Evil in Fiction, the Nature of

Registered User

10-31-24

What is evil? Does evil even exist? It is prerequisite of most horror, but is evil fictive?

Without pronouncing upon ultimate philosophical questions, we can, at least, consider aesthetic ones. What are the varieties of evil in fiction?

Evil as Monism (Monism of the Bad) = Life is suffering. Basically existing is always a net-negative in terms of utiles, so evil is an incorrigible aspect of conscious existence. See Detective Rust from True Detective.

Evil as Absence (Monism of the Good) = There is no such thing as "coldness." There is only the absence of temperature. Airconditioning and freezers don't have magical "frost units," rather they (paradoxically) generate more overall heat into the total environment. Locally, they move hotter air away from your room and return cooler air (still quite warm relative to absolute zero). Likewise, one account of evil is negative. It is simply the absence of good. Of course, this forces us to ask what the nature of the good is, which only pushed the problem back a step.

EXAMPLE: Evil as Chaos. On some views, evil basically is chaos, the absence of order, the primordial darkness which was pushed back by the light. If so, evil is just the end state of entropy. Life strives towards order. If so, however, we can't really speak of "chaotic evil" (because redundant) or "chaotic good (because self-contradictory). And this would mess up our D&D character sheets.

Evil as Dualism = Evil exists (as a thing) and good exists (as a thing) and they fight with each other. But what are the properties of this thing?

EXAMPLE: Lawful Evil is ordered, a branch, however, deformed, of justice. Some kids on dirt bikes run over your kid and get away with it, so you summon Pumpkinhead.

Most horror assumes a supernatural universe, thus a purposeful universe, and they a universe with more rules than a boring scientific universe. If there is no justice in a cold mechanical universe, there is justice in a universe with final causality (purpose, design).

I wonder what the predominant view of evil is in our horror tales? What is our collective mythos of evil?

Last edited by Corax; 11-01-24 at 05:28 AM.

Corax

Registered User

11-01-24

Raimi's Three Rules of Horror

1 The innocent must suffer

2 The guilty must be punished

3 The hero must taste blood to be a man

4 The Dead Must Walk*

Number 1 indicates what we find threatening about horror. The innocent don't deserve it. Horror is a violation of the moral universe on their view.

If the universe cannot or will not right itself, it is up to us to fix it; the guilty must be punished. In effect, we are the immune response of the universe (or perhaps we are the creators of the moral order and therefore we must sustain that order through action, even in the face of chaos).

The labor of fighting evil is itself the crucible that galvanizes our hero. There is no easy solution. You must taste blood to be a man. If you would be a protector, then you must drive back those shining eyes at the perimeter of the campfire.

Structurally, this sounds similar to the pledge, turn, and prestige, and a bit like Campbell's hero's journey (e.g., the hero's journey is transformative, you don't come home the same person, if you come home at all).

*proposed by Coens, so I won't belabor it.

Raimi's rules feel a bit like "chaos" or "chaotic evil" imposing themselves into our artificial realm of civilization. A disorder that has to be driven back with sacrifice and risk. The universe doesn't simply bail you out in the Raimi verse. Rather, you are given the choice to fight or perish.

Last edited by Corax; 11-01-24 at 12:31 PM.

Corax

Registered User

11-01-24

Horror as Therapy (the Psychological Need for Chaos)
Stephen King

Why We Crave Horror Movies
By Stephen King

I think that we�re all mentally ill; those of us outside the asylums only hide it a
little better � and maybe not all that much better, after all. We�ve all known people who
talk to themselves, people who sometimes squinch their faces into horrible grimaces
when they believe no one is watching, people who have some hysterical fear � of snakes,
the dark, the tight place, the long drop . . . and, of course, those final worms and grubs
that are waiting so patiently underground.

When we pay our four or five bucks and seat ourselves at tenth-row center in a
theater showing a horror movie, we are daring the nightmare.

