Face of Evil

In the time that I have worked with people with significant mental health problems, there have been occasions where I worked with people who committed serious crimes: arson, murder, rape... In all these cases, the person in question found nothing wrong with the act they committed. They all had their explanations. And for each of them, what they did made sense and there was nothing to feel bad about.

When you ever encounter in literature or film a "satisfying" villain, I believe what makes that villain acceptable is the sense that this was a regular person that ended up going down a wrong path. That perhaps, initially, their path wasn't so far from the path most of us walk. Over time, they ended up in a darker and darker place... their eyes adjusting as they go... until finally, what appears as darkness to you and I is perfectly clear to them. That is to say, that a villain's perspective on life changes gradually to accommodate their increasingly evil world in a manner that the world does not appear evil to them.

A true villain should not realize... should not believe it when they are told that they are a villain... just like someone who is color blind may not know that what they think is red is actually green. And, in the end, the real tragedy is not that they have no remorse for what they do. It is that they have no awareness that they have done grievous harm that demands reconciliation AND, when justice finds them, they are clueless as to why they are being punished or killed.