What is the Nature of Evil?

[Ann Goodman]

And not knowing if John was good, bad, or a victim of fate could be a good thing. Some stories can leave you hanging and make you wonder. Was John the good boy or the bad boy or neither.

 

[Epona]

For your story, I think it's up to you to decide what the nature of evil is. If you want to have supernatural, evil beings then have them - it doesn't have to be the same as the real world. For me as a reader, I'd like to know why the beings were evil. Do they feed or fear? Feed of the guilt of the people they convince/coerce to do their evil deeds? Or maybe they just plain old enjoy it. Whatever it was I'd like to see what made them tick.

I think creating 'evil' people that are believable is a lot harder. As people have said, it's a very complex & subjective thing. The most important thing for me, is to try and give the baddies depth, and a reason for being the way they are. I think the reason should be something the readers will be able to relate to, or at the very least be able to understand.

 

[JDP]

To most of us, the suicide bombings you mentioned are anything but good, but they're seen by their own people as heroes. Surely, they wouldn't have thrown their lives away if they thought they were doing evil.

This reminds me of the Mitchell and Webb sketch where they play two SS officers. Looking at the skulls emblazoned on his uniform, one of them has the sudden epiphany that they are actually the 'bad guys'. It's very well done.

Back to the subject of the thread, I think you needn't worry about the nature of evil. Write your story as it needs to be written. Yes, people can be evil. Yes, perhaps a demon or something similar could be considered wholly evil; perhaps not. Perhaps there aren't any demons in the world you've created; perhaps they're the good guys. No-one but you can decide what the evil will be in your novel; it has to run utterly parallel with the entire make-up of your world. Does there even have to be 'good' and 'evil'?

IMO, a good story starts with just that -- a good story. Don't try to push it into a moral mould like so much play-dough. Perhaps 'What is the nature of evil?' will be the thought that your readers will ponder having finished your book, more entertained, enlightened and curious than they were before.

Go back to the beginning of your accumulated material, and I bet the tale will tell itself; you'll just have to write fast enough to keep up!

 

[RodneyMcKay]

And if she did have a very painful illness that prevented her from taking her own life (i.e. it wan't poisoning) and she pleaded with her husband to end her suffering and there was a $10m life policy, we, the readers, would spend the rest of the story not sure whether "John" was good, bad or himself a victim of fate. (And if the author was cruel to us, we'd still not truly know by the end.)

Ok... I obviously missed this part of the conversation

 

[malko]

in my stories evil is usually something you grow yourself.
people cook it up in their back room
and water it when they feel bad.
If it gets too big then it eats someone,
kinda like little shop of horrors
(without the end bit where the plant has loadsa heads, I hate that bit)

I think rhododendrons are evil, they poison the soil where they grow.
Are simplex virus, HPV and syphilis evil? or just opportunistic?

Is it evil simply not to be good?

Evil is an enduring character in writing,
to say that it doesn't exist does not ban it from fiction.
I like that people are so charitable that they paint evil with a smiling face.
That parasite enjoys feasting on me and causing me pain,
to think that it doesn't care is much worse.
Hating mice and other vermin, seeing them as evil and delighting in their deaths
does not make us evil.
It is fair and just to squash flies with glee because they enjoy spitting **** on our food.
That really there is no difference between two colliding galaxies, a rat, a human and an aids virus
and we are all part of a whole, doesn't matter.
We are free to murder anything we don't feel too badly about

because evil does not exist, we are free to create it.
the character of satan is the craftsman of evil.
He made the horrors of the world as a gift to god, to show his love.
They say god looked at what he had done and said,
'Clean that up, I'll be back when you are finished.'
Since then satan sweeps the earth with a tiny broom,
cursing all the evil that he made so easily

 

[RodneyMcKay]

Evil... very abstract sort of thing isn't it

 

[Peter Graham]

Hi Malko,

I think rhododendrons are evil,

Rhododendra, strictly speaking. How are they evil? I thought they were just plants. I've got one on my garden. I shall keep a close eye on it from hereon in.

Are simplex virus, HPV and syphilis evil? or just opportunistic?

Or just bacteria/viruses?

Is it evil simply not to be good?

If it was, then any act that was not in some way altruistic would therefore have to be evil. Including walking to the pub, having a bath, making some toast or doing a humourous impression of William Ewart Gladstone for one's own amusement. Or watering the rhododendron.

We are free to murder anything we don't feel too badly about

Depending on your view of the difference between "murder" and "killing" and assuming that you are not talking about killing other humans contrary to criminal law, I'd say you were about right.

He made the horrors of the world as a gift to god, to show his love.

That was a bit of a silly thing to do.

Since then satan sweeps the earth with a tiny broom,
cursing all the evil that he made so easily

Perhaps he should hire a mini-digger. That'd shift it in half the time!

