Consciously Evil vs. Unconsciously Evil

Why the latter is responsible for far more destruction.

Literary scholars have long marveled at a peculiar feature of Shakespeare’s characters, Richard III and Iago (the bad guy in Othello). Both plainly state to the audience that they are motivated by malevolence and a desire to harm others. Richard proclaims:

I am determined to prove a villain

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

Iago makes a similar statement in his confession that he wishes to destroy Othello.

The Moor is of a free and open nature,

That thinks men honest that but seem to be so,

And will as tenderly be led by the nose as asses are.

I have't. It is engender'd. Hell and night

Must bring this monstrous birth to the world's light.

Yesterday I wrote a post—The Spirit that Negates—in which I meditated on Goethe’s character of Mephistopheles, who states that “evil is my actual element.”

After I posted my essay, a critical reader contacted me to point out that, towards the end of my post, I conflated characters who are consciously evil with people who unwittingly participate in evil enterprises.

I wrote back to concede that he was right. What makes Richard III, Iago, and Mephistopheles fascinating villains is that they are fully aware of the evil they are doing.

The vast majority of people who participate in evil enterprises believe their actions are in the service of a greater social good, even if their actions include harming or killing people. They are able to do this because they have been indoctrinated to believe that their victims threaten or oppose the purported greater social good.

I thought about this today when someone forwarded me a news report about an a popular Australian YouTuber (with over 1 million followers) known as Pretty Pastel Please (real name Alex) who recently died from myocarditis at the age of 30. After the COVID-19 vaccines rolled out, she encouraged her followers to receive them and she expressed contempt for the vaccine hesitant in posts like the following:

I suspect that Alex genuinely believed in the goodness of her advocacy work for COVID-19 vaccines. It probably never occurred to her that maybe the “dumbasses” she reproached had good reason for being concerned about the safety and efficacy of the new product.

As we saw during the COVID-19 pandemic, the majority of people were strongly inclined to believe fervently in official propaganda, and never to question official orthodoxies. An especially terrifying moment for me was when Jimmy Kimmel told his audience that unvaccinated people should be denied medical care. As he put it:

Vaccinated person having a heart attack? Yes, come right in. We'll take care of you. Unvaccinated guy who gobbled horse goo? Rest in peace, wheezy.

An extreme iteration of this kind of scapegoating is documented in the book Ordinary Men: Reserve Police Battalion 101 and the Final Solution in Poland, by Christopher Browning. As the author shows, the “ordinary men” of the title were NOT Richard IIIs and Iagos, but average middle-aged men who were indoctrinated by Nazi propaganda.

Long before I read the book, I intuitively sensed that in virtually any scenario in which a population is subjected to fear and propaganda, the majority of people will believe official orthodoxies and play along with all manner of irrational and even criminal behavior.

During the pandemic, it occurred to me that a key part of everyone’s education should be rigorous study of chapters in history when ordinary people participated in doing terrible things. The moral of each lesson should be: Don’t think for one second that you are, in your basic nature, any different from these people. On the contrary, the probability is high that you would—had you lived in that time and place—done exactly the same.

What I find impossible to understand is how so many ordinary people have, in recent years, embraced “gender affirming” hormonal treatments for minors as young as 13 and sex change surgery for minors as young as 15. To me, this is so patently and grotesquely outrageous that it is incomprehensible how any ordinary man or woman could accept it, never mind advocate it.