Why? Some of the reasons are simple and obvious. To show that we can, that we are not afraid, that we can ride this roller coaster. Which is not to say that a really good
horror movie may not surprise a scream out of us at some point, the way we may scream
when the roller coaster twists through a complete 360 or plows through a lake at the
bottom of the drop. And horror movies, like roller coasters, have always been the special
province of the young; by the time one turns 40 or 50, one�s appetite for double twists or
360-degree loops may be considerably depleted.

We also go to re-establish our feelings of essential normality; the horror movie is
innately conservative, even reactionary. Freda Jackson as the horrible melting woman in
Die, Monster, Die! confirms for us that no matter how far we may be removed from the
beauty of a Robert Redford or a Diana Ross, we are still light-years from true ugliness.
And we go to have fun.

Ah, but this is where the ground starts to slope away, isn�t it? Because this is a
very peculiar sort of fun, indeed. The fun comes from seeing others menaced �
sometimes killed. One critic has suggested that if pro football has become the voyeur�s
version of combat, then the horror film has become the modern version of the public
lynching.

It is true that the mythic �fairy-tale� horror film intends to take away the shades
of grey . . . . It urges us to put away our more civilized and adult penchant for analysis
and to become children again, seeing things in pure blacks and whites. It may be that
horror movies provide psychic relief on this level because this invitation to lapse into
simplicity, irrationality and even outright madness is extended so rarely. We are told we
may allow our emotions a free rein . . . or no rein at all.

If we are all insane, then sanity becomes a matter of degree. If your insanity leads
you to carve up women like Jack the Ripper or the Cleveland Torso Murderer, we clap
you away in the funny farm (but neither of those two amateur-night surgeons was ever
caught, heh-heh-heh); if, on the other hand, your insanity leads you only to talk to
yourself when you�re under stress or to pick your nose on your morning bus, then you
are left alone to go about your business . . . though it is doubtful that you will ever be
invited to the best parties.

The potential lyncher is in almost all of us (excluding saints, past and present;
but then, most saints have been crazy in their own ways), and every now and then, he
has to be let loose to scream and roll around in the grass. Our emotions and our fears
form their own body, and we recognize that it demands its own exercise to maintain
proper muscle tone. Certain of these emotional muscles are accepted � even exalted � in
civilized society; they are, of course, the emotions that tend to maintain the status quo of
civilization itself. Love, friendship, loyalty, kindness -- these are all the emotions that we
applaud, emotions that have been immortalized in the couplets of Hallmark cards and in
the verses (I don�t dare call it poetry) of Leonard Nimoy.

When we exhibit these emotions, society showers us with positive reinforcement;
we learn this even before we get out of diapers. When, as children, we hug our rotten
little puke of a sister and give her a kiss, all the aunts and uncles smile and twit and cry,
�Isn�t he the sweetest little thing?� Such coveted treats as chocolate-covered graham
crackers often follow. But if we deliberately slam the rotten little puke of a sister�s
fingers in the door, sanctions follow � angry remonstrance from parents, aunts and
uncles; instead of a chocolate-covered graham cracker, a spanking.

But anticivilization emotions don�t go away, and they demand periodic exercise.
We have such �sick� jokes as, �What�s the difference between a truckload of bowling
balls and a truckload of dead babies?� (You can�t unload a truckload of bowling balls
with a pitchfork . . . a joke, by the way, that I heard originally from a ten-year-old.) Such
a joke may surprise a laugh or a grin out of us even as we recoil, a possibility that
confirms the thesis: If we share a brotherhood of man, then we also share an insanity of
man. None of which is intended as a defense of either the sick joke or insanity but
merely as an explanation of why the best horror films, like the best fairy tales, manage to
be reactionary, anarchistic, and revolutionary all at the same time.

The mythic horror movie, like the sick joke, has a dirty job to do. It deliberately
appeals to all that is worst in us. It is morbidity unchained, our most base instincts let
free, our nastiest fantasies realized . . . and it all happens, fittingly enough, in the dark.
For those reasons, good liberals often shy away from horror films. For myself, I like to
see the most aggressive of them � Dawn of the Dead, for instance � as lifting a trap door
in the civilized forebrain and throwing a basket of raw meat to the hungry alligators
swimming around in that subterranean river beneath.

