Sunday 17 February 2019

Life Fantasies - the pettiness of villains, the trivial motives of evil

Something that secular modern people have a lot of trouble grasping is that evil-dominated people (villains) usually have very petty motivations of a kind that strike 'normal' people as trivial.

This is just a fact; but it takes a fair bit of maturity and experience to notice and acknowledge the fact. To the adolescent mind, it seems rational that a villainous person, a person scheming to subvert and destroy Good, should have complex, deep and interesting motivations. This is perhaps the root of the fascination/ obsession with anti-heroes and ambiguity that characterises most fiction of the past fifty years and more.

I certainly used to think that way, needing to look deeper behind simple-surface motivations seemed  obvious; and my feeling was along the lines of "there must be more to it than just that!"

Yet I gradually came to recognise that my own secret motives - things I actually brooded-on but would have vehemently denied to myself and (especially) to others if pointed-out, were often extremely simple and silly - immature 'life fantasies' of a really corny and melodramatic nature; imagined scenarios of being helplessly-admired, or what 'people' would think about me 'if'...

(These life fantasies are, indeed, easier to hide from oneself than from others - sometimes they can be seen-though on very slight acquaintance, almost at a glance - when another person is attuned to such things.)


The falling-of-scales-from-the-eyes moment for me was when I suddenly realised that - in the UK - many of the most powerful and famous people really, really, more-than-anything want to be given Royal 'honours' such as medals (like the OBE or OM), to be called Sir or Dame, or to be ennobled as a Lord or Lady or something higher.

(And this craving applies to the most publicly active Leftists much more powerfully than to the religious - as is clear from the actual distribution of honours; and this is to be expected because of the innate and increasing evil of Leftism.)  

I suddenly realised that many or most of the people around me in medicine, academia and science were actually planning their lives, and indeed living their lives, so as to gain and accumulate such honours.

Honour-seeking was 'the key' to their behaviour - in particular, it was the reason for their so eagerly  going-over to the dark side in such large numbers.


This is, of course, a very silly and trivial thing around-which to organise your mortal life... It seems way too simple, too reductionistic to be a sufficient explanation. Nonetheless, it happens to be true: it happens to be how actual people actually behave - and indeed this is so blazingly-obvious that it is hard to understand why I and others routinely failed to notice and acknowledge the fact!

And the same applies to the greater, and greatest, evils of Men - they are done for the pettiest of reasons; as seems to have been the case for Satan.

In particular, when a person feels 'slighted', even in a way that is objectively trivial - this can and does sometimes grow to become a life-dominating, insatiable obsession - leading to very extreme levels of rape, torture, murder, war, genocide...

Indeed there is no limit to what a man humiliated, a woman scorned, will do when in the grip of the petty resentments of an evil Life Fantasy.

4 comments:

Epimetheus said...

Demons have Daddy issues!

Seijio Arakawa said...

Well-intentioned villains may begin with a well-intentioned scheme but always continue with a childish refusal to accept feedback from reality.

It is always useful to ask when embarking on task X, "should the outcome be complete and utter failure, would it still be a worthwhile use of my time?"

Augustina said...

You mean all those brilliant, fashionable, great men and women are really Hyacinth Bucket underneath it all?!?

Bruce Charlton said...

@Seijio "a childish refusal to accept feedback from reality" - feedback from life is (and has been for me) a vital aspect of life; yet I observe that most people and institutions seem completely immune to any and all possible experience.

(Not sure if this is actually 'childish' - I'd say children are more inclined to accept feedback from life than are adolescents. Adults are too rarely encountered to make a generalisation about what they do!)

This is, of course, because evidence is interpreted in light of assumptions - no experience ever *compels* acceptance that life-feedback is negative.

But for me, negative feedback from life did (eventually) make me expose and challenge my wrong assumptions. Thank Heavens! But that does seem to be very unusual.