ROBUST discussion

Here's my take on this important question:
http://coolmainpress.com/ajwriting/ar...

Here's Matt's own version, a good crisp, essential read:
http://www.writersfunzone.com/blog/20...

And here's the tweet to send to your friends if you want to share this important and helpful article::

#Villains in #literature: my analysis. tinyurl.com/b5cvkks @Beth_Barany @The_Evil_Hare @thrillsjute @Chrystallathoma RT

Good piece. Villains are hard to write for me, being all full of peace and light as I am...

Seriously, I enjoy the challenge, truthfully I do not believe I have ever met a true villian from whom to gain inspiration, honestly I am not likely to write what might be termed an evil villain. There were never any woods in my 'hood to give a reason for my mother to tell cautionary tales to keep me away from imaginary wolves. I grew up in a leafy town where folks did not lock their doors. No latchkeys hanging about our necks when we kids came home to an empty house after school.

I have no point of reference for that kind of villain. My demons usually come from within; unreasonable fear, anxiety, anger, the challenges we face as human be-ings trying to make sense out of life and then living it to its fullest through all the trials and tribulations thrown at us. Pretty boring stuff, but that appears to be the life I chose...

We are all born to evil, as the sparks fly upwards. The heart of man is desperately wicked, is it not? The trappings of civilization keep a lid on things, for the most part, but it's in the quiet times, the lonely times, where you see evil manifest itself in the individual in small and petty ways.

Interesting to see how marketing knows very well that we're all driven by desire, not just the villains (well, we're all villains), and takes full advantage of that.

It's a rare person who consistently chooses good in the small and big things.

Great topic. This should be discussed more. Any serious discussion of this by writers must invariably drag in tangential topics such as moral obligation (writers to readers).

Christopher wrote: "We are all born to evil, as the sparks fly upwards. The heart of man is desperately wicked, is it not? The trappings of civilization keep a lid on things, for the most part, but it's in the quiet t..."
Interesting topic, indeed.

The evil I see from a professional (civil law lawyer) perspective is people who hit a bump in the road business- or money-wise, and do something desperate and in a grey area to fill the hole. Then things slowly spiral downwards, and with every desperate action the line between right and wrong blurs more for these people.

Often, these people are able to excuse their own behavior (I'm a victim of circumstance etc.) and/or create some sort of rationalization for it.

I grew up under Apartheid. I worked with people in the late 80s and early 90s whose family members "disappeared" (their bodies have never been found and it is assumed they were killed by security forces or by their own comrades).

I also worked with a woman who was part of the killing machine that was a certain sector of the security forces. She worked with intelligence forces recruiting students to the Apartheid cause of the government before going to work at a place in the north where bodies were dug up with clear signs of horrific torture. To hear her talk about her work is to come face to face with a souless inhuman person who thinks nothing of what they did. She thrived on it and struggled to cope with life after black people were freed.

Friends who served in the Army during the late 70s and early 80s who served time during the border wars where we got involved with the Angolan forces at the time have from time to time told of the horror of war and what human beings are capable of doing for their beliefs.

I've had endless conversations with people about the genocide that occurred in Rwanda. Their stories are truly horrific.

Christopher, yes, man at heart is evil. The capacity to care for your fellow human being to the extent of giving your life for that person I truly believe is very rare.

Dave, no one is a victim imo. We are all given the tools to make the right societal choices. We have the power in our hands yet we choose time and again to disregard what we know in our souls is the right choice to make. I truly believe that once you cross a small line into the Dark Side, you can never come back fully to what is right. Your choices after that are all influenced by the possibility of going further and further away by what society has deemed respectable.

Claudine wrote: "Dave, no one is a victim imo."
I agree. I just wrote it to show how people deflect the issue. It is a decision, conscious or subconscious, to cross a certain line.

Claudine wrote: I truly believe that once you cross a small line into the Dark Side, you can never come back fully to what is right.
Well, that kind of kills the whole redemption theme, doesn't it? :-)
I am not sure I agree. I think some people, after they cross such a line, realize it, are horrified by it and search/find their way back to the Light. But I am also sure that a majority does not.

Can one truly redeem oneself? You can try, you can make better choices but for me, you are always tainted by crossing the line.

I don't think I've ever met anyone who was through and through evil. Perhaps I've just led a sheltered life.

Hitler?

More close to home Saddam Hussein? Not Bin Laden. That's fanaticism rather than evil.