Why bother? Because it keeps them from getting out, man. It keeps them down
there and me up here. It was Lennon and McCartney who said that all you need is love,

and I would agree with that.

As long as you keep the gators fed.

Last edited by Corax; 11-01-24 at 10:58 PM.

Corax

Registered User

11-01-24

The Psychology of Horror and the Nature of Evil in Fiction

If we proceed from the assumption that art is not arbitrary (i.e., not anything goes, but only certain things work), then we must ask what the criterion of correctness for art? If we do no reach for Platonic criteria, then it seems we must find our criterion of correctness in the psychological needs of the audience (Platonic forms taken out the heavens and located in the crooked timber of our humanity). We come to art because we need something. Horror, being a repetitive form (i.e., a genre) speaks to a stable, possibly universal need of members of our species. What does horror do for us? In learning this, we can judge art on the basis of whether it delivers the goods. If horror, as our present example, serves our need for catharsis, curiosity, transfer, simulation, or whatever, then we can judge it on the basis of the needs that are served by the genre. These needs/functions can certainly be debated, but if we assume neither Platonism nor arbitrariness, then our debate will merely revolve around the question of what it is that horror does for us (psychologically).

If so, then we might be able to guess at the nature of evil, as it is depicted in horror fiction. If, to consider just one conjectured psychological function, horror reflects our desire to exact revenge on an unjust universe or society then Jason (who died in the care of incompetent camp counselors) serves our deep-seated urge to balance the scales. If so, then the nature of evil in horror will reflect purpose/design in the universe ("the guilty must be punished," as Raimi asserts). And if this is so, horror will not deny the meaningfulness of our lives, but rather reaffirm it. That which betrays the dignity, honor, and purpose of the human person, risks cosmic revenge. It if for this reason that even Socrates was caused to pause after giving a speech against love in the Phaedrus when is conscience warned him that Aphrodite would not appreciate having been disparaged and then makes an apology. On this view, horror is axiological, it operates in a world of meaning, a warning to us all not to violate primal order.

Of course, human psychology is not unitary and simple. We are not monoliths, but a collection of kludges, with needs that jostle elbows with each other (various competing passions and sentiments). Consequently, horror, might serve many (sometimes contradictory) needs and function as a corrective to a situation (comedy is a cure for seriousness, piety is a cure for buffoonery). Even so, however, we should find a bounded set of needs (i.e., tropes, topoi), and be able to discuss them as the fundaments of a limited range of takes on evil we find in fiction.

Last edited by Corax; 11-01-24 at 03:38 AM.

Corax

Registered User

11-01-24

Horror as an Aspect of Our Ongoing Conversation About Reality

Art, to the extent that it is not merely a reflector (of our psychological needs), may also be a directed. Those needs may be nudged. Some aspects of our reality are constructed (i.e., there is no such thing as "marriage" in nature). Is it a mirror or an engine? A little bit of both?

When we look for paradigmatic cases of evil we often look to famous historical figures (e.g., Adolf Hitler, Ted Bundy, Taylor Swift), but we also look to fictional representations (e.g., Hannibal Lector, Iago, Walter White). In this latter sense, fiction is a feedback loop. The snake swallows its tail a bit. Evil is not just represented in fiction, but constructed by it. It's not just a mirror, but also an engine.

Therefore, horror fiction plays a role in defining our moral universe (e.g., what is evil, who are the villains, what are the forces that threaten civilization). Consequently, horror, like all art partakes of politics. But of that which we are not allowed to speak we must pass over in silence.

I_Wear_Pants

I don't actually wear pants.

11-01-24

Please get friends.

__________________
I destroyed the dastardly dairy dame! I made mad milk maid mulch!

pahaK

Registered User

11-01-24

Originally Posted by I_Wear_Pants

Please get friends.

Friends are evil.

__________________

2018 | 2019

I_Wear_Pants

I don't actually wear pants.

11-01-24

Originally Posted by pahaK

Friends are evil.

