weaknesses.
In Little Red Riding Hood and the Big Bad Wolf, the evil wolf disguises himself as the young girl’s grandmother, pretending to be safe and nurturing in all the ways that grandmother was. What is exploited here is not only the child’s naïveté, but her agreeableness and desire to be seen as a good girl. She wouldn’t want to be rude to her sweet old grandmother! What kind of granddaughter would that make her? Deadly sins of the girl: pride.
In The Emperor’s New Clothes, charlatan grifters flatter the vain emperor with praise, and promise him the finest clothes that will be visible only to those of upstanding character such as himself. The emperor hides the anxiety he feels when he cannot see the cloth, sowing a seed of doubt in his mind about his own character. He egoically wants to believe he is a good person — the best, in fact — but it’s more important to him to be seen as a good person. So he goes along with the charade, concealing his doubts about the evil in his own heart. Meanwhile, everyone around him participates in this same deception, from the time the imaginary clothes are first woven in the palace, until the much-anticipated parade in which the emperor shows off his fine adornments to the entire town. All the nobles and townspeople alike experience the same self-doubt, and fall prey to the same social pressure to prove their moral excellence, so they all pretend they can see the cloth, too. This embarrassing nonsense goes on until finally a child calls it out for what it is. At first, the response is to scold and silence the child, who clearly must have a rotten heart. It takes several brave people admitting the reality of what their own eyes are telling them before the entire grift is exposed. What is exploited here is our vanity and desire to be seen as good; shame; and susceptibility to groupthink. Deadly sins of the duped: greed, envy, and pride.
Similarly, in Aesop’s The Owl and the Grasshopper, the owl seduces the grasshopper with flattery and the offer of a tasty drink, only to eat him. What is exploited here is again, you guessed it, vanity; our willingness to doubt our instincts for the sake of being agreeable; lazy desire for comfort and avoidance of the mental effort of discernment; and our attraction to the pleasures of the senses: the owl’s soothing voice and the promise of delicious nectar. Deadly sins of the grasshopper: sloth, gluttony and pride.
In his The Scorpion and the Frog, the scorpion promises not to hurt the frog, encouraging the frog to distrust his instincts. Then, the scorpion stings the frog after all, admitting it is his nature to do so; it was the frog’s fault for believing an enemy attempting to deceive him. What is exploited here is, once again, our willingness to doubt our own instincts in order to play nice and be seen as helpful. Deadly sins of the frog: pride.
In ancient Greek mythology, most famously The Odyssey, sirens lured weary sailors to their demise with their irresistibly beautiful songs and devastatingly gorgeous appearances. What is exploited here is desire and fatigue. Deadly sins of the sailors: lust and sloth.
There is one story that deserves greater analysis. This is a piece I’ve been meaning to write for ages.
And now, for a deeper dive: The Good Place.
In the contemporary adult show The Good Place, a devil disguised as a handsome, kind, and friendly older gentleman by the name of Michael — quite literally the name of one of the most famous angels — invents a new form of torturing humans in the afterlife. Instead of physical punishment, he abuses them psychologically. He engineers a new kind of hell that disguises itself as heaven and slowly unravels through a series of embarrassing mishaps combined with setups in which each victim is paired up with someone uniquely suited to get under their skin via nothing more than personality quirks. What is exploited here is again vanity, agreeableness, self-doubt, and shame.
The deadly sins of the victims of The Good Place deserve individual elaboration. Tahani: greed, envy (toward her sister), and pride. Chidi: pride (about his morals) and wrath (his shame and terror toward his own anger causes him to avoid confrontation). Jason: sloth and gluttony. Eleanor: lust (toward men and women), gluttony (eg., shrimp and other pleasures), sloth (moral laziness), greed (self-centeredness in every way possible), envy (toward Tahani especially), wrath (as unchecked as her greed), and pride (in feeling superior to the rules of good moral conduct throughout her life).
Perhaps the most interesting character in The Good Place is Chidi. Eleanor knows she’s a dirtbag and belongs in hell. Jason is openly idiotic and immoral. Tahani believes she is an excellent person, but is only deceiving herself; her vanity, envy, pride, and greed are abundantly apparent to anyone else.
