Good/Evil – How Damaging It Is

So fascism is the new democracy in Europe, as intolerance builds like bathroom mould. The cause of all this is quite simple: Idiots. But I’m getting ahead of myself…

Even if you bunked off all your Literacy classes at school, you will know that all stories require conflict. The easiest conflict is ‘Good vs Evil’, where the story will begin with everything being all lovely, then baddies will arrive, the goodies must battle them in some way, the baddies seem to get the upper hand, but then at the last minute good vanquishes evil forever and everything goes back to being lovely.

There. I have just summed up 99% of everything ever written.

I call this structure ‘The Narrative Filter.’ TV Tropes probably has a better name, but I can’t be bothered to spend the rest of my day flicking through one of the biggest and most interesting websites ever created. ‘The Narrative Filter’ is thus named because the real world does not work like the template I described. You are seeing reality filtered so it appeals to a broader taste. Not a bad taste – just one everyone can get behind easily.

“But Max!” pipes up a fictionalised version of yourself I have just created, “the majority of all stories are devised for the sake of escapism. Sometimes the real world is really depressing, and it’s great to escape to a place where it’s clear whose good and whose evil.”

Yes, your right - fictional version of you. The only problem is that fiction and reality becomes far too confused through ‘The Narrative Filter’. You only need to look at the last Call of Duty game to see reality condensed into a broad, untrue narrative. The USA are good, Russia/South America/Arabs are evil. The baddies are evil because they want to defeat the USA…for some reason, and the USA are good because they fight back with their infinitely more powerful military hardware.

Do you see how damaging this might be to ones perspective of reality? ‘Baddies attack so we attack back harder,’ ‘Anything that attacks us is the most evil thing ever,’ ‘You prod us with a stick and we nuke you off the face of the planet because you totally deserve it’

Obviously not everything is as dumb as the Call of Duty franchise and its subsequent hellspawns. But this whole thing of evil baddies being evil because they are evil and must be stopped because they’re evil because they eat celery needs to stop.

The best villains talk sense. Richard III is hated by all due to his deformities, so he decides to live the rest of his life as a villain. Salieri (from Amadeus) becomes jealous of Mozart’s talent in comparison to his own mediocre music and wants vengeance. Big Brother (from 1984) is of the belief that its ideology will be the first to last forever – and thus Big Brother will exist forever. Magneto doesn’t want to live in secrecy as a mutant. The HAL_9000 sees all the humans on-board as threats to the mission and attempts to terminate them. Nigel Farage suggests that immigration is detrimental to our econo-ohwait.

The best villains need to talk sense because otherwise they do not exist. They are just targets for our heroes to shoot at. We look at them and think “Oh, I’ll never be like that guy” “Oh, something like that would never happen” “Oh, no-one would ever partake in the demonization of a different race. It’s not like we’re making the same mistakes RIGHT NOW”

Villains need to make us think “If something went wrong in my life, could I be this person?” Without any understanding of how the villain works the audience will begin to assume that actions do not have motivation. Someone bombs a marathon and everyone is like “That person must be evil. There is no other reason” Someone drives a plane through two towers and everyone is like “These people just want to watch the world burn. They had absolutely no reason to attack us.” People who vote UKIP are like “We’re not racist. We just want all these brown people out of our country.”

Our entertainment is propaganda. Ever since the Bible, good and evil have been finite states with no middle ground or motivation or redemption – and it’s really, really damaging. Because people don’t know that there is no such thing as good or evil, humanity continues to make mistakes…and we’re not learning from those mistakes.