Oh then I guess he has them then...

Corax

Registered User

11-01-24

The Structure of Evil and Dungeons and Dragons

Our fictional constructs gain a materiality when they become a shorthand way of thinking. Indeed, even categories often carry ideological freight. Categories invoke divisions in reality, assertions about what is and is not. They mark distinctions which, if accepted, force divisions upon us.

Consider the formal categories of Dungeons and Dragons.

Advanced Dungeons & Dragons
Players Handbook
A COMPILED VOLUME OF INFORMATION FOR PLAYERS OF ADVANCED DUNGEONS & DRAGONS, INCLUDING: CHARACTER RACES, CLASSES, AND LEVEL ABILITIES; SPELL TABLES AND DESCRIPTIONS; EQUIPMENT COSTS; WEAPONS DATA; AND INFORMATION ON ADVENTURING.
by Gary Gygax � 1978 � TSR Games
ISBN 0-935696-01-6

Dungeons and Dragons sorts characters in term of good, evil, lawful, and chaotic. These are two binaries that naturally yield a grid

Lawful Good---------------Chaotic Good

Lawful Evil-------------------Chaotic Evil

But this image is complicated by a midpoint category of "neutral" and this results in a nine square grid with "true neutral" (neutral on the question of order/chaos and neutral with respect to good/evil) as a center square. With regard to evil, our options are (quoting from the 1978 handbook)

Lawful Evil: Creatures of this alignment are great respecters of laws and strict order, but life, beauty, truth, freedom and the like are held as valueless, or at least scorned. By adhering to stringent discipline, those of lawful evil alignment hope to impose their yoke upon the world.
Neutral Evil: The neutral evil creature views law and chaos as unnecessary considerations, for pure evil is all-in-all. Either might be used, but both are disdained as foolish clutter useless in eventually bringing maximum evilness to the world.
Chaotic Evil: The major precepts of this alignment are freedom, randomness, and woe. Laws and order, kindness, and good deeds are disdained. Life has no value. By promoting chaos and evil, those of this alignment hope to bring themselves to positions of power, glory, and prestige in a system ruled by individual caprice and their own whims.

The categories, if accepted as "true archetypes" create a feedback loop that influence our thinking about the world. I have been much struck, for example, when perusing a Reddit thread discussing a video of a public outburst ("That's what happens when you push lawful evil in the real world!", "Chaotic Good strikes again!"). The implicit conclusion we are forced to draw without really thinking about it is that chaos and evil are two different things. Thus, this little grid is, by formal repudiation, a rejection of one of our candidate definitions of evil (i.e., evil as chaos). Because chaos and evil fit into two different bins, they cannot be of the same essence, so a subtle bit of politicking informs our thinking about the nature of evil when we play D&D. Metaphysics by categorical fiat. A clever, if unintentional bit of legerdemain. A "formal proof" in the most banal and trivial sense imaginable.

If, however, we wound up (as scriptwriters) doing a D&D horror movie, we would confront a limit in advance of our writing--the perspective of evil which is categorically denied by the ontology of our source material (i.e., that evil and chaos are of the same essence).

This is not an absolute limit, but it is something which has to be negotiated. With regard to vampires, this has proven tough for modern audiences, because they like the bloodsucking and sex, but not the Christianity, so BLADE assures us in his film that crosses and Holy Water don't do anything to vampires (defiance of the frame) and Buffy the Vampire Slayer vaguely refers to "Powers that Be" rather than the Christian God, although the show is populated with all manner of traditional demons and devils.

The moral of the story is that our categories are not innocent, but carry assumptions with them that preconfigure our stories. And to the extent that our stories serve as touchstones for the real world (allegories), they also set limits to our real-world thinking.

Last edited by Corax; 11-01-24 at 10:53 PM.

Corax

Registered User

11-01-24

Romulus and Remus or Tweedle Dee and Tweedle Dumb?

