"The greatest trick the Devil ever pulled was convincing the world he didn't exist"
- The Usual Suspects (1995)
We're always trying to be good, nice, perfect, heaven-worthy, human...anything that shows we have intelligent control over our emotions. We're made to believe that we shall be rewarded for all that. We believe we don't believe in those rewards - we do it because we're good.
But, what good is intelligence if you can't test it? What good is anything if you don't have the courage to push it? If the fear of the rope snapping is keeping you from bungee jumping, can you really call yourself someone always up for challenges?
I challenge everything - my intelligence, my humanity, my "niceness". After all, had I not done that 26 years ago, I would not know how to crawl, walk, talk or hold a spoon. When is it that we start letting the fear of pain or non-conformity stop us from "trying something different"? So, I push myself as much as I can until I see where my limits lie.
How loud can I listen to music before I lose my hearing? How much weight can I gain before I get disgusted at the guy in the mirror? How much gore can I watch before I start feeling queasy? How much physical or mental pain can I take before I snap? How long I can I stay calm in a tense situation? How bad can my thoughts get?
Ever read about those people who put puppies in bags & drown them in rivers or those serial killers or people that keep others captive & torture them? Ever wondered what makes a person so evil? I have. But most of us stop there. I go further. I put myself in their shoes & wonder what would motivate a normal person to do that. Is it really a psychological condition? Is it some wrong signals in their brains? Then why don't we see that in apes or any other intelligent animals? If a cheetah can develop maternal instincts toward a baby baboon, surely she is intelligent enough to do something more sinister.
You put yourself in the shoes of "evil people" & you see things that you don't wanna know. You realize that any normal person could become like them & continue living like that forever without anyone finding out. Is it strange that most cases never get solved? If you believe that the world is what shows like CSI or Criminal Minds tell you, then this is your "Wake the fuck up & look around" call.
Of course, by now, you probably think I'm some kind of sick twisted person that should be put in a straitjacket & left to smear their own feces all over a room with padded walls and I don't blame you. Being brought up in a world where the only path you're taught to walk down is the path to conformity. As soon as you stray from it, you are labelled a traitor, a rebel, a crazy, etc - anything that will make you feel "abnormal".
What is normal? A set of rules defined by a set of people who believe they're right? So, those African cannibal tribes aren't wrong are they? Their rules state that they maintain the size and prosperity of their tribe by killing their own. Oh, but they're uncivilized, aren't they? Funny how we do the same in a broader sense and just call them "soldiers" and not "sacrificed tribesmen".
War is different you say. No one eats their own countrymen. Sure, we don't. The tribesmen sacrifice maybe one or two people and eat them. We sacrifice hundreds and thousands for our so-called freedom - an abstract emotion that only feeds our so-called minds and big egos. And we call ourselves "civil".
Talking about evil people, what do you do to a man who kills another man? You either lock him up for eternity or hang him. In both cases, you are eventually taking his life - a metaphor for killing. As Gandhi once said, "An eye for an eye makes the whole world blind". And that is what we have become - blind. We do not see what we have been told not to see.
Of course you want to "See no evil, hear no evil, speak no evil" but there is no "Understand no evil". So, what happened there?
These are the questions I ask and those are the questions I try to answer. I'm pretty sure you've heard the phrase "Get to the root of the problem". Of course you can't do that if you don't dig deep enough. Not every problem is like a banyan tree - way too complex but with all the roots visible high above the ground. Instead, if you'd like to get to the root, you need to dig hard and deep and you will get your hands dirty and that is what I do.
It is only after you've dug deep enough and looked at every possible cause that you realize that the basic idea behind every evil thought and every evil deed is very simple. It is not a matter of motivation or psychology or a medical defect in a person. It is the basis of human nature itself that is the reason behind us noticing this behavior in human beings only: "Our ability to question"
Yes, ladies and gentlemen, it is our ability to question that is the reason why serial killers are who they are and people throw puppies into rivers. It is the reason why people keep others captive and rapists do what they do. It is the ability to question that makes us want to harm someone else or get into fights.
"What? That makes no sense" is what you'll say and I agree because it's exactly what I told myself a few moments ago. You see, when I started writing this article, I was questioning myself "How deep can I go? How evil can I be?" and I came to the general conclusion that most people end up the way they are because they have control over who they want to be.
Contrary to popular opinion, I believe that every person has the ability to choose who they want to be. Of all those men and women having marriage woes, why is that man the only one that kills his spouse? Because he wants to and chooses to and that was going to be my conclusion: "I am who I am because I wish to be so" but then I realized that that couldn't be it. There must be a deeper motivation.
And when I asked myself "When I'm trying to be what I want to be, how do I choose which one?" and the question that came to mind was "What do I want to be and why do I want to be so?". It was then that I realized that it wasn't our choice that mattered, but the motivation behind that choice i.e. our ability to question that choice - something no animal is known to do.
Maybe that's why society asks us not to question anything. If we did start doing so, we may not stop and then we'll be labeled "evil" or "abnormal". But then you gotta ask yourself, if all of us started "questioning everything" and "understanding evil", would it still be called "evil"? More importantly, would we still be considered "abnormal"?
It is only after you've gone deep enough and understood all of this that you will (like me) sit back, look around, look at yourself and ask "Am I really evil?". And my answer will always be:
"Well, I don't know. Are you?"
