The Brilliant Side Of Bad - Why Evil Is So Compelling And Good Is So Insufferably Boring

Hannah Arendt was famous for her work on 'the banality of evil', how ordinary people do unspeakable things; and she used Adolph Eichmann as a prime example - a man of literature and good taste, cultured, and knowledgeable, but capable of the most horrendous crimes imaginable. 

David Brooks a number of years ago wrote an interesting article about human nature.  “Why”, we ask, “Do good people do bad?”.  Brooks wondered why this doesn’t happen more often since we are programmed from birth and down the millennia of human existence to be self-protective and aggressive and to expand our perimeters and secure our interests.

John Calvin believed that babies come out depraved (he was sort of right; the most violent stage of life is age). G. K. Chesterton wrote that the doctrine of original sin is the only part of Christian theology that can be proved. This worldview held that people are a problem to themselves. The inner world is a battlefield between light and dark, and life is a struggle against the destructive forces inside.

This worldview was both darker and brighter than the one prevailing today. It held, as C. S. Lewis put it, that there is no such thing as an ordinary person. Each person you sit next to on the bus is capable of extraordinary horrors and extraordinary heroism.

 

Frank Bales, the topical subject of Brooks’ article is the young soldier who massacred 16 people in Afghanistan.

Friends and teachers describe him as caring, gregarious and self-confident before he — in the vague metaphor of common usage — apparently “snapped.” As one childhood friend told The Times “That’s not our Bobby. Something horrible, horrible had to happen to him.”

This is a normal reaction, affirms Brooks:

According to [the worldview that prevails in our culture], most people are naturally good, because nature is good. The monstrosities of the world are caused by the few people (like Hitler or Idi Amin) who are fundamentally warped and evil.  This worldview gives us an easy conscience, because we don’t have to contemplate the evil in ourselves.

Josef Conrad in Heart of Darkness expressed it best in the words of Kurtz, 'The horror...the horror', the deathbed realization that not only were the cannibalistic savages he courted the very incarnation of human voracious paganism, but that all human beings shared the same trait. 

Yet there can be no denying the irresistible appeal of such pure, amoral, willful behavior.  Nietzsche observed that the only validation of the individual is the expression of pure will, the Übermensch riding over the herd, 'beyond good and evil' and the characters of Shakespeare, Ibsen, Strindberg and others have created characters of enviable, but terrifying will. 

There is something far more compelling about Richard III than Richard II, his predecessor, the one devilish and Machiavellian in his plots to secure his reign; the other given to fantastical poetic dreams, emotional weakness and a suicidal desire to die at the hand of his enemies. 

Goneril and Regan are unspeakable harridans, murderous sisters with no compassion or remorse who consign their father, King Lear, to madness and a solitary death; or Dionyza who without a scintilla of moral hesitation sends Pericles's daughter to her death; or the macabre, pure evil Iago who plots to destroy the noble Othello. 

  

Hedda Gabler, Rebekka West, and Hilde Wangel, Ibsen's heroines are women of pure, unadulterated will, ambition, and personal desire.  Lovborg, Solness, and Rosmer are all sent to their death by these determined, brilliantly soulless women.  There are others.  Literature is filled with such villains and villainesses. 

While one rightly and justifiably condemns Hitler and Stalin for their murderous and genocidal actions, one cannot help but wonder at how humanity, God, or Natural Selection have created men of such power and unmitigated, unstoppable wrong; and as such are fascinated.  The horrors of the Holocaust, the millions humiliated and frozen to death in Soviet gulags, and the tens of millions destitute and dying because of Mao's enforced collectivism can only make us wonder.  Who are we, after all? 

After all is said and done, Americans pity Joe Biden, a weak, beholden, timorous idealist, a fantasist and prayerful aspirant to a better, more peaceful, more verdant world; and cheer the macho, unintimidated, uncorrected, and outrageous Donald Trump.  It is not only American Wild West individualism that is behind the cheering and adoring crowds.  It is because Americans, Europeans, Asians love, want, and adore the great, the unbowed, and the Supermen.  It is no surprise that after years of a wailing, penitent, clothes-rending and breast beating liberal idealism, the Right has emerged strong and defiant on every continent. 

Despite liberal democracy autocracy, African Big men, neo-emperors and czars are still in power.  As much as progressives would like to believe that Americans - all people - are inherently good, compassionate, considerate, and cooperative, history has shown that we are not.  Strong men - and increasingly women - are in power because of an innate human destiny - strength, dominance, supremacy and rule. 

 

More importantly and less openly expressed is the desire to be like such rulers.  We are all Nietzscheans, not obedient Christians at heart.  Jesus may help keep our willful desires in check, but our thoughts are with the mighty.  Genghis Khan, not Joe Biden is our hero. 

It is no surprise that Islam is so fast growing and seemingly unstoppable.  It is a militant, absolutely undeterred religion.  Muhammed was the original Muslim strong man, and ISIS, al-Shabab, the Taliban, and Hamas are his offspring. 

Donald Trump has been called by the Left an insurrectionist dictator, a strong man, an autocrat interested only in complete authoritarian power; but that is exactly why he appeals to America in this early era of the 21st Century, a country tired of lamentations, penance, and dutiful compassion.  We were never so, never in the days of colonization, Manifest Destiny and Westward expansion, the Wild West, or the unbounded era of Darwinian evolutionary supremacy in the age of Rockefeller, Carnegie, Vanderbilt, and Morgan. 

Dostoevsky created a Devil in The Brothers Karamazov, and he tells Ivan that without him life would be a thumping bore, church on Sundays, fidelity, good works, and responsibility; but that we are not created to be such choirboys.  On the contrary we are programmed for irrefutable self interest, violent aggression and personal territorialism - all of which produce drama, tragi-comedy, and hilarious vaudeville to enjoyed not mourned. 

 

Liberal democracy notwithstanding, the desire for strength, unmitigated, unalloyed power is more a part of our nature than any compassionate, considerate, and inclusive Christianity.  We have been sold a bill of goods by Jesus, Ivan Karamazov claims, offering majesty, miracles, and authority embodied in the Church and giving it rise to institutional hegemony; but Ivan was wrong.  We love and want authority, the more unassailable the better. 

So do we want a Hitler, Stalin, or Pol Pot on American soil? Hardly, but at the same time there is no doubt that Americans prefer a strong, undaunted, undeterred macho like Donald Trump to his weak, feminized predecessor. 

Trump is not evil as he has been portrayed by the Left; and it is an injustice and demeaning insult to Holocaust survivors to suggest he is a Hitler.  His undiminished sense of legitimate power and righteous authority, and his absolute commitment to reestablish the foundational principles of the United States are not Hitlerian, but very American and very, very human.