Copyright © 2002 Christine Morgan

The Nature of Evil

I ponder the nature of evil quite a bit. It's just one of those things that people like me think about. Goes with the job when being the GM of a game, because most of the time, the GM's job is to run the monstrous forces of evil against which the PC heroes must valiantly strive. It goes with the job of being a writer, too, particularly in my two chosen writing fields of fantasy and horror.

Evil. Is there such a thing as absolute evil? Sure, there can be absolute evil in a game, especially one that clearly delineates alignments. If the rule book says a given character class, creature, or race is evil, boom, there ya go.

But the more I think on it, the more it strikes me as unrealistic. Religions will have what's right and wrong, what's good and evil … but those outside a specific religion will have their own ideas. I prefer to think of evil in the following terms: perspective, circumstance, and intention.

Evil is a matter of perspective.

Looking at the state of the world at the moment, it's fairly plain that deeds considered to be evil by some of the population are considered just and righteous by another. A 'villain' might often believe he or she is doing the right or necessary thing, and it's the perspective of the other side that sees it as evil.

Evil is a matter of circumstance.

The same act can be seen as good or evil depending on the situation. Killing another person, for instance. If a soldier kills, it's viewed (by the side the soldier's on, at least, or the winners of the war who write the history books) as a good thing. If someone kills another in defense of himself or a loved one, that too is often viewed as a good thing. If someone kills another for personal gain or savage pleasure, bad thing.

Evil is a matter of intention.

This one is related to perspective. People do rotten things with the best of intentions, or because they might not know better, or might not have thought through the effects such an action might have. If it's accidental, or born of ignorance, it's not necessarily evil. If it's deliberate or full-knowing, then it is much more likely to be truly evil.

But absolutely evil? In a game I ran a dozen or so years ago, I had a deity, Calaan, who started off as being defined as the goddess of evil. As the game progressed, I became less and less satisfied with that label. Being a force of pure evil isn't practical enough, I thought. Calaan became, over the fullness of time, the goddess of death and the mother of demonic violent beings. Still an evil presence from the point of view of the mortals, but she had another job to do besides just being a feared and despised power.

My current game, and the world in which I write my fantasy novels, features the dread god Haarkon. Another death-god, and the usual trappings associated with the classic dark god are assigned to him - scary skeletal figure in a sweeping black cowl, gives his followers power to raise corpses as Undead. His initial appearance in the first book still falls into the trap of Evil with a capital Evil, and I'm not happy with that. Someday, I hope to be able to go back and revise that book, because there are many things I want to change and Haarkon's debut is one of them. Again, as I've had more time to think about the place of death gods, the more I've come to dislike the whole notion of equating death with evil.

Evil is little, mean-spirited, and individual. Evil is selfish and greedy. Evil is purposefully and maliciously doing things to hurt others. I see it as a force living inside each of us, maybe having a stronger foothold in some than in others. To shunt it outside, to blame it all on matters beyond our control (the Devil made me do it, Pandora's Box, Eve and the apple, etc.) strikes me as a way of transferring blame, of making excuses.

The evil in fantasy games is often mixed up with monsters and stereotypes. All orcs are evil. Why? Because they're orcs. Some dragons are evil by virtue of the color of their scales. Racial profiling at its most basic.

It doesn't have to, and indeed shouldn't, be that way. I have written elves who are vicious murderers (and these aren't the 'dark' elves either) and 'monster' races like half-orcs and minotaurs who are heroic. The main baddie of my first trilogy was an evil gnome, of all things. The 'dark elf' character in the current trilogy is more noble than her 'high elf' companion.

A culture can have customs and tendencies that may be seen by another culture as "bad" or evil. In my world, cannibalism is an established orcish rite. And cannibalism is one of those things that we in this modern world view as extremely bestial and cruel. A culture's reputation can make the casual observer all too willing to attribute every aspect of it onto the individual, when every society has those who stand apart from the norm. These, the misfits, make for the most interesting characters both for the writer and the reader.

The same sort of thing is often found in horror. Vampires used to be one of the ultimate archetypes of evil (albeit sexy evil). Now we have vampire characters who are heroic, standing apart from the stereotype of their culture. An entire cross-genre has sprung up between horror and romance, in which the object of affection is a paranormal being.

Horror has a few catch-alls for ultimate evil. There's the ever-popular Forces of Hell (demonic possession, birth of the Antichrist, etc.), Things from Beyond (squelchy Lovecraftian critters, alien invasions), Nature Run Amok (everything from Hitchcock's "The Birds" to the novels of Shaun Hutson), and Manmade Terrors (generally either the work of mad scientists or nuclear testing).

But more often, horror (novels in particular) will deal with the individual evil. The lone haunted house, the demented psychic, the vampire. The "spooky little town" of Twilight Zone and Stephen King fame. These evils can often be overcome or escaped, while the Big Evils above can only be averted for a little while.

I am a longtime reader of horror, as those who know me are well aware. Began with The Shining when I was ten and never looked back. Over the course of my life my bookshelves have filled with the collected works of King, Koontz (who denies he's a horror writer), McCammon, Saul (who also denies he's a horror writer), and many more. But only a year ago did I discover a new addition to that list of favorites.

