Evil is not a Mental Illness

The Re-Branding of Monsters in Modern Storytelling

Perhaps the greatest sign of the Evil of our times is how all of our stories are too reticent to say that Evil is Evil and not simply some "mental illness" to cure with hugs and cOmPasSiOn. I am reading Bram Stoker's Dracula for the first time, and I've just finished Phantom of the Opera. In each story, the monster was truly monstrous and not some "misunderstood outcast" who secretly was good inside. The monster was ineluctably Evil. Killed without remorse. Selfishly sought his own lust and carnal desire. Loved no one but himself.

The opening chapters of Dracula show the count mercilessly killing children, gorging himself on their blood. The Phantom of the Opera depicts a monster who kills anyone who gets in the way of his fulfilling his lust for Christine. The Hocus Pocus witches are happy to suck the life force out of little children to make themselves younger. They are not “misunderstood”. They are objectively evil monsters. But modern iterations of these stories have turned Dracula into a brooding sexy introvert who only takes blood from blood donors and woodland animals. They turned Hocus Pocus into a feminist fight for the right to do quaint little magic spells. Maleficent, the dragon demon who put a death spell on a baby out of jealousy, was merely a rape victim being marginalised for her magical nature. The Orcs have families too guys!! Maybe all the monsters are just tortured outcasts, minorities who need more compassion and love and we are the evil ones for judging them don’t you know?

These are not merely fictional fantasy stories with no bearing on reality. How these monsters are treated in modern storytelling reflects, in a very real way, how we deal with Evil in our real life societies. Murderers and rapists are given compassion by leftists whereas their victims, innocent children, men and women, who are slaughtered senselessly, are called racists or bigoted for ever complaining about it. They are told to be more compassionate toward these murderers and any effort to quell the violence is punished not simply by social ostracism anymore, but by real arrests, getting fired, getting deported from the country. This is the modern west today. The perpetrators’ names rhyme with Trustin Judeau and Steir Karmer, among many others. 

Life and Art are intrinsically linked.

Why are we afraid to say such monsters exist in people today? Because to admit that Evil is real, is to admit that we need God and He is the only one who can give us the strength to fight it.The purpose of our stories is to depict the most important aspects of reality to us, so that we might navigate the world better, both on the physical and the spiritual dimension.

By pretending that evil does not exist, or that it is always "misunderstood" we prime people to become better prey for it to sink its blood thirsty teeth into. A great modern day story would be a therapist sent to Count Dracula and one by one he depletes them of blood, and laments at his "mental illness" that keeps making him do it.

"The last glimpse I had was of the bloated face, bloodstained and fixed with a grin of malice which would have held its own in the nethermost hell" Page 60, Bram Stoker, Dracula

What makes someone do evil things? Modern psychology would have us believe that it is an entirely materialistic set of external events that cause a person to do this. Even as modern culture bases its entire structure of morality on “consent”...it does not believe in free will, the very thing that is necessary for consent to exist at all. If a person has no free will, then whether or not they consent to something is an entirely a matter of their external influences including their material biology--a gene that makes you more readily consent to something, means that there is no such concept as “consent” only a base biological compulsion. Sam Harris discussed this years ago in his book about Free Will which is a ludicrous piece of trash, just like his career.

There are many factors that may contribute to a person growing up to become a serial killer. If they are abused as a child, if they are neglected and never shown any kind of loving relationship, if they face violence at every turn of life, perhaps they will have a higher probability of turning into a killer. But we all know that this is not an imperative because there are many people who are born into such circumstances and do not become serial killers and in fact grow up into very kind and decent people. There are also many people with perfectly healthy and normal upbringings who become violent criminals anyway.

Despite the desires of PsychoPass-esque geneticists, and tireless brain scientists looking at psychopath brains, there is no “criminal gene” that has ever been discovered to be causal. No material causality has ever been conclusively demonstrated to be responsible for evil. Mankind cannot evade blame for the failings of his soul. Adam couldn’t stay in Eden by saying “Eve made me eat the apple!”

Our souls are not written in lines of biological code in our cells. It is true that one’s experiences affect us, but they are our responses to these experiences that make us who we are, not the experiences themselves. There is no formula that determines our personality based on our experiences. This is the free will, which will always be ineluctable and impossible for materialists to ever grasp. 

We do not know the origin of Evil. But we know that every heart is capable of it and if you believe yours is not, you have never dared to look at your own reflection with any level of honesty. This is our fallen nature. Every heart is also capable of Good. But what we are capable of is not what we are. “Potential” is the mistress of idle thinkers. 

When someone shows themselves to the world to act on Evil then they should be judged as such. Judgement is good. It is the only way we can maintain a good society, and yes, for those putting their fingers up right now, it is also Christian. “Judge not that ye be not judged” from Matthew (7:1-3) is about hypocrisy--it does not tell us to never judge people. “For with what judgement ye judge, ye shall be judged” (the rest of the passage is hardly ever quoted). In fact, if we allow evil to continue happening when we know it is wrong, we are partly culpable in it. This is the story of Soddom and Gommorah. Curious how that part of the Bible is never brought up by degenerates who bristle at judgement for their evil actions. 

The Death Penalty, Deportation, and Criminal Punishment, are all requirements of a good society to maintain its safety and functionality, coupled, of course, with a rigorous and fair justice system that does not bend to the caprice of any ruler or class of society. This was figured out a very long time ago, it is time that we remembered it. Pity and compassion ought not to put any person above the law. The law is only Right, when it is congruent with the Law of God. 

The only way to judge something as Evil is to understand Good. It is only in contrast against the straight line that we can judge the crