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[side_show]

Hey folks,

Since you're basically all strangers who I know really well, I'd like to invite you to contribute to my latest project:

I want to know:

The evil within you.

The evil you’ve done.

The evil done to you.

The evil you keep inside, that no one knows but you. 

I am a professional artist and writer collecting personal stories of the dark, ugly, awful truth for a project I am creating.  Stories will be used as part of a theatrical performance.
To share your story:
 
Email to EvilTheatre@gmail.com

Facebook & MySpace:  add friend “Story Evil-Theatre”

Stories can be shared anonymously, or you can leave your name.  If you want me to interview you in person, send me your contact information via any of the contact methods listed above and I’ll be in touch.

[jough]

Some doors can't be closed once they're opened, Smells.  Are you sure you really want to know these things?

[side_show]

I feel fairly confident that I've been party to enough evil myself that I will be okay with anything that is thrown my way.  The reason the anonymity option is there is for those who want it, not because I desire it.  I've done enough awful stuff to others and had enough awful stuff done to me, that I know what this is about.  I mean, it's the sort of job I've done before - sitting down with victims of genocide and war veterans and such and them telling me all the stuff they've never told anyone before, me turning it into art.  I've been there many a time.  It is part of the question though:

"Battle not with monsters
lest ye become a monster
and if you gaze into the abyss
the abyss gazes into you."  - F. Nietzsche (Beyond Good and Evil)

I'm interrogating this - it's the artistic journey of creating the piece.  Do we become somehow soiled by experience, or can we supersede it?  I don't know.  I'm looking.  The piece will be a post 9/11 examination of people's personal experiences with evil.  We hear the jargon that "evil doers" are "other" people, mysteriously not within our personal sphere, yet somehow threatening "our way of life."  My personal experience is that this is untrue - that the evil is beside me and also within me.  I believe in the possibility of inherent goodness in everyone, but also the possibility in inherent evil within everyone and that is the contradiction I'm examining.

[littlefallsmets]

The only time I've been purposely evil about anything ever is scorned affection... and even then... it was a fake kind of evil, like I was forcing myself to try and be evil and it just came out like this strange fun-house mirror parody of evil because... y'know... I actually loved the girl or whatever and I just was trying to talk myself out of it by trying to be a dick and failing at it miserably.

I dunno.

The interesting thing about my taste in media is that... whenever a character is just evil or just likes doing bad things, I immediately can't take it seriously. Everyone is the hero in their own story, you know, absolutely everyone.

Hitler, Mother Teresa, the bored girl working at the CVS around the corner... we all the all of us really believe that we're doing the best we can at any given time, you know.

All the best stories, I think, are about people who've done horrible things but getting inside their head and figuring out why in their life experience they've come to believe that it was all right and good, in some way, ultimately.

But so many people are so... desperately afraid of that, of that kind of story, because they don't wanna admit that they could turn that mirror on themselves, too.

I'm not saying I haven't done horrible horrible things but... nearly all of them have been accidental and I really thought I was doing the best thing that I could at the time, the only exceptions being in heartbreak.

I do have one thing, though... maybe I'll mail it to you, it's... kinda personal.

[wombat]

Is there something wrong with me that... I can't think of anything?

I often feel that I am surrounded by stupidity which has an effect that's the same as evil - the results are the same even though the motivation is different. But I think we often attribute worse motives to people than they really have - they're stupid more than they're bad, or they just don't give a fuck, which stinks, but I don't think rises to the level of evil.

So, all the lousy crap that people have done to me - I don't think I could apply that word to it. But maybe I'm wrong and that's part of why the world doesn't always make sense to me.

[theinevitable]

i feel the same way, but with less life experience to back it up.

[V-Adore]

I'm really conflicted about sending in my story, because it's something that relates to a topic that many people find evil but I, personally, don't; I'm split between not wanting to reinforce the general assumption that it's evil and wanting to relate just what parts of it did bother me. I'll think on it some more.

[theinevitable]

Even the most sadistic and destructive man is human, as human as the saint. He can be called a warped and sick man who has failed to achieve a better answer to the challenge of having been born human, and this is true; he can also be called a man who took the wrong way in search of his salvation.
-Erich Fromm, The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness

I love this quote so much. I wish I hadn't had to return the book to the library before I finished it. So awesome.

[Doc]

I've done some things in my life I'm not particularly proud of, but as LFM says nothing that at the time didn't seem justified to me. But if anything that makes it more evil doesn't it? Because built into that statement is the assumption that your desires are more important than someone else's. There's a good Pratchett quotes that goes 'Sin is when you treat people as things, including yourself.' and I think there's more than a grain of truth to that.

One thing that isn't that high on the evil scale (I think) but that has always stuck in my mind is this: Once when I was a kid, say around 10 or so, I was chasing my little brother around the house, not in a fun way: he had done something or other that annoyed me and must have just been going on a bit too long because my mother kind of pulled me up and asked me what it was exactly that I wanted to do to him and I just said 'Hurt him' and I really truly meant it in the sense that I just wanted to cause another person (my brother no less) as much pain as I could because of how he'd made me feel. Obviously my mother didn't let me follow my cunning plan through to it's conclusion.
It was a completely childish reaction but at the same time a kind of disturbing one since I know there are still times I just want to hurt something, not because I think it will make anything right but just out of a primal sense of vengeance. 