Claudine wrote: "Can one truly redeem oneself? You can try, you can make better choices but for me, you are always tainted by crossing the line."
Does redemption come from within (redeem oneself), or from others (to me, you are always tainted...)? I don't know, just wondering out loud.

Hitler through and trough evil? I am Jewish, so it is almost impossible for me to say no. But still I wonder if he started his rise within the NSDAP with the idea to plunge the word into war and to annihilate all Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals etc., or if he initially thought he was merely doing what needed to be done to resurrect Germany.
Would that condone his actions? Of course not, not even remotely. But I don't think anybody sets out in live with the goal of becoming an Evil Overlord.

I've always had the impression that someone like Hitler (and any other person hellbent on world domination even if it is only being in charge of your local book club) cannot have a conscience that anyone would consider normal. They operate on a different level to everyday normal people. Redemption for him...I'd say impossible. The acts committed in his name preclude any redemption at all simply because the world even now cannot and will not forget. The pursuit (some would even say fanatical pursuit) of Nazi war criminals proves that.

I wish I kept a link to this article I read. It stated that CEOs and serial killers / psycopaths / Hitler types are all without conscience.

On Hitler, I've always felt that he took advantage of the mindset at the time, that in the end his annihilation of parts of the population had more to do with his own personal preferences and that the mood of the German populace at the time was ripe for a good old fashioned brainwashing.

Hitler in Mein Kampf pretty much laid out what he planned to do. That was before he came to power. In the west, in the office of The Times in London for instance, it was commonly said that no one who was serious would write such atrocities in a book. (I think the pornographic end of the indies would have come as a shock to them too.) But it wasn't only Westerners. In Germany people who were later said should have known better laughed at the book, said essentially the same, and permitted Hitler to take power, when they could legally have denied it to him, a) with the idea that under their eye he would be easier to control and b) as a potential scapegoat to be thrown to the mob. Instead Hitler threw them to mob.

There's a generally accepted scale of psychopathology devised by the Canadian psychologist Professor Hare. On this scale of 40 points, with 25 points as still normal and 26 points as defining a psychopath: In Britain 1 in every 200 people is officially a psychopath, in the States 1 in every 100, including most of the prison population, and all the serial killers. But most professional sportsmen, many high-level business leaders, fighter pilots, firemen, all kinds of people everyone knows at least a few of, probably wouldn't be successful at their jobs if they weren't borderline psychopaths. Hare just just tabulates symptoms; it isn't really a predictor of action; self-control is not only possible but common.

I've never read Mein Kampf.

To a certain degree you have to be a ruthless cunning bastard if you want to be at the top of the food chain and not be considered psychotically criminal. I don't know who is more dangerous, the man with the knife and the gleam in his eye when he tells you exactly how you are going to die or the shark who attacks you on the sportsfield or business arena.

Claudine wrote: "Hitler?"

Chairman Mao made Hitler look like a pre-teen amateur with his socialist policies. During a time when the world, including America, was tired of war, Mao starved around 70 million Chinese people to death.

That's not counting what Stalin did to the Ukranians. They lost anywhere from 10 to 12 million due to starvation.

The sad thing is, both Stalin and Mao had plenty of food. The crops, farm animals, all food got taken at gunpoint, shortly after the public was disarmed through 'strict gun laws' during those days. Makes you wonder why the history professors still think socialism can work.

Russia during the Cold War and China at the beginning of Mao's rule were truly horrific. For me though, the second world war has more of an impact in terms of the brutality that was practiced simply because we still today chase those Nazis down. There's that one news story of the 98 year old in Hungary in the last few days. When do you draw the line at stopping the persecutions? For me, closer to home and a better impact on making those responsible for heinous acts would be what happened in Chechnya and other parts of Russia when the wall came down. Yet no one seems as concerned about chasing up those people responsible. Oh they do track them down but it doesn't seem to be with the same zealousness as Nazi war criminals. Maybe it is because for the first few years of WWII not many of the Allies seemed concerned enough to do anything about the atrocities?

The Allies weren't in agreement on anything, except that they didn't want to make the mistakes of Versailles all over again, and give Germany a festering reason to start another war. Churchill wanted to shoot the top Nazis out of hand, and then treat Germany with magnanimity. And that, after some kerfuffling, is what happened. Shooting out of hand was replaced by the Nuremberg Trials, and magnanimity was paid for and organized by the Americans in the form of the Marshall Plan. Stalin drew his Iron Curtain specifically to prevent the Marshall Plan in effect buying their way to his very borders, not even having to fight like the Germans did.

