The (Un)recognised Faces of Evil
The most atrocious regimes have always presented themselves as the most righteous or virtuous.
Looking at it, not seeing it.
- Marillion, “House”
Actor Adam Driver made an interesting comment a few years ago when discussing his role in the Star Wars movies, a character called Kylo Ren. In that story, Kylo Ren is an tyrannical leader of a galactic empire, the commander of the First Order, as well as its Supreme Leader, who doesn’t back down from any kind of violence or oppression in his pursuit of establishing universal control and crushing the resistance. Driver, now a two-time Academy Award nominee, said that as an actor playing the role, he never saw the vicious character as evil, but only as someone who tried to do what was right.
I remember how the comment sunk in me at the time, which I believe proves Driver’s great insight and ability as an actor – for as history shows, tyrannical leaders have hardly ever seen themselves as wrong or evil, despite the most atrocious kinds of acts they have committed. Actually, to the contrary, it is precisely the most authoritarian and unkind ideologies and societies that have generally posed themselves as the kindest, most righteous and tolerant of all. After all, they have only aimed at a fairer society, they say, preserving or representing the true virtue. So it is certainly true that evil hardly ever recognises itself as such, never claims itself as evil.
In the Soviet Union it was a crime to doubt that Communism would lead its restrained ‘subjects’ to ‘a brighter future’, and even though its regime had executed tens of millions, the posters still carried cheering, gleeful faces that said they were part of the happiest and most free society ever – it was the liberal West that didn’t care for its people. Nazi Germany claimed it was after national unity and prosperity, and extinguishing the ‘weak’ was only a matter of greater societal and moral good. The Khmer Rouge of Cambodia, carrying out continuous mass executions between 1975 and 1979, decimating estimated 25% of the population, was precisely the leadership that renamed the country the Democratic Kampuchea, and similarly, in Africa, the Democratic Republic of Congo has had a long history of being one of the most autocratic and corrupt countries in the entire continent. Even more remarkably, the Rwandan genocide of 1994 was largely carried out with the thought of eradicating ‘pure evil’, which the leaders of the prevalent Hutu tribe believed the other tribe, the Tutsis, to be.
In the interview, Driver further commented on ‘evil’ (despotic, ruthless leaders) by saying, “They think that what they’re doing is morally justified, so there’s no end to what they’ll do to make sure to whatever agenda they have is being pushed, and they’re incapable of hearing the other side.” He believed that others not in that category would at least examine their conscience, “if [they] make time for it”, and thus have the ability to take a step back from time to time to question the full validity of their own self-perception.
*
Another similarly fascinating depiction of ultimate evil is found in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings, in the form of the all-seeing eye of Sauron. The eye can turn itself anywhere at any time and remarkably, it’s lidless – which means it won’t stop observing even for a second. That this is, in the story, an epitome of total power and malice feels eerily reminiscent of totalitarian pursuit to invade the private realm of people – have them report their presence or mind – and is similarly a befitting image for the ever more encompassing new technologies of facial recognition and CCTV, not to mention massive digital trail.
Anti-totalitarian Tolkien who had moulded the evil of his story apparently after his own experiences at the frontlines of World War I, believed evil had no ability to create, but only mock – it aimed for control particularly for its creative and spiritual impotence. “Evil is not able to create anything new,” he said, “it can only distort and destroy what has been invented or made by the forces of good.”
But Tolkien’s image of the superlative eye is perhaps also a way of expressing that there is something intrisically holy (wholesome) about our privacy and by the mere fact of being followed something seems stripped from our liberty and integrity. In the case of Driver’s character Kylo Ren, the same is pretty much achieved by the quality of forceful mind reading, not totally removed from the idea of thought control.
*
It is clear that beside the protection of the private space, one of the main foundations of the Western tradition of liberalism has been its determination to protect everyone’s right to speak even when they say something others might disagree with. Since the Enlightment, truth has no longer been a privilege of the clergy, but something discovered in the weighing of various hypotheses, and seldom final. As argued by several observers, notably the British philosopher John Gray, this is no longer the case – it has ever more common, especially amongst the ideologies of the new, hyperliberal left to now see the opposing side not merely as someone carrying a different viewpoint, but as someone inherently immoral or evil.
