Evil Cartoons

Complete evil is a literary fiction. The crook who openly calls himself a crook and has no justification for his own actions other than his own crookedness, is an unrealistic invention. It may sometimes look like it to us when observing some of the most incredibly villainous deeds that historical characters have been capable of performing but looking more carefully into their motives would exclude total wickedness.

Hitler, for example, maybe the most evil individual history has produced, did believe that the world would be a better place without Jews, and so at least he pursued his own distorted notion of the good, and wishing to do good can’t be evil.

To find instances of utter evil we must turn to fiction, and those characters rather appear to be extracted from a cartoon. “The Joker” as he is portrayed in the Batman movies could never exist. He “just wants to see the world burn” without any reason or justification and any attempt at psychologically explaining such a conduct would be a waste of time.

If anyone were to come anywhere close to such an attitude in real life, they would probably refer to the state of the world and claim that their activities were consistent with what was happening anyway. Or more likely, they would originally be a part of some greater movement that would stop at nothing to reach whatever goal they had. On the way they would find sadistic satisfaction, which is of course an evil, but they would always retain the original goal as a justification to resort to.

A completely evil person would be one who didn’t have any cause, would never try to justify himself and in fact thought himself evil. Such a person would not have a human nature and a human psychology and could therefore not exist.