Daniel has a point. You cannot argue that Stalin did not know what would happen when he grabbed the seed corn in 1928/9 through to 1932/3 in the great dekulakization; he had made an inspection of seedcorn grabs by the prototryads less than eight years before on his honeymoon. (Lovely guy; took his new bride into a war zone.) From the beginning, Stalin's industrialization plan, which this grain grab and reorganization of land was supposed to pay for, was the greatest warlike operation launched by a government against its own people in all the hsitory of the world, and exceeded since only by Mao's stupidities. Those are both manmade famines; thoughout the famine he made, Stalin kept up grain exports to pay for the machinery he imported, much of which for lack of transport rusted on the docks until grabbed by the invading Germans ten years later.

Stalin's famine is in TERRORS, the second volume of my series COLD WAR, HOT PASSIONS. Anyone who doesn't have a copy, ask and you shall receive. Stalin first laid out the logic of it at a picnic at Pereldekino, outside Moscow, with children playing around his knees..

Stalin and Mao were grotesquely evil, sure, though, in general countries tend to always find externalized evil far more threatening than internalized evil, which is a big reason why the Nazi stuff has a lot more resonance, I'd argue.

It's always easy to rationalize it away, even when clearly known, as "an internal problem" without some sort of Realpolitik geopolitical concern.

Well, that, and the Nazis put a lot of effort into mechanizing genocide in terms of procedures and even record keeping, which gives it a weird additional resonance, particularly in the context of the 20th century, the ultimate century of the industrial machines world-wide, a symbol of the repudiation of man's progress inherently leading to a better world.

Incidentally, Andre, I finished TERRORS. I need to write a review, but I'm kind of behind on everything. My wife got strep throat last week, so I'm still playing catch-up with a lot of stuff because I had to handle a lot of stuff for her when she was sick.

J.A. wrote: "Incidentally, Andre, I finished TERRORS. I need to write a review, but I'm kind of behind on everything. My wife got strep throat last week, so I'm still playing catch-up with a lot of stuff becaus..."

Convey our wishes for a speedy recovery.

I'll look forward to your review.

J.A. wrote: "Well, that, and the Nazis put a lot of effort into mechanizing genocide in terms of procedures and even record keeping, which gives it a weird additional resonance, particularly in the context of the 20th century, the ultimate century of the industrial machines world-wide, a symbol of the repudiation of man's progress inherently leading to a better world."

Hitler was very clever in using the laws he made. The convention, until you come to Saddam Hussein, and even then it takes a long time, is to conclude that even crimes on such a scale that they're crimes against humanity are essentially internal matters. In Hitler's time there was another problem, now shamefacedly not mentioned much, which was that a huge, huge, huge, swathe of the opinion-formers, the great and good, believed in the "science" of Eugenics, which in the popular form is the preservation of the race, social Darwinism, large-scale neutering, euthanasia for the "unfit", etc. Sounds like Hitlerit's programs, don't they? But the history of these measures, in the States in the first 40 years of the 20th century, and through to Mrs Gandhi's time in India, makes depressing reading. Hitler didn't originate most of those ideas; he stole them from respected, even revered anglophone philosophers. Eugenics was the Global Warming hysteria of that age.

It lingered in the States in many ways decently to the '70s and even a tiny bit into the '80s.

When I was in graduate school, I had to take a medical ethics class. Although much of modern medical ethics was prompted by Nazi actions, a lot of it was also prompted by various very questionable and often quite appalling if not downright evil experiments people did in the US.

Certain things done in mental institutions in the US in the 30s and 40s were Nazi-level evil in quality, just not in scale.

Not wanting to change the subject, but to bring it down to "story" scale, I'm going to reply on the other thread of the same name.

see you there?

Let's take a minor villian - Rush Lumnbaugh - he is an evil man who sows divisiveness and slings mud on anything and everything. He lost a tremendous amount of power with the 'Birthcontrol Porno' remarks.

So many of his advertisers skipped out - there were no commercials for his show for over a month.

I laughed until I cried over that.

I wonder who the original shock-jock was. There might be a story in it.

Anyone remember a movie called "Network"?

Very 70s yet simultaneously very current.

Howard Stern???

He's also gone from the open channels. Only found on sat-raido.

