ECLIPSED BY EVIL

I often stray in wonder on how the seemingly ordinary individual can commit such heinous evil, but I’m starting to believe the answer may lie in the word ordinary itself. Ordinary means familiar, and familiarity is one of the great cosmetics of morality, for once a thing becomes sufficiently normal in status, it can fester undisturbed in plain sight. Life survives through resilience – its relentlessly stubborn refusal to die, the ability to adapt, to evolve, to an ever-changing world. What set humanity apart was its resourcefulness, for why adapt, when you can simply burn everything down. The problem, aside from being terrible neighbours, is that when tools are placed between life and its environment, detachment follows, and resilience becomes internal, suddenly, in the automated pursuit of efficiency, you’re rearranging horror until it matches the curtains. This, in part, is what makes evil so unsettling, for it rarely, and even then, merely, requires anything to a degree of passion at all. We imagine villains driven by grand hatreds, because at least hatred has the dignity of commitment, but much of history’s great evils are driven by those who are only half-invested in the direction, as the nonconfrontational become obedient through the idleness of their own morality. For great harm is often done not by those who love evil, but by those who find goodness a little too demanding on the day. When cruelty has been made routine and conscience has been dulled by repetition, the unsettling, begins to settle. I acknowledge you may question the choice of topic here, for it appears suspiciously to circle that of morality. A topic I have repeatedly claimed now to no longer cover. But like anybody who has ever claimed something to not be how it looks, only requires from you the simple request that you, like I, not look. I return here, because if it’s not corrupt governments or religious genocide, then it’s individuals loaning out their own children and drugged wives to be shared with strangers, like some pizza party at a book club. And I’m struggling, for every day the papers bring more to pile up on the history books of yesterday’s atrocities. And now, just calling myself human, leaves a foul taste in my mouth. I frantically flick through the dictionary of my mind, but pages appear missing. We have built a whole vocabulary to describe the world we live in, yet, time and time again, it proves to utterly fail in capturing the abyssal monstrosity of our own species. And I don’t know what is worse, – that a loss for words leaves me unable to process it, or that I have grown so accustomed to human depravity, that even shock has abandoned me. Look at us, with our societies, our courts and laws, built on the idea of civil order. We tell ourselves this is what sets us above the rest of the animal kingdom, but close your eyes and throw a rock, you’ll not only hit someone that probably deserved it, but look at you, why are you throwing rocks? To me, the truth is unavoidable – civilisation is nothing more than a leash, and when people are released into the wild, not only do they prove themselves to be just as feral as any other creature on this planet, thanks to their intelligence, they’re also the most creatively satanic. For as is evident, by, what can be held right in front of you as evidence. When history, on occasion, casually strips away consequence, people rush to invent new ways to violate one another. I could point to the activities that took place in China, to the amusement of the Imperial Japanese army. What started out as biological and chemical research, turned to casual ‘what if’ tortures, exploring the boundaries between pain and death. There is also the dehumanisation and genocide committed by the Nazis, carried out like routine administration work. Like each person was nothing more than a cell in an Excel sheet. Oh, hang on, I made an error, just let me delete this row. The casualness with which unimaginable acts were committed, especially with such events that took place in Unit 731, still, to this day, keeps me up at night. For most of this cruelty was not even driven by fear or ideology, it was driven by curiosity mixed with a power trip. How often do people mourn the cruel treatment of slaves, while barely questioning the fundamentally indefensible notion of a person being reduced to one in the first place? And they tell me that man was made in God’s image, so I guess the joke is on me, for I hadn’t considered that this also included His ego. And the most haunting part, is I don’t even know if I’m horrified by humanity, or by me. Because I am aware that hidden from myself in all my reasoning is a more personal fear. Beneath the disappointment, and the mental gymnastics stitching previous posts together, is the knowledge that I am not immune. Integrity is a line I believe I would never cross – but only because I’ve never had to. If history makes one thing painfully clear, it is that morality is not a matter of character, but a matter of conditions. History is easy for people to dismiss when it sits safely in the past. Gaza is easy for people to dismiss because it is over there, somewhere else – viewed as footage, broken by optimistic adverts. But when I look into people’s eyes around me and see the same patterns of evil, I am disgusted, and then in a window, I’ll catch my disgust reflected back at me, and realise I have the same eyes. Because evil is so often just the output of reason, and again and again, it seems that being human is reason enough. Because the writing has always been across the wall, all eggs are bad eggs when left out long enough. For humanity, when given the right conditions, will always optimistically set out to discover how far down into depravity it can go – until it finds, to its great comfort, that the bottom is nowhere in sight.