The trend seems to have started in politics, perhaps particularly by Trump’s election to the US presidential office, and then Brexit, but it has long spilled over to far more personal fields. One can think of the calls of Covid times to segregate or even jail the non-vaccinated or initiatives to criminalise non-acceptance of man-made climate change. In some way or other, more and more of the previously private matters have been made a question of social and moral acceptability and worth. Differences of opinion are thus no longer seen as mere points of disagreement, but as cause for seeing the other side as fundamentally malign, infringement on whose rights is hence no longer an act of violence, but rather, a matter of moral responsibility. Indeed, they are no longer just differences of opinion to be disagreed with, while tolerated and at best welcomed – they are now hate, harm, disinformation, etc, which all should be rightfully suppressed. They are now the ‘evil’ to be fought against.
Perhaps it is no accident though that we are hereby coming back to clerical or religious language. Even if the church itself has been dismissed as ‘evil’ by certain people, like Richard Dawkins, it seems that as society we are still drawn to its ground-laying, absolute terms, and role. It is the pragmatic scientist, or perhaps the enthusiast social justice warrior who is now the new priest for identifying the vile and virtuous, the noble and sinful, the worthy and unworthy amongst us. And even the goal seems to be essentially the same – a purge for moral corruption. Except that when the desired paradise lay formerly in afterlife, and was personal and internal, the ideal pursued now is rather more a here-and-now societal and political matter.
We have recently heard Driver’s colleague Robert De Niro call Donald Trump ‘pure evil’, India’s newly re-elected PM Modi claim the opposition to be the symbol of all evil in the country, or a few years back, a former UN high commissioner describe denial of climate change from fossil fuels as ‘malign and evil’. And these are only few examples. The trick and danger of it is that by establishing someone as ‘evil’ almost, one is almost deprived of usual rights – for obviously, ‘evil’ deserves no debate or compromise, any seat at the table. It is almost stripped of humanity. And in itself, there is no doubt a level of truth to it – there isn’t much to debate on, or yield to, with mass murderers or sadistic dictators. Yet something is painfully off when the label starts to be treated with notable ease, without first critically examining one’s own arguments and ambitions, and assessing whether one of them isn’t a desire to see oneself better than others – more moral, more virtuous.
(Joshua Oppenheimer’s much-praised documentary The Act of Killing on Indonesia’s mid-1960s war on Communism is one of the graphic and still largely denied, gut-wrenching historic examples of a purge falling on itself with far more violence, injustice and trauma than what it allegedly set out to battle against.)
*
As much as a presumption of one’s unequivocal rightness can be viewed as a religious idea, it feels fair to say it is one pertaining to a corrupt, dogmatic religion – where one’s religiousness is seen as a matter of personal superiority, rather than a duty for ever further self-examination, and service. In politics, the same drive to prove oneself right seems furthered by the urge to always ‘save face’ (which oftentimes actually means wearing a mask, just like Driver’s character in the movie) and never openly admit one’s errors and shortcomings in fear of not being re-elected. The lust for power always wants to look innocent. Any calls to achieve an agenda ‘by any means necessary’ should therefore always trigger our attention, whatever its alignment or name.
Most importantly though, it seems to me that we may have almost stopped believing the most obvious – that there is a seed of evil, as well as that of goodness, in everyone’s heart. The only question is – as the now contentious J.K. Rowling has remarked in her Harry Potter stories (even though the idea, of course, isn’t that new or original) – which one do we act upon. Adam Driver gets perhaps as close to the root nature of evil in his comment as one, in a simple way, can – that it lies in the failure to examine, or the failure to even make time to examine one’s own conscience, and to ask whether we really are as morally justified as we might think to pass judgment on others. Or else we’ll feel, like Kylo Ren, right in whatever is our agenda, and become “incapable of hearing the other side”. And perhaps evil really starts from a failure to notice that.