There was also a guy in a cowboy hat in Cleveland - he was the one who blew up with 'nappy-headed ho.'

Don Imus.

If we're taking "political radio figures who say inflammatory things to rev up a political base and affect discourse"* as a potential version of shock jock, then I'd step all the way back to Father Charles Coughlin.

*Rush, after all, is a qualitatively different sort of radio personality than Stern, even if both share "being inflammatory" as part of their radio strategies.

Rush is the first to be considered the 'head of the GOP' which I found horrifying, to say the least.

However, in a story, he's a very good model for a villian who THINKS their right when they are very, very wrong. He is an evil man!

I was tickled when his power base crumbled.

Father Coughlin, right, the first electronic demagogue. Back in the day when the Press Club in DC still served decent-sized drinks, I knew an old journo who claimed Coughlin admitted to him that his radio show was a conspiracy planned at No. 1 St Peter Square, Rome, Italy. But this old chappie, any time after about 11am, was also prone to see the X-files in his head, long before they made it onto television. He absolutely *knew* that these six-foot high cockroaches were the real masters of the Earth, though he always said, "the Universe", winking to show he was making a joke about the extent of their rule. Or maybe not...

Silly man,

Everybody knows it's reptiles, not cockroaches!

I remember once watching a documentary program on conspiracies. They kept bringing on David Icke as their listed "conspiracy expert". Yes, I get the old ad hominem fallacy, but I still think that when your "expert" believes most of the world's leading figures are reptilian alien hybrids that, at some point, you should kind of mention that because since he wasn't offering concrete evidence anyway, his credibility is definitely subject to debate and relevant.

You have an audience here, but I am not qualified to participate in the discussion - American politics has always dumbfounded me.

How they came to be the powerhouse they always imagined they were in their own minds is beyond me...

I don't believe in the conspiracy theory of history. The foulup theory accounts for everything that needs an explanation. For instance, the Global Warming scam was a monstrous conspiracy against civilization and democracy itself, and the people who conducted it were power-hungry scum, but it was an open conspiracy, very clumsily conducted, and exposed more by the stupidity of the plotters than by those of us who tried to explain that these academics lied and lied and lied, and that there were too many lies not to be centrally directed. So many of us said that the lies were of such a number and such a consistency that there must be central direction, that when the central direction was exposed int he Climate Gate scandal, it came as a sort of weary relief even for those who abused us for questioning "peer-reviewed SCIENCE" or, as we had been calling it for a decade and more, "the new religion for the dumb and dishonest".

I have yet to hear of a conspiracy known to more than one person -- which by definition isn't a conspiracy -- that isn't eventually exposed.

Americans have a sort of 18th century morality: They're good people and therefore they're right. It comes as a shock to most of them that others, with diametrically opposed aims, also think of themselves as good people who are therefore axiomatically in the right.

Too many Americans watch Fox News...

K. A. wrote: "Too many Americans watch Fox News..."

See, that's why I cannot comment on American politics - I would never have come up with that perfect one-liner!!

I've found that in my home state (Bianor is from Ohio) Fox has bought up all the little TV stations.

The state is now hopelessly in the grip of Faux Noose and will never recover economically.

My condolences, Kat. But you know, Americans do have heart and you will re-invent yourselves and if you can come together as one will be better for it...

I think I'll stay in Kentucky, sell eggs at the farmer's market and go hermit to write.

Simeon Stylites went hermit right out in public by living on top of a pillar for 37 years.

Presumably one had to step lively below the pillar when Simeon performed his ablutions.

Diogenes, who wasn't a hermit (far from it, he called himself a cosmopolitan, perhaps the first to do so), slept in a large amphora (vase) in the marketplace.

Isn't a classical education ever so useful?

Andre Jute wrote: ..."Presumably one had to step lively below the pillar when Simeon performed his ablutions..."

Kench!

Only ever so useful when one has the quick wit of yours truly...

Oh, ha ha, brain cramp, just realized what I wrote. The yours truly, of course, was meant to refer to Andre, the one with the quick wit. Some days I wonder about my grey matter. If I were of a mind, I might be a good research subject about ageing and the brain...

Dave wrote: "Claudine wrote: "Can one truly redeem oneself? You can try, you can make better choices but for me, you are always tainted by crossing the line."
Does redemption come from within (redeem oneself),..."