I'm referring to Richard Laymon, who sadly died earlier this year. My first encounter with his books was One Rainy Night, which utterly blew me away. I have bought and read and relished many of his novels since and still have more to add to my collection, and they do not disappoint. This man wrote horror in its starkest, boldest, in-your-face form. No mercy. His stories are jam-packed with human evil (if a tad breast-obsessed), and a genuine treat to ghouls like me. Island and The Traveling Vampire Show are just fantastic, the first not needing so much as a whiff of the supernatural to be as much a novel of true horror as anything I've ever run across.

And while I'm on the subject, having wandered a bit but not far, I must mention Bentley Little. I'd read some of his earlier stuff and been neither here nor there about it, until I picked up a copy of The Association a few months ago. What a brilliant, kick-ass, spookily believable piece of darkness! Anyone reading it would likely think twice before living in a gated community. I know it had that effect on me.

After being so impressed by that one, I picked up his recent short story collection (titled, reasonably enough, The Collection). Many of the stories were the kind that infuriate my husband, since cause isn't explained and the ending is often left unresolved (the "this happened, who knows why, deal with it" school of fiction), but I enjoyed them greatly. My favorites were two that took a twisted alternate look at American history. Just what was the deal with Washington's false teeth? And would it surprise anyone if historians really were part of a massive, centuries-long conspiracy?

But I was on the topic of the nature of evil. I believe it's in us all. Buried, most of the time, as the majority of people try to behave in ways they deem "good." The question is, why? Why do we try to be good? Fear of punishment? Freud held that guilt, and the fear of getting caught, was what made society function. We learned at an early age to sublimate what we really wanted in favor of what was permitted. Yet down deep in the dark core of us all, a capering evil imp still lurks.

All of us? Yes, I think so. Some act on it more than others, but it's there. This is the imp that takes delight in the misfortune of a rival, that is fascinated by violence and pain, that wants to be selfish and never mind what other people say. This is the imp that leads us to want to do things we know are bad for us, bad for others, bad for society. When we're caught, we're sorry all right … but are we really sorry for what we did, or because now we know we're going to be punished?

The world has always been full of this sort of evil. Nowadays it seems more prevalent than ever, what with huge corporations cheating their stockholders, teachers and clergy abusing the children in their care, serial killers, fanatic terrorists. Whenever I see one of these people on the news, I wonder. Are they distraught because they did a bad thing, or because they were caught? And if they hadn't been caught, would they still be doing it?

Some like to equate evil with insanity. That someone would have to be crazy to act like that. And to some extent, that isn't unreasonable. The problem comes with the nature of insanity. It's irrational by its very definition, and for the purposes of making a villain, insanity is not generally very effective. An insane person is not likely to be able to put together a plot that makes sense, carry it out, or keep anyone around to help out.

Megalomaniacs become so sure of their invincibility that they won't believe anyone can ever find them no matter what kind of clues or evidence they leave, hence they become careless. Paranoids eventually believe that even their closest friends and cohorts have turned against them. Multiple Personality Disorder, the classic Jekyll-and-Hyde (and always, wrongly, confused with schizophrenia; the two are not the same) can make for an interesting twist, but the "evil" personality often tends to be as careless as the megalomaniac mentioned above, or may actively hate the "primary" personality and do things deliberately to get him or her in trouble.

The insane villain is generally going to have to be a loner, either because he or she can't stand to have anyone around or vice versa. We've seen it countless times in movies, the evil queen or warlord who begins to lose it and lash out when things start to go awry - and when there's heroes on the scene, things go awry. Supporters and underlings will have second thoughts, abandon their posts, turn traitor. Insanity is all emotion and impulse, belief without fact, lacking in logic, and when the world presents events that fly in the face of what the insane villain believes, nobody wants to be in the vicinity.

It's an age such as this that presents a challenge for the fiction writer. What can a horror novelist come up with that's worse than what we're seeing around us every day of the week? (well, Laymon and Little and those guys can, and more power to them!) There used to be a trend toward escapism into horror, because we could read those scary books and be inwardly relieved, knowing that those things couldn't really happen, that the world wouldn't allow such evil, that it could never be that bad. Except that it can. Or worse.

I suspect there'll be a trend toward fantasy instead, where the lines between Good and Evil are so clearly drawn (and it's right along that mountain range near Mordor). We've got a rash of superhero movies now, and superspy movies, and even a new Indiana Jones in the works. Our collective psyche is craving heroes and villains that are firmly what they are. We want something or someone to believe in and trust.

But I've gone on about that in other columns. My initial intent in writing this was to try and explain what I saw as evil, to define it the way I see it. I've found that I can't. Like art or pornography, it's one of those "know it when I see it" kind of things. Which are different for everyone.

I guess all we can hope is that each and every one of us should strive to do what he or she believes is best, and let the situation dictate. There aren't any hard and fast answers, not that I can find. We've just got to do the best we can. In the end, the Golden Rule is the one to go by - do unto others as you'd have done unto you.