It's hard to read articles like the one that came across the front page of RedState on Thursday evening that detail an atrocity so heinous that, despite knowing it happens in this often unfair and cruel world, still shocks you when you hear about it.
Especially as a father of a one-year-old, this particular story had me fantasizing about cruelty of my own, albeit justified cruelty.
As Streiff wrote on Thursday, seven men in Houston, Texas, gang-raped two toddlers in a mall restroom, filmed it, and posted it online for the use and enjoyment of others who are just as sick and twisted as they are. It's the kind of story that makes you want to simultaneously gather your children into your arms and hold them protectively while also wanting to throw these seven men into a windowless room and subject them to the horrors of the darkest parts of your imagination.
In his article, Streiff wrote something about the nature of evil that I agreed with wholeheartedly, and it's become something of an overlooked thing in the modern era:
Second, there is a reluctance by society to recognize that evil exists. Real evil. It is not a lack of impulse control or a personality disorder; we are seeing actual, garden-variety evil. Some people can't be deterred and can't be rehabilitated. We've become too "modern" to accept the presence of supernatural forces. Even Christians, whose entire religion is based on the supernatural, are left trying to find psychobabble explanations for what are patently and obviously evil actions.
This is very similar to a thought that I had on Wednesday when I wrote that our entertainment industry needed to stop attempting to always give villains in modern stories a semi-justifiable reason as to why they're evil. In our modern times, every villain in every story has to have some sort of sob story of a background or a solid point as to why they believe their solution, albeit villainous, is justifiable:
But a modern trend has sprung up that has pulled this tried and true storytelling into the backseat. Now it's all about the villain being understood and even empathized and sympathized with. Now, the villain always has to have a point.
To be clear, this isn't necessarily a bad form of storytelling. Some of the best movies have villains that you can't help but find yourself considering the side of and wondering if they maybe have a point. Some villains are tragic villains in that their defeat, while necessary, makes you mourn that a person got the way they did and had to be put down.
READ: We Need Proper Villains to Return to Our Stories
As I say, the villain you can empathize with isn't a bad form of storytelling; it's just that in our modern culture, it's gotten out of hand. We've gotten to the point where Disney has been consistently rewriting its stories to make some of their most wicked villains, such as Maleficent and Cruella DeVille, into misunderstood heroes.
It's the same concept as "the greatest trick the devil ever pulled was convincing humanity he doesn't exist."
This effect on society is that it consistently attempts to look past the evil someone does to discover the hurt they suffer or find the point they want to make. In other words, they try to find an excuse for the evil that was done.
Evil appreciates this.
Evil preys on the empathy of the ignorant and the soft-hearted. It relies on the hesitation of good people. It lies and deceives so that when evil accomplishes its ends, it does so with an element of sympathy from people. It strives for people to "understand" it to mislead them into treating it with velvet gloves or even passive disapproval.
But the truth is that evil does exist purely for the sake of evil. Oftentimes, there is no justifiable reason evil actions occur, nor is there any point to be made. Sometimes, people are evil because evil is what gets them ahead of others or scratches a perverted or cruel itch they have.
And it's here that people need to not bother with too much understanding and just take unrelenting righteous action against evil. While I'm not saying we shouldn't look deeper into what causes a penchant for cruelty and perversion, we do ourselves no favors by not making an example out of those who willingly indulge in unforgivable evil such as the kind Streiff reported on Thursday.
I don't need or want to have a reason to have sympathy for these men. I don't want to crack the door open for evil to justify itself or pave an avenue for it to accomplish more.
When you're looking to purge a disease, you might study where it originated and the conditions which caused it to thrive in the first place, but the ultimate goal is the destruction of the disease.
Evil is a disease, and destruction is the only real solution.