Angel and Spike as Contrasting Examplars of Evil

But, uh, for a demon I never did think that much about the nature of evil. No. I just threw myself in. Thought it was a party. I liked the rush, I liked the crunch. Never did look back at the victims. --Spike

I want to torture you. I used to love it, and it's been a long time. I mean, the last time I tortured someone, they didn't even have chainsaws. -- Angelus

Spike's evil is that of casual dehumanization. He did really regard people as people. Rather, he completely instrumentalized them, violating Kant's categorical imperative under the formula of humanity. He's a kind of casual sensualist looking for a thrill.

We like to talk big. Vampires do. "I'm going to destroy the world." That's just tough guy talk. Strutting around with your friends over a pint of blood. The truth is, I like this world. You've got... dog racing, Manchester United. And you've got people, billions of people walking around like Happy Meals with legs. It's all right here. But then someone comes along with a vision, with a real... passion for destruction. Angel could pull it off. Goodbye, Piccadilly. Farewell, Leicester bloody Square. -- Spike

Angel's (or Angelus lest we offend Buffy-Nerds) approach to evil personalized dehumanization. Angel revels in the destruction of the person, knowing that they're suffering. He plays with his food, because the person on the inside means something to him. As a villain is kin to Stansfield in The Professional:

Stansfield: It's always the same thing. It's when you start to become really afraid of death that you learn to appreciate life. Do you like life, sweetheart?
Mathilda: Yes.
Stansfield: That's good, because I take no pleasure in taking life if it's from a person who doesn't care about it.

Angel doesn't violate the principle of humanity (at in the sense of having no regard for the inherent humanity of his victims), but his caring about the experience of his victims (as victims) seems to make him a worse villain.

So what is more threatening? What is more evil? Loki on whimsical murder spree or the careful villain who cares enough to make sure you suffer?

In the Whedonverse, it seems that we have heartfelt evil (Angel) and heartless evil (Spike). Before we give Spike a pass we might consider that he may be all the more insidious for reflecting the banality of evil.

Corax

Registered User

11-01-24

Altruism vs Egoism: Two Views of Evil

Evil as Egoism - This one is familiar enough so as to seem to be the truth (or "a" truth) on face. To be selfish is evil or a form of it. Self-sacrifice is good. Self-aggrandizement is bad. The self-centered person uses everyone around them and is a menace because they only care about themselves). Why would you treat other people rudely, let them die, or even kill them?

Familiar tropes incoming. The baddie remarks that the goodie is weakened by his/her overreliance on his/her friends. The goodies rejoins that, on the contrary, friends are their strength. Or as Vin Diesel reminds us friends may even be "family." Baddies create division and uncertainty in their own ranks when they kill their own henchman out of frustration. Indeed, the Satanic inversion of Christianity is simply egoism. "Do what thou wilt, and let that be the whole of the law." The lone wolf villain vs. the scrappy gang is typical consequence of this formulation.

Evil as Altruism - This one is harder to wrap your head around as it cuts against the grain of the messaging of religions of the axial age. If, however, you've read Ayn Rand, then the story here is familiar enough. Basically, the idea is that altruism is a treadmill of "death to self" and requires that every individual (no matter how deserving) must endlessly hand over everything they have to everyone else (no matter how undeserving).

Here direct examples are hard to find, outside of productions of Atlas Shrugged. However, the "other as enemy" as a threat to individual liberty, happiness, and life can be found in "man against the world"/"fighting city hall" tales. Valley of the Dolls, Invasion of the Body Snatchers, all those movies that show the individual being stripped away and absorbed into a ruthless collective (Resistance is Futile!) indirectly fit into this mold. Zombie movies fit here (that great mass of "other" out there that might eat us if it becomes a mob -- I wonder if the 1% of this world are especially frightened by zombie movies?).

Corax

Registered User

11-02-24

Evil as Being vs. Evil as Becoming

The timely vs. timeless. In which domain lies the good?

If we're fans of the good-is-order/bad-is-chaos dichotomy, we will likely incline to Platonism and appeal to a timeless and motionless realm as the soil of "the good," and refer to the mundane, Earthly (sublunary as they used to say) as a place of corruption. Arguably, this is just a manifestation of that larger category. It is hard to get categories straight and they're often tyrannical, so we might be better advised to survey all our options before carefully curating them.