I think it's impossible to redeem yourself or others. We are decidedly imperfect, whether we are a towering incarnation of evil like Stalin or Hitler, or the little old lady down the street. Only perfection can redeem, no? Otherwise, we are just a bunch of tar babies trying to give each other a hand and ultimately getting stickier and stickier (there's the reference from my, er, classical education).

It is possible for a person to redeem themselves.

I know of a couple of Vietnam Vets who have become councilors to make up for the things they did during the war.

They feel they are making up for past mistakes.

I bet if you speak to them indepth about it it, they will still feel as though nothing they've done and are doing will ever seem to make up for what they did. They will forever try and redeem themselves.

I had friends who, during the late 70s and 80s, took part in armed oppression of black people not only in this country but in Angola, in Namibia. They killed in the name of a government that betrayed them in the end.

Pretty much what the Nam Vets went through on coming back.

I also have friends who were on the other side, people who fought for independence by committing similar acts of violence. For neither side is there any feeling of redemption even after the whole country went through a very public truth and reconciliation attempt.

Neither side feels as though anything they've done since the end of apartheid will ever make up for acts committed by both sides.

As Christopher said, only perfection can redeem and I fully agree with that.

To use a relevant example, Nelson Mandela is regarded as a near God by most of the rest of the world. He got there by murdering people or being part of an organisation that planned and acted out murderous operations against civilians. Oh they targeted institutional places and people but by and large it was the innocent who suffered. Not just whites but blacks too. Yet he sits with a Nobel peace prise in his possession, as does the last white president of a minority group in South Africa. Whatever those two men did to bring about a largely bloodless transformation and true freedom for 90% of the population, there isn't anything they can do to truly redeem themselves and get rid of the stink of dead bodies on both sides.

He can be held up as a great example though of what it means to try. And that, in my opinion, is all one can do - try.

I think there's a substantive difference between redeem and redemption. It seems like most people make attempts to redeem the mistakes and transgressions of their past every now and then (donating money or time to worthy causes, taking the family on a vacation, etc. all the way up to bigger efforts such as vets becoming councilors as KA mentioned). But, I'd argue that while these efforts are certainly worthwhile and go some distance towards redeeming the mistakes of the past, they never arrive at actual redemption. Redemption is waking up in the morning and honestly being able to say that one's account is completely and utterly paid. The soul is clean.

Mandela is a glaring example of what I'd say is the human inability to never wipe out the past. He's got a bloody backstory (one of my brothers used to live and work up in White River, north of Johannesburg, and he has the same perspective that Claudine has). How can anything he does in the now balance out the sins of the past? What does balance in this context even mean? The idea that good deeds can outweigh bad deeds doesn't make any sense. What human judge has the wisdom to say this murder or this lie can be compensated for by this act of service or this donation to the SPCA?

When did he live there? Doing what? We drove through there a few times in the almost 9 years we lived in Centurion which is a suburb of Pretoria, 65kms away from Joburg. There's nothing much there apart from farms, wildlife farms and Kruger Park, even now :).

Christopher wrote: "What human judge has the wisdom to say this murder or this lie can be compensated for by this act of service or this donation to the SPCA?"

And some, with truly terrible sins and betrayals, have doubts about the forgiving powers of even the celestial judge: the concept of the Sin Eater lives on.

As a novelist, I must say I find the clients of the Sin Eater more interesting than him -- after all he's just another mercenary garbageman -- right until the final moment when the devil claims him for all those sins has consumed. As a psychologist I know for a fact that pain beyond a very low limit cannot be perceptually intensified, but...

"He can be held up as a great example though of what it means to try. And that, in my opinion, is all one can do - try."

The very fact that they care enough to try says a lot about them.

Granted, I've not seen those things and haven't done anything that compares. However, making the effort is a huge admission of willingness to change.

Claudine wrote: "When did he live there? Doing what? We drove through there a few times in the almost 9 years we lived in Centurion which is a suburb of Pretoria, 65kms away from Joburg. There's nothing much ther..."

Claudine, he lived there in the early 90s for a couple years. He worked as a bush pilot, flying missionaries, aid workers, govt types, etc around the southern portion of the continent (Namibia, Mozambique, etc). He really enjoyed his time in SA--thought it a beautiful country.

Does the earliest appearance of a Sin Eater type predate the Israelite exodus from Egypt? I ask that because the concept of the sacrificial goat in Exodus (or Leviticus...one of those books from the Torah) seems to be a sort of Sin Eater: symbolic transfer of the community's sin to the goat, exile of the goat into the wilderness.