Reality doesn't match up to what I'm told it's supposed to; I don't know any evil men. I think I'm supposed to. By evil, I mean of course the sort of evil men movies premiering the week before Halloween imply are hiding in your car right now. The man with the knife. The man with in the suit in the office with floor to ceiling windows, fingers pressed to fingers. The woman who locks her foster children in the basement, you are not a person, you are a thing, you have to earn your scrap of bread, you dog. The ones who are cruel because they like it.I read about them in the news; these kinds of evil men must exist. But how could I know them so well when I see them on the screen? "Ah, yes, that is just the sort of evil that exists, and just the sort of justice that must be mediated to stop it." So many of the resonant stories, the ones I think about for days afterward, the ones I sink down into again and again are filled with this evil, from the time I was born, from Red Riding Hood to Lord of the Rings to Boy's Life to The Eyes of the Dragon to Slumdog Millionaire to Let the Right One In, it's there, and the evil men are real, and I know them, without having met them. Cruelty and hate hide under all the rocks and in all the dark empty rooms.
But I look around me now, and I can't see any. Yes, yes, I can peek into the internet and find any number of websites dedicated to chronicling the psychopaths and the serial killers and distant politicians. The kinds of people my friend Adam says don't exist since he can't see them in person. But in my day-to-day life? Even in my excessive lazy-job-induced amount of time on the internet? I see a whole lot of hurting people. I see a whole lot of lonely people. I don't see any evil men.
And maybe I should. If there are any police officers reading right now, I imagine they would tell me that the evil men are closer than I think. That I am glad the police patrol and protect and intimidate. Otherwise, POW, right in the kisser. And if there are any people who live without very much money reading, I imagine they would tell me that the evil men are everywhere and they own everything, and keep it for themselves, and there is no way to get ahead. Even the other people without very much money will do anything to get just a little.
But even those people aren't Hannibal, aren't Goebbels, aren't Maleficent, aren't Iago. Those are selfish people, or desperate people, or angry people. But evil?
Maybe it's the opposite, then. Maybe I know only evil men. And this is why all these stories resonate. Everyone around me holds all this potential for cruelty, and have somehow, miraculously, they keep that pushed down under, letting good shine out. So when Stephen King's cruel children characters torment his normal kid characters, and then are killed for it by supernatural clown/temporal-spiders or whatever, it's not that I identify with the normal kids, it's that I see the cruel kid within myself and want it to be killed there, too.
But that's too simplistic, too. Because I do identify with the normal kid. Maybe I haven' t been bullied to that extent. Maybe I haven't been tortured. Maybe I haven't had everything taken from me. But I feel those things. I want justice for me. I want justice for other people. I've seen cruelty, and I've seen oppression, and, heck, I even have this huge weight of knowing that by typing this on a computer I am in some way affecting other people's lives ecologically and economically, people I could not even attempt to visit and get to know without continuing to contribute to the same cycles and systems. So, I'm right there, too.
So, yeah. I do not know any evil men. I do not know anyone but evil men.
But all this seems to me like it might be a pedestrian conversation. Stuff, maybe, we all know. So, there are deeper questions this idea of no evil/all evil brings up for me. Two sets of questions, actually.
First, how do atheists deal with evil in the world? I don't mean intellectually. I mean emotionally. How do the people who really, honestly, don't believe that there is anything beyond the emperical come to grip emotionally with the fact that there are really cruel people around? Also, even as a hyper-social species as we are, why should I, intellectually-justifyably, care about people who are hurting rather than just kill them off? Just because I get an endorphin release? Because my genetics dictate that 'nice' survives? Those answers seem really shallow. To treat someone as a human, and humanity enough for respect seems like a mystical concept, not an empirical one. But one that I think most people are drawn to emotionally. Maybe I just don't get ethics. But, even on the plane of ethics, most atheists I know believe there are some disposable people. Some people for whom it's ok for the gene pool to remove via natural selection. That I shouldn't care about them because we're evolving past them. In other words, not mine, "Does it make you happy you're so strange?" Does reality match up with what you're told, and what you tell?
Secondly, how should we theists (small-t) deal with all of this? I don't mean emotionally. We've got lots of good reasons to care about people and treat them well. Everyone's made in the image of God, so treat 'em good. Love your neighbor like you want to be loved. Gotcha. I mean intellectually. It seems like an awful big cop-out to say that the reason life really really sucks for a lot of people is that God lets it be so in order to allow for free will. Because life doesn't have to suck this much, does it? And why should a person who doesn't believe in God take seriously the reason that evil is in the world is that God is too big and too wonderful, and his ways are above our ways? Isn't it just simpler to say that life sucks because it was chance for it to be here, and we evolved in such an odd way as to notice it? And also, are people generally, who actually believe what I say they ought to belive actually changed for the better? Actually less cruel? Does entering the upside down kingdom turn me upside down? Or, in other words, not mine, "Is it bright where you are? Have the people changed?" Does reality match up with what I'm told, and what I tell?