[melack]

I have a third nipple -- does that count?

[Doc]

WITCH! WITCH!

[AlohaDawg]

Hmm.

Evil.

Good vs Evil.

I think that our human position makes it very difficult to be objective about our own position between good and evil, and even the position of others. It does seem apparent on the really large scale that Nazi Germany as an entity perpetrated a lot of evil acts, and left a legacy of evil in the world by ramping up antisemitism, nationalism, racism, and homophobia to amazing and hellish levels. We can say that Hitler was evil, but was he more or less evil making orders or policies than those at the lowest level actually doing the killing, the torture, the mayhem? And can we, from our human level, be sure that Hitler wasn't being directed by something more evil than himself?

My Christian self believes that today's Protestant mainstream has an interesting diametric going on in this regard. I know many people who stand in church, week after week, praising God and contributing to the Church and its work very sincerely. But a huge proportion of them are happy to say they believe in God, and in Christ, but will not admit (particularly out loud) that they believe that there is Satan at work in the world.  In fact, those of us who are quite sure Satan is at work in the world are practically looked at like crazy people when we talk about the fact that everyone who believes should be in a constant struggle with their fallen self, that part of us that still reflects original sin, and is capable of Evil thoughts, words and deeds. All sin is, in fact, rooted in the deception of mankind and original sin, which was perpetrated by Satan in the Garden of Eden, and places us in constant tension and a state of spiritual warfare.

If Satan is a human construct, as so many seem to believe, how can God not be a construct as well? I have difficulty believing in God and the risen Christ in the absence of a very real enemy. Without Satan, Christ's suffering, death and resurrection, as fulfillment of God's promise to redeem us from sin and ransom us from death, becomes far less meaningful. Satan must be real for God to be real, in my opinion.

We are all capable of evil, and I have sinned plenty in my life, and that is partly a result( in my opinion) of evil at work in the world, and partly an unwillingness to look beyond myself and my own (perceived) needs. It seems to me that you are looking for stories of transformative evil, a deed that crosses the line that separates forgivable sin from unforgivable (in our human perception) sin. Of course, there is no unforgivable sin for those who repent and turn their backs on sin, at least to God. The world, however, is another story. The kind of deeds it seems you are looking for are the kind that we bury away forever, lock up in our own Pandora's box, the sort of thing that makes it difficult to look in the mirror if you have any kind of conscience. And some have rightly pointed out that those genies never go all the way back into their bottles.

If you had no conscience, though, perhaps you wouldn't identify those acts as evil in the first place...

Looking down at these responses, it's interesting to think about the words behind the words. I know for a fact that in our midst, there are criminal pasts, people with mental health issues, probably people who have been victims (and possibly perpetrators) of heinous (and evil) acts of exploitation and abuse. There may be people who made choices, like terminating a pregnancy or ending a marriage, or attempting to end their own lives who may have felt trapped in an untenable situation.  I've made peace with my own past, with the person I used to be - it wasn't that hard, I never considered myself evil although I have, in the past, been pretty callous and occasionally cruel for no real good reason other than it was easier than being understanding or caring or kind. And I used to be a lot more impulsive about my own pleasures at the expense of other people's pain.

Maybe some level of Evil is our standard state and  the transformative power is Good - I mean, in many cases it seems more of an effort for people to be kind. In so many cases, people are indifferent at best. But I like all of you enough that there is nothing you can say in this thread that would make me hate you.  I just hate to have my illusion of all my perfect, well adjusted and highly functional message board friends shattered...

[Doc]

Maybe some level of Evil is our standard state and  the transformative power is Good - I mean, in many cases it seems more of an effort for people to be kind.

I agree on this point, though I suspect I'm coming at it from a different angle. I remember someone posting in another thread (I think it was LFM?) about how a lot of the pain in the world is caused by the fact that we are living in an environment that we are not suited to. I don't think this is entirely false but I'd argue that many of the acts we define as good happen when we make a choice to disregard our own (generally selgiraffe) instincts and put someone else before ourselves.
I wouldn't go so far as to say Evil is our default state but Good almost certainly isn't. As A-Dawg says above, it's generally indifference. Most people just don't bother to think of others, which I wouldn't classify as evil since lack of conscious choice can't have moral value, but when you start taking others into account, as small a thing as it seems, that's the start of goodness.
We walk around with kind of two worlds: one that we see around us and this huge world that we have behind our eyeballs and we tend to ascribe them similar value, so a person who takes up a small amount of the world we can see might be judged less important than a big idea in the world in our head. When we do that though we're forgetting they have wolds inside them too.
I hope that made sense, I just had a triple shot cappuccino so I'm hearing colours and tasting sounds this morning.

[wombat]

We walk around with kind of two worlds: one that we see around us and this huge world that we have behind our eyeballs and we tend to ascribe them similar value, so a person who takes up a small amount of the world we can see might be judged less important than a big idea in the world in our head. When we do that though we're forgetting they have wolds inside them too.

This is so true, but you know, maybe part of the problem is that if you really think about it - that every single other person has that big world in their head that they're at the center of it - it tends to make your brain explode. Dealing with every single other person you meet all day, if you thought about this every time - it's hard to see how you'd get on with your life. Treating most other people as minor characters is kind of an understandable defense mechanism.

[Doc]

Oh no doubt, that's why I say it's not evil to not consider it, but it is certainly good when we do.