Regards,

Peter

 

[malko]

Rhododendrons, come on, look at their spiteful leaves and angry, grasping roots.
Monsters, I tell you, monsters.

Bacteria and Viruses are part of life,
but a very crappy part,
why should any of life exist by blundering into existing
living setups and trashing them?
I'm only talking about viruses that are a pain in the neck
bacteria that want to sit quietly metabolising can go free.
There are those pryon things which cause CJD
they derive energy from turning brains to mush
is that really not evil?
I don't trust you to make heaven come true
if you're gonna let in menaces like that.

Yes, anything that is not a direct expression of the perfection of being
is a veil and an affront to that perfection
punishable by life eternal in the debased universe.

I don't really know the difference between murder and killing
'a slaughterhouse is a place for efficient murder'
'a slaughterhouse is a place for efficient killing'
seems the same to me

Evil is common and glamorous and current.
Boat loads of evil folk and their dogs abound.
All it takes is a bit of a try.

Being balanced and reasonable and detached
is totally evil.

Not killing people that piss you off is evil.
What right do you have to leave the human race unpruned
because it upsets your suburban babymorals?

When you do your inevitable wrong
don't pretend it doesn't matter,
it does matter, so enjoy it.

Evil won the second world war,
reason lost britain india.
Superstition lasted a million years of good living,
science is teetering on the brink after 200.
Which is the more viable prospect?

love to all

 

[RodneyMcKay]

Your personal vendetta against the gardens of the world is uninteresting to us itterlectials (aka me)

 

[RodneyMcKay]

we're good interlectuals who can't spell interlectual

 

[chrispenycate]

I suspect that, when all the cards are counted, more damage will be discovered to have been done for motives which seemed beyond criticism at the time than for greedy, selfish ones.
Take now. The most important problem, and the one from which most of the others stem, is an excess of human beings. And where did this population growth that is too fast for social mores to catch up with it originate? In the desire of the medical profession to alleviate human suffering. The most laudable of sentiments causing the most difficult of situations and, in the long run, self defeating as there are now more humans to suffer.
Certainly individual greed, and the desire to avoid any loss of personal comfort (traditional "evil" motives), is adding to the final payment, but the root cause is excess of humanity.
So, if I released a virus which sterilised ninety percent of humans, I'd be hailed as a saviour, right? By the time medical science had worked out how to eliminate the effects (at least in rich countries) the baby ploomp would have given a chance to stabilise or reverse desertification, to discover that, just as an army requires fewer officers than soldiers a society requires fewer administrators than administrated. (And could get by very nicely with fewer lawyers, fewer politicians and fewer bureaucrats; still, I'm not sure any of those could be retrained to work)
A bit of a "Greybeard" scenario; but anyone featured in a novel attempting to do that would be immediately classed as "evil", however pure their motives were.
Can something which gives beneficial final results be "evil", no matter what the original intentions? And can we condemn the doctors who, by introducing asepsis and saving millions of lives have created the present crisis?
I don't see how good and evil can be judged until all the results are in, and we'll none of us live to see that.

 

[Ursa major]

Often, there's a lack of thought about the consequences of actions and policies, even when they seem simple (the policy, that is, not(?) the policy maker).

Last night, I heard the procedings in the House of Lords, in a debate about the European Union. One lord - of UKIP, I believe - stated that by leaving the EU, the UK would be able to create another 2,500,000 jobs. I couldn't help wondering where the people needed to do these jobs would come from. Surely not Europe. (I further wondered what the other members of his party might think of this influx.)

 

[malko]

there is a nice riff on the 'good/evil' setup in the cartoon
'the powerpuff girls movie.'
under the guise of
'helping the world and making it a better place'
an evil monkey causes some undeniably perfect girls to do great wrong

 

[The Pelagic Argosy]

I prefer to read and write stories where the characters, regardless of whether they are labeled 'protagonists' or 'antagonists,' are motivated by a complex mixture of lofty ideals and selfish desires. The interest comes in discovering which motivations will win out. I think this approach has some advantages. 1) In the fantasy genre, it's a fresher approach than the 'band of heroes vs. a nebulous Evil/megalomaniacal dark lord' template. 2) The ending will be less predictable.

The fact that this relativistic approach is, IMHO, closer to the true nature of what we call "evil" is just an added bonus.

 

[Daniel Hetberg]

I think the question what evil actually _is_ is the work to be done by the author. Ultimately, there's probably no right or wrong answer to that question, so it's defined by the author, and his answer will likely appeal to people who feel very similarly, or possibly very differently.

Good and evil are opinions, and you know what they say about opinions... everybody has one. Also, if there are ten thousand people saying one thing is bad, this won't and shouldn't stop the ten-thousand-and-first person from doing it anyway, since he believes it's good. The ten thousand people just have better chances of punishing one guy than the other way around.

