Understanding the Evil: an Example

I love my comment threads. People think and share those thoughts with me. Always makes me warm and fuzzy.

Someone commented that we always know evil when we see it and someone else commented that he wanted the good guys to be good and the bad guys to be evil.

I answered those but I thought they were both comments worth pursuing and I had an example to use as an, well, example. If you've ever read thriller fiction, some of the best I've read is by Thomas Harris, specifically a remarkable gem called The Red Dragon. (Yes, he wrote Silence of the Lambs, but I found if without what made The Red Dragon so good). The protogonist was troubled and brilliant, really a man with depth, troubled with his talents and yet appalled by them (an empathy that allowed him to reconstruct the thinking of serial killers).

However, what really fascinated me was the villain. Which isn't to say the villain wasn't horrible, didn't do heinous and evil things, wasn't a sociapath who felt no guilt about sacrificing others to his own twisted goal. He was and Thomas Harris did not pull back from all the ugliness (and that applied to Hannibal as well). But we were given a front row seat into the making of the monster, of the bits and pieces that pulled together to turn a boy with a minor handicap into a creature than would coldly sacrifice an entire family after family.

What made it seem masterful to me was that, without taking me to a place where I could excuse or condone the Dragon's behavior, I could empathize with him, understand how his feet were put on such a path, even pull for him to overcome his drives without really wanting a "happy" ending. Overcoming his baser drives wouldn't undo what he had done, but it would mean he had pulled away from the evils, the insanity, the cruelty that had shaped him.

Why was that important? Why understand the bad guy?

I'm not entirely sure but I think there are several reasons. Because even good people do little evils and we can't combat that if we don't make an effort to understand it. Because that's true of the big evils, too. Because the story was far more compelling by understanding the Dragon. Because the story was more realistic because, despite being a monster he did, he was also an identifiable human being.

And, looking at the twisted logic he used to try to overcome his drives, we can see how challenging it can be to see the evil for what it is, especially when our perspective isn't the way it should be.