AN EXPLORATION OF EVIL

So, if you can find a group of people who not only protect you but also give you a sense of care and purpose, then they will be where your loyalty lies. Military groups are similar. They also get people to join through the promise of protection and family and frequently play around with good and evil. They quickly set up an Us versus Them mentality i. Many groups often break down recruits in order to rebuild them in their own image and this is regularly done via evil deeds.

Gang initiations often require criminal acts, like stealing, beating, raping or murdering. One of the first thing rebel armies do to child soldiers and kidnapped girls is make them kill someone, often someone they love like their parents. This is a multi-purpose strategy.

Who else can relate? He aligned himself with a powerful father figure whom he believed cared about and protected him.

He was asked to kill a beloved canine companion whether he did is still open for discussion and, once he was revealed to be a traitor to his team, Ward believed he could not turn back; his only choice was to continue his evil ways. Yet the show appears to be asking whether this is the way it should be. It is why otherwise good soldiers commit wartime atrocities or upstanding people just snap and act in ways that no one ever would have imagined they could. Evil is often just a way for people to survive, especially people like Ward who were raised around evil.

After all, if you never know goodness, how are you supposed to be good? Our tendency to be so rigid in our beliefs about good and evil is dangerous.

If we go around thinking that we can recognize evil whenever we see it, we are likely to be fooled. It makes us doubt that the person we see behaving horribly can possibly be doing what we think they are. It makes us less likely to intervene because we know that person and they are not evil. It makes us manufacture justifications and rationalizations so that we can still believe in the goodness of that person and not worry about the evil.

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He was the one they all trusted to keep them safe. No one doubted his loyalty, moral center and commitment to good. But here is what they did that makes this so powerful.

Thus, while Ward continues to act badly, his humanity is still on display. His evil is a bit questionable or, at the very least, contextual.

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As a culture, we all have pretty strong feelings on evil. Although the students struggled to articulate their objections, their horror was mainly because of their belief that evil is huge, recognizable and hopefully rare. We delight in putting Hitler in a box and self-righteously saying that of course we would have immediately understood that he was evil and would never have followed him. If you read accounts of Hitler from people who knew him, they talk about how brilliant, articulate, brave, artistic and charismatic he was.

Those are hardly the characteristics we associate with evil. Moreover, Hitler was just one man. He could never have done so much damage all by himself; he had to have people helping him. Again, I can hear those out there claiming that they would have spoken out for the downtrodden and abused, that they would never follow or participated in such evil. They steadfastly believe that they would not voluntarily do mean things to others, especially those who are in vulnerable positions. In these very famous experiments, ordinary people believed that they were shocking subjects like themselves for the mere purpose of learning correct answers.