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Yes, everyone.
Which is to say: everyone tells a story to themselves about their lives, and in everyone’s story their actions are justifiable and make sense. It’s quite natural to think of some people as utterly incomprehensible, completely detached from reality, incapable of noticing obvious flaws in their beliefs, or valuing evil for its own sake. But mostly people aren’t.
Not everyone’s story is in the same genre. Some people are in a sitcom; some people are in a save-the-world science fiction novel; some people are in a mainstream, realistic novel about a father going to work every day and nobly sacrificing so that his children will have a better life. Me, I’m in a tremendously tedious biopic and we’ve been stuck in The Artist’s Early Life for an extraordinarily long time.
Of course, some people do tell stories in which they are the villains. But nobody tells a story in which they’re a lame, stupid villain; they tell stories in which they’re the villains that you wind up rooting for. They might be Punisher, wreaking vengeance on those who truly deserve it, willing to make the hard decisions for the greater good of all. They might be Frank Abagnale, living by their wits, cleverly outsmarting the forces of law and order. They might be Darth Vader, evil but oh-so-glamorous.
(In my experience, the last group tends to be pretty wimpy on the actual evil front.)
People are sympathetic to themselves mostly. When they aren’t, it’s called depression and it’s a pretty serious mental health condition– but even depressives, in my experience, often still have a story about how everyone has mistreated them and they’re holding up under adversity. That means that, for everyone you loathe and despise, there is a story in which they’re doing the right thing. If you try hard enough, you might be able to understand it yourself.
This applies even to the great villains of history. Nazis, Maoists, segregationists… they aren’t that different from us psychologically. I’m probably more different from the average neurotypical than I am from a Nazi with borderline personality disorder; in the right conditions, I too would be a Nazi. This is important. It means that you can’t say “I have a story I’m telling myself about why I’m sympathetic and good, so that means I must be sympathetic and good.” Everyone has those stories.
That doesn’t mean you have to stop thinking they’re doing harm, of course. People who think they’re doing right often hurt people in tremendously awful ways; the most dangerous people in the world are those who are well-intentioned but misinformed. But I think understanding people who are doing wrong is the first step to convincing them that they shouldn’t, and it’s an important tool to keep from demonizing people who hurt you.
Because… some of those self-justifying stories people tell should throw up a red flag. They’re stories told far more often by those doing evil than by those doing good. And “those people are Always Chaotic Evil orcs” is one.
Idomeneus said:
Good stuff.
I guess the question is whether people do whatever they feel like doing, and post-hoc rationalize it as a sympathetic story – or are making their decisions based on being the hero of a sympathetic story, but it just has tragic accidents when their story conflicts with another story?
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Skippan said:
This would be mostly irrelevant if you hadn’t ended with the line about Orcs, but there’s a story[1] set in post-Return of the King Middle Earth told from the perspective of some Mordorian soldiers.
https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/10329770-the-last-ringbearer
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blacktrance said:
There is a certain archetype of an unsuccessful (due to some combination of autism, anxiety, and depression) and villainous person. They don’t have a narrative of them overcoming adversity, but succumbing to it, and they’re self-aware enough to know that they’re not any kind of cool villain. Are they the heroes of their own stories? If they are, then the meaning of “hero” is stretched to almost be empty.
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Immanentizing Eschatons said:
Hmmm, I’m not sure what you are referring to here, where does the villainous part come in?
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blacktrance said:
I’m talking about altright 4channers.
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martinkasakov said:
(Spoilers for 12th grade assigned reading)
That sounds a lot like you’re describing Camus’s The Stranger. And although the protagonist (whose name escapes me) isn’t a good person — in fact he’s an unrepentant murderer — its hard to argue that he isn’t the “hero” of that story. At least as it was told from his perspective, probably less so from the perspective of the law or the dead Algerian.
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gvprtskvnis said:
“in everyone’s story their actions are justifiable and make sense”
“People are sympathetic to themselves mostly. When they aren’t, it’s called depression and it’s a pretty serious mental health condition”
This doesn’t match my personal experience very well. I see myself procrastinating and making up excuses for something I did wrong all the time. I don’t think my decision to continue to attend college rather than dropping out and donating a hundred thousand dollars to AMF makes sense. I also have very little sympathy for myself, but I doubt that I have clinical depression (I get in depressed moods, but it’s usually about 30% of the time with 70% being normal).
Is this really all that atypical?
(I *do*, however, see myself as the hero of my own story. Thinking everything I do is right and having sympathy for myself don’t seem necessary for that.)
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Immanentizing Eschatons said:
I don’t think this really makes sense to non-moral realists like myself. Pretty much no one values evil as they define it for its own sake. But people have differing terminal values, and I can’t think of any coherent meaning of “evil” other than having highly incompatible terminal values. So I guess what I’m confused about is what people even mean in the first place when they talk about “evil” as a separate thing from this then.
Now I don’t value anyone having bad things happen to them, and have no problem with the idea of loving thy enemy and all that, but I can’t deny that people often have fundamental and irreconcilable differences in terminal values.
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Dread Lord von Kalifornen said:
I’m pretty sure Ozy is a moral nonrealist.
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Dread Lord von Kalifornen said:
I think that the reason Darth-Vader-ish people are so wimpy is that the non-wimpy ones tend to get killed when they do unwimpy evilness.
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Lawrence D'Anna said:
I feel like 80% of the mayhem in the world would disappear if most people could be made to understand this.
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