Chidi, on the other hand, has worked hard his entire life to try to be a good person in every way possible. He questions the ethics of each and every decision before him, down to which muffin he should eat for breakfast, to the irksome bewilderment (and ultimately alienation) of everyone around him. Ultimately, what traps him is his reluctance to embrace his humanity. Chidi is not a prideful person by any means — for the most part he is humble, modest, and meek — but there is a certain arrogance in believing one can unilaterally transcend the task of fully incarnating as a human. He is scared to feel his bodily desires and his emotions, even love. He somehow believes that he can rise above all instincts and sensations in the intellectual pursuit of moral good. When he finally melts down in the scene where he goes berserk as a professor in front of his entire college class, he reveals the anger — or the deadly sin known as wrath — that he has been unwilling to face the entire time. Yet we must feel anger in order to be alive, to self-actualize, to know what we want and when we have been crossed or thwarted. Ironically, what traps Chidi is not his indulgence in the sins, but his rigid, fear-based abstinence from them.
As the characters evolve, Chidi becomes spontaneous for the first time in his (after)life, and begins to experience real happiness. Eleanor becomes kind, compassionate, and helpful as she falls for Chidi. Tahani’s armor drops as she starts to see the emptiness in her envy, greed, and vanity, and drops the shame-based false pride in favor of embracing what genuinely interests her and forming real relationships that have nothing to do with performance. As for Jason, while the archetype of the fool never changes, it’s the innocence we see at the heart of the fool, despite all the folly he is prone to when in an immoral environment, that ultimately saves him.
For the sake of this article, I’m not going to analyze Michael. He is an interesting character with a vast story arc, but for now, I will be working with the archetypes displayed earlier in the show, and Michael as Devil.
The Devil doesn’t play by your set of rules.
Unless you are a sociopath through and through, Evil doesn’t play by any set of rules you could come up with.
Your morals are useful to the (metaphorical) Devil in one sense alone: how they can be manipulated.
If Evil does exist — and I believe it does, though I do not ascribe to any religion — it will use any tool at its disposal. Perhaps it even derives an extra special form of delight from using your weaknesses against you.
Evil does not at all mind wearing the mask of Good. Evil will dress itself up as adoring grandmother, seductive siren, charismatic and subservient tailor, or architect of Heaven.
Evil doesn’t grimace and glare; it grins and twinkles.
Evil will tell you you look nice today, exploiting your vanity. It will tell you to relax and take a load off, appealing to your sloth. It will present you with an enticing buffet, tempting your gluttony. It will seduce you into bed, weaponizing your lust. It will guilt you for having boundaries, manipulating your wrath. It will offer promises of success, luring your greed. Perhaps most importantly, it will tell you what a good person you are, indulging your pride.
There is little in the world so useful to Evil as a social movement that believes it is dedicated to the greater good, composed of individuals who are victims of their own moral pride.
The takeaways: know yourself
Examine your own shadow. It is where all deadly sins can be found.
Be aware of where you are gullible and naive. Recall when you have been duped. Locate your moral Achilles heels, your intellectual blind spots, your emotional hooks.
Understand what is tempting to you. Especially assess your desires for approval, belonging, and certitude.
What are the shiniest objects that might catch your attention? Are they the pleasures of the senses? The temptation to rest your weary mind? The admiration of a certain class of people?
Shame is a powerful inhibitor. What could someone do, guilt trip you for, or accuse you of that would most readily trigger your shame, and therefore your silence?
So is self-doubt. Where might someone sow seeds of doubt in your conscience?
Examine your fears: what is the worst that could happen to you? How does this fear control your actions? What risks does it compel you to avoid at all costs?
Find your instincts, and what blocks you from listening to and acting on them.
Notice what sets you apart from the crowd. Ask yourself if you are really so certain that the crowd has it right. Perhaps they are wrong, due merely to the same human foibles you face in yourself every day.
The good news: you are not evil
…you are simply as susceptible to evil as the next person, and as anyone in history. Beware of the pride that would have you believe otherwise. Examine yourself. Then study the landscape of this Earthly realm, the bridge between Heaven and Hell where the ways of Good and Evil dance their eternal tango.
