Evil Homer

I was going to post this as a comment on John Rickard's Empire of Dirt, but then realised my comment might be as long as his post and figured I might as well write it here instead.

His latest post talks about bad guys and the difficulty with explaining why they're bad. The first two explanations that he discounts for being either cliché or tiresome are the broken home/abusive parents and the simple case of a evil-doer who does evil because he feels like it.

The problem is that while the second is something of a fantasy, the first explanation is actually the one that's on the money. Or it is in as much as early childhood largely dictates how the rest of someone's life turns out.

I've recently been reading What Do You Do After You Say Hello by Eric Berne (who also wrote the equally fascinating Games People Play). Eric Berne was heavily involved in developing the psychological theory of Transactional Analysis. Unlike many other psychological theories, it actually tries to put human behaviour into a structured framework. Basically this involves three ego state; Parent, Adult and Child. The idea being that as kids we have the unabashed self-gratification of the child state joined to an internalised version of our parents (um, the Parent state), mediated by the objective, sensible Adult we hope to develop as we grow up (the equivalent of Freud's superego).

Now, as with any psychological theory, the ideas can be taken with a pinch of salt. I consider the body of work in psychology still to emulate those blind men feeling up the elephant (who end up coming away thinking it's just a tree with a really big schlong). However, in my opinion, transactional analysis is one of the stronger theories and ties into the idea that all our behaviour works through a process of stimulus -> emotional response -> thought [this stage is optional] -> action. We react to most things on the basis of habit - habit formed from past experience (emotions, as I've mentioned before, are simply shorthand for summing up a lifetime of coming across similar such events - if you've got a bad feeling about something, it's because on past occasions, similar circumstances have turned out badly (though that's not say you're necessarily picking out the right cues to determine whether it's actually comparable to those previous situations)).

To simplify; we develop habitual response patterns as we grow up. These patterns are learnt through conditioning (if I do that I get sweets, if I do that I get slapped around the head with an iron), socialisation (my friends are playing chicken with trains, so should I) and a monthly subscription to Knitters' World. Thinking allows us to analyse these patterns and, potentially, change them. However, when we're very young, we aren't in a position to do that. Our early response patterns are impressed on us largely by our parents. That's why Berne says that the entire course of our life can be determined by what has happened to us by the time we reach three years of age (six if you're lucky).

Abusive parents can lock a child into a self-destructive behavioural box they can never get out of. Supportive parents, on the other hand, can result in a child who's self-assured enough to learn that he has picked up all these bad thinking habits off his parents. This grown-up child can then make the considered decision to go off and become a depressive alcoholic, instead of just becoming a depressive alcoholic because they've been conditioning to do so.

So, in 99% of cases in real life, if someone goes bad, it's because badness was inflicted upon them while they were a toddler.

Still, that doesn't make interesting reading in a story. It is, however, plausible. A regular guy, unassuming, without a disturbed background going bad? Does that work?

Me? I say not.

I say not because I tried writing it once upon a time. I'd just played the game Knights of the Old Republic. A female character in that turns from the light to the dark side. Goes bad in other words. Inspired by the game and dispirited by the inevitable cack-handedness by which Anakin would fall to the Dark Side in the then forthcoming Revenge of the Sith, I set about writing my own story. Plus good girls going bad always has a peculiar attraction.

But bad is hard to write. Ooh, suddenly I gain enjoyment from beheading puppies, when a moment a go I found it despicable? No. Not going to happen. I found I had to make the switch a rational decision. Okay, the net effect may still be lots of beheaded puppies, but if the character realises they're harbouring world-eating parasites or a puppy killed their parents when they were young, then suddenly it makes sense. It just lacks the evil villainy that a truly bad character requires. That's why John ends up deciding that not explaining why the bad guy is bad is infinitely more effective, even if it's not always satisfying. A variation on that is why many people still characterise Hitler as inhuman monster. They don't want to reconcile themselves with the idea that he was actually a normal human being, just like them, who, through the capricious hand of fate, found himself in a position to turn his nurtured prejudices into concentration camps and gas chambers.

Writing off Hitler as evil is to ignore the fact that many, many people out there have been raised with equally hostile prejudices and with equally destructive personalities. Some of them get to run small countries (Uzbekistan or Zimbabwe, for example). Hopefully, no others will find themselves in a position to start a new World War.

The story I wrote based on Knights of the Old Republic can be found here. Note it does contain minor spoilers for the game. I couldn't turn my girl from good to bad. However, I could turn her from the Light Side to the Dark Side merely by changing her point of view (and by the judicious application of Japanese World War II brainwashing techniques... which, as it turns out, are all about bypassing the 'thinking' process and reprogramming those habitual response patterns).

In theory I suppose I could actually hypnotise people and turn them evil, but I am currently good enough to resist practising my powers.
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