William Blake, The Gates of Hell
How do you rough up Wrath, Greed, Pride, Lust, Envy, Sloth and Gluttony?
What do you wallop them with? Blakean rhyme; with ‘bows of burning gold, arrows of desire? How about self-flagellation? Equanimity and acceptance? We sit in theatres of cruelty - in our living rooms in front of screens, and then writers, actors and directors serve us up with large portions of evil, for entertainment.
Assuredly, evil is better understood personified. Coppola, Tarantino and the Cohen brothers plagiarised the life of The Iceman, who killed over 200 people for the Mafia. These directors flaunt evil in quixotic, individual packages - they excuse themselves suggesting that they offer explanatory metaphors for capitalism, where Iago the killer is a City boy now, a speculator in futures who short sells country debt. He’s out for himself, for profit. He says:
There are those who know the score and fake their respectability and honesty when they are just out for themselves; in it to line their pockets.I am one of them. I am not what I seem. I am not what I am.
Greater evils come wholesale. Jung wrote how the failure to come to terms with the unconscious would manifest itself dangerously in European history, projecting the darkest shadows.
In the new dark ages evil behaves like a Djin: like the Belgian coloniser, the bombers, those who sprayed Agent Orange in Vietnam. Eichmann alone was banal and pitiable – an uncoiling snake on the guillotined head of a Medusa .
Evil perceives that it is put upon: Radio Thousand Hills in Rwanda chanted:
"Do not be afraid, know that anyone whose neck you do not cut is the one who will cut your neck...Let them pack their bags, let them get going, so that no one will return here to talk and no one will bring scraps claiming to be flags!"
The Raj was the victim of the mutiny; Davey Crocket was a victim of the Mexicans. 3,000 New Yorkers trump 655,000 Iraqis. David Starkey blames the Black British community for the recent riots.
And big evils trump little evils making them temporarily vanish. Those who claim common identity with victims may commit crimes, so long as they are lesser than the crimes perpetrated against them. The Pater Noster in reverse.
The Crimes of the KLA are trumped by the massacres carried out by Milosevic's Serbs. In this Zeno's paradox of evil, evil can subdivide within a finite space until finally it reaches its substrate - the individual. And there, there is also evil, the abuse of private and professional power. A teacher destroying the confidence of a young child with a single put down, remembered forever.
And how about you? Could you avoid the moral contamination that accompanies power? The powerful ignore right and wrong, they act upon the world. Talk to them about good and evil and they will smile. They have their own moral accounting systems which always leave them in the black.
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