Villains, however, are sometimes characterized as tyrants who reject the realm of becoming. Consider the character of J.D. from Heathers who reasons as follows,

You want to wipe the slate clean as
much as I do. Okay, so maybe I am
killing everyone in the school
because nobody loves me. You have
a purpose though! Remember? Let's
face it, the only place different social
types can genuinely get along with
each other is in Heaven.

This is close to, but not quite "Evil as Monism," because this view has no contrast (all evil, no good). Here the temporal realm is rejected by J.D. as inferior to the atemporal realm. This is still a dualism. Remember, Detective Rust doesn't believe (at least at the start) that there is any shiny afterlife to escape to.

So which is it? Do we live our best life in ordinary time with soul-shades in Hades left to envy those who are still in the game? Or is life basically pain with only motionless promising us eternal, bliss, peace, and harmony?

stillmellow

Msg

Basic Non-B

11-02-24

I always found "Evil as routine" to be interesting. When the villain or villains have committed so much evil, that it often barely registers. Or maybe it still does in the moment, but afterwards it's just the same old usual cleanup.

Or if being artistic it's important to them, they only focus on the technical perspective.

Even the evil cultists can become obsessive over getting things perfectly right, that the horror of their actions has become lost on them.

How many people were sacrificed at the top of Aztec temples before the high priests could only think about how much their backs were killing them.

Some examples are:

Cabin in the Woods
The Girl in the Photographs
Haunt
Midsommar
Motel Hell

Corax

Registered User

11-02-24

Originally Posted by stillmellow

Right, the "banality of evil." Perhaps what is at the root of this is Institutional Evil (I recall Chomsky once remarking that many slaveholders were very empathetic upstanding citizens who were, nevertheless, monsters in their institutional roles as slave holders). Our institutions are what largely routinize our practices, right?

We don't generally think of ourselves as the baddies (there is Plato's argument that no one willingly seeks to do evil), so it would seem that something outside our natural will to do good must put the bend in the timber? A bad habit, a routine, a cultural vision, an institution?

Corax

Registered User

4 weeks ago

Being vs. Becoming/Order vs. Chaos II

A villain (Linoge) in one of Stephen Kings stories (Storm of the Century) has this to say about evil/badness in one scene:

She's going to eat you alive over and over and over again because that's what hell is all about, Robbie.
Repetition.
I think in our hearts, most of us know that.

This idea is also played out in the Whedon-verse when Gunn self-imposes a punishment on himself for causing the death of a friend, a never-ending torment of waking up to a nice family breakfast and then having your heart ripped out when you to the basement to get a lightbulb for your wife. Hell is repetition. The terror comes from the knowledge that that thing in the basement is waiting for you and in exactly two minutes, it's going to happen. No surprises. Everything is ordered.

So, is this evil the evil of being or becoming? On the one hand, the never ending movement of becoming is a grind we don't get set aside until we die (entering the timeless). The torture-as-repetition treadmill is a monotony of motion. Motion and motionlessness. Thus it would seem to be evil of the realm of the sublunary, the mundane, the world of becoming. That stated, we can't really depict evil/horror as "being" in a narrative which requires time. A frozen image is a painting or an icon, a motionless picture. The closest we can get to showing the terror of unchange in our world of motion is to show that which is changing as being unchanging (because it repeats). I think True Detective gets pretty close to expressing the idea of the terror of "being" when it repeats the idea of time as a flat circle in which innocent victims always have been, always are, and always will be tortured and killed in exactly the same way. The image allows us to imagine something closer to the "block time" of physicists in which we imagine a existence being an eternity unto itself (your life is your life and your life is always going to be the same, if it wasn't, it wouldn't be yours, but someone else's). Thus I am inclined to take King's idea and put it in the evil-as-being bucket, at least for now.

On this view, evil is having no surprises (everything is set and the terror emerges from our realization of the fatalism of our situation, even our predisposition to accept or reject it stoically being beyond our control). Life, on such a view, must end to cut off the horrible unbearable repetition of it all. To be immortal would be the worst curse of all as you would just watch the same cycles of life, again, and again, and again. Who wants to live forever?

On the other hand, becoming is also a source of evil in the form of the unwelcome. The jump scare is a classic instance. That thing which you didn't guess, that random, chaotic, unanticipated evil that kicks the chair out from underneath your self-satisfied assumptions about the world your place in it. All horror that trades on suspense (i.e., not knowing what will happen in the next few moments) is in the realm of becoming, mundane, but different. Not nice, but different. The dread of the new.

We might guess that horror that asks us to fear creepy children may reflect our fear of unwelcome novelty (they're going to replace us and they don't speak our lingo) and that horror that asks us to fear creepy old people may incline us to the psychology of fearing what we know is coming (we're going to be them).

And this leads us to a third view between the arch forms of Being vs. Becoming and Order vs. Chaos -- Balance.

That is evil is simply being out-of-proportion. An unvarying life is a living hell because it has no surprises, it's all repetition. This is the complaint of the God Emperor of Dune who has seen it all again and again in lived experience, genetic memory, and prescient exploration of possible futures. The great worm Leto's greatest source of dissatisfaction is the lack of novelty in his world. He has few surprises (he sees everything). On the other hand, a life that varies too quickly does not bore us, but it does unmoor us. It's too much for us to handle and is thus threatening.

Thus, we might view evil as an unwelcome balance of order and chaos, being and becoming. Of either traveling too slowly, in too orderly a fashion, too predictably or of traveling too quickly, too chaotically for us to competently navigate it. If so, is when we're forced to live life at the wrong speed, and not just when we're forced to go down an unwelcome road. If so, evil is contextual. Repetition might be a corrective to a grinding hell (relieving us by stimulating us). Order might be a corrective to a chaotic situation, providing us a needed relief from overstimulation (no longer having to worry about what's around the next corner or if a random cat will jump out at us from a cupboard.

Corax

Registered User

3 weeks ago

Originally Posted by patimeh

What about " God Emperor of Dune"?

What about it? For Leto II, hell is definitely repetition.

He is like the villain in that horrible 2021 Amazon Prime production called INIFNITE (which rips off every movie you've ever seen, because it appears to have been written by a bot).

Chiwetel Ejiofor plays Ted Bathurst, a villain who is tired of being reincarnated and wants to break the cycle of life. The grind of becoming again and again and again is too much, so he's after a magical egg MacGuffin, an anti-life bomb to break the cycle.

Leto II is trapped in a sameness that he has imposed on his entire empire. The human race must break out of the familiar sameness of their pattern of life, or they will go extinct (this is the Golden Path). Thus, he is making them thirst for exploration and novelty. Surprise. Chaos is good. It is fertile. It is the new. Evil is the pattern of the past. It is sameness. It is repetition. The lesson for humanity is one "that their bones will remember" -- seek out the new, grow, evolve. As Duke Leto warned Paul, "without change, something sleeps inside of us, and seldom awakens." Leto II is the awakening of the whole human race, freeing them from fatal pattern, most important of which is the trap of prescience. Knowing the future is fatal, a decided evil. Again, goodness is chaotic. It is unpredictable. It is free will. Leto II gives chaos back to the universe by engineering people who cannot be seen by those with psychic talents. His universe is thus freed of those who would impose a pattern of ordered control. Leto II is like Loki in this sense. He punishes the human race for being so power-hungry as to seek control rather than embracing the chaos of life lived without guarantees.

Indeed, this could be taken to be the unlearned lesson of the Butlerian Jihad which barely defeated the thinking machines (the AIs). Humanity learned not to let machines do things for them (because machines can't be trusted), but they fell into another power-trap when they turned humans into computers, information machines, predictors, controllers. The Kwisatz Haderach was another control-trap. In essence, Leto II is Tyler Durden from Fight Club. He breaks the system and forces humanity to live in the moment, closer to the ground.

Corax