 

[malko]

In a full fantasy world it would be strange if everyone was a balanced psyche, can't there just be a few baddies? Baddies are fun and illogical and have cool powers that you wouldn't take home to mother. Somewhere there should be someone who plain terrifies every one of your hard, 3d, real, central, fully described guys. This thread was started to think up a new, interesting kind of evil for huscarl's background, it isn't any use if we all admit that there is no evil, really. There is evil, and it's in fantasy books. Big, scary, spooky evil. We just want a twist. And 'there is no good and evil, just a spectrum of self deluded moral stances' isn't a sexy twist. How about evil as threads of glass on the wind. They break on your forehead and you scratch off all your hair with the itching. Your hairs sail off on the wind, carrying the fibreglass curse. Bald, redfaced people, flood the land, wandering blindly; itching. Can we just let the real existence of evil slide for a bit and try to think of some interesting kinds, please? I write scientific body-horror, so all the evil that I can think of is about people making each other sick. Someone who writes something a bit more deep should be able to come up with some cracking ways to be believably bad, in a new way. I believe in good and bad, comfort and pain, friends and assmunches. I'm an old fashioned cat. But then writing is terribly old fashioned.

 

[Ursa major]

The "baddy" doesn't have to be cool and illogical. The cold and logical mind can be just as terrifying in the right (wrong?) circumstances.

To quote H.G. Wells (from near the beginning of War of the Worlds): "Yet across the gulf of space, minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish, intellects vast and cool and unsympathetic, regarded this earth with envious eyes, and slowly and surely drew their plans against us. And early in the twentieth century came the great disillusionment."

The thought that this might be occurring in my world makes me feel warm and comfortable, I don't think.

 

[malko]

The bad guys from war of the worlds had giant walking robots, cool power, ray guns, cool power,
and they waged war over a planet that was uninhabitable to them, illogical.
Just send one guy and see if he survives, don't commit your planet to a war footing
and then discover that you don't want what you are fighting for.

If they were so clever, they would have been the goodies

Plus,
'minds that are to our minds as ours are to those of the beasts that perish.'
So nice of HG to leave us the plans for his unperishable mind before he died, and his mind perished.
We all perish, bad guys most of all.
Without baddies, who do you rake with satisfying minigun fire?
without baddies, how do you make your love interest glad to be with your inattentive lead?
*sings* without baddies, the world is cold and dark, harsh and stark.
send me baddies without end,
send me infidels to rend, and demon's lives to spend; in warfare... *end*
Give me characters so rank that no person who reads them will ever willingly act like them.
Give me bad guys like brakes on the narrative gocart,
suppressing the sickening rise of acid-house self satisfaction,
allowing quick turns and leaps and crashes without losing our central identity.

If no baddies, why thick people?
cut 'em out, reason is not so difficult, let 'em drop.
People too boring to write about? Don't put them in either, everyone is worth the same.
Everyone is as good as they can be and we are all trying so hard, aren't we?
No evil people, because you never meet allmightybastards in the workplace do you?
There are no justifiably hated people, we are all equal and fine.

Even writing crime there can be no baddies, the killer is explained in chapter 3,
he's as much a victim as anyone.
No problem that the writer had to think up the rationale,
but the evil crimes just leapt to mind unbidden.
Evil is what you fight every day not to do.
Much of it is not resisted, it happens.

 

[robccld]

Evil, well to quote a somewhat famous line
"Evil is a point of view", from one perspective that evil act could be considered good, saying that it also means that a great number of us share the same point of view of what evil is. But to your question evil and its nature relys soely on the person and how far they are willing to go for their beliefs. To which I add evil is also a belief, intresting isn't though i doubt it answers anything but thats my take

 

[Moonbat]

(ha ha ha ha) evil cackle
(tee hee) innocent giggle

I'm loving this thread, what a deep discussion. I

have to say that 'Evil' as an independant entity doesn't exist. As many of you have said it is all relative, 'one man's poetry is another man's poison'. As Neiche (sp) says in beyond good and evil, an animal that slaughters defenseless cubs that are not his own is not evil, it is nature.

I think the most evil thing would be nature, would be evolution, the selfish gene and all that.

But Evil is there, or not-goodness is there, I do things that I know I shouldn't but I want to and the fight I have against my own will power (which I usually lose) is what makes me give in and do the thing thast I know isn't good for me but I enjoy.

Actually Nature is probably the most 'evil-seeming' thing I have whitnessed, especially insects, Wasp! they are just plain mean. We think that a grown man raping a child is evil and the parents and the child are victims, but imagine if the rapist planted eggs into the baby that ate the baby from the inside out and eventually escaped to devour the grieving parents and lay eggs in more babies! That is nature and not really evil.

So the ultimate evil that you can have in your book, is nature and one species survival pitted against the next.

I wonder how un-evil you could make a villain. I suppose if you wrote it well a goodman could be the villian to your anti-hero?