Do you believe in evil?

Okay, so let's get beyond the cultural understanding of evil. The Misfits made much of an evil affectation that remains rather pleasing to the adolescent aesthetic. I reveled in that shit. Then you have all your sadistic cinema ranging from teen slasher flicks on the low end to The Audition on the high. We are awash in evil icons and themes, and none of them approach the power of evil.

But what is evil?

The problem is that this provocative word needs to be stripped of the husk of subjective context. Evil is action with the absence of empathy, or one individuals ability to recognize the emotional state of another. Under the aegis of this particular definition many acts suddenly become evil. Take for instance eating the last piece of cake in the refrigerator that your girlfriend has been coveting all day while at work. Evil. Using up all the hot water so you can take a bath. Evil. Insensitivity then, in fact, becomes evil, and we are all monsters to someone, somewhere, sometime.

"But surely these are misdomeanors", I hear you protest. Take for instance putting a sawed off shot gun in the face of a pregnant woman, who hasn't hurt anyone, and pulling the trigger. Evil. What if this pregnant woman is Hitler's/Stalin's/Mao Zedong's/Rosie O'connels mom, and you can prevent a lot of human suffering, in the future? Wouldn't it then be evil to not act? You can see that this is a piss poor (to say nothing of it's plausibility) example.

We need something clean, something that's black and white. Something unsullied by the misuse of the word its self.

This is what I'm getting at, the whole point of this pointless exercise.

This is evil.

This is evil.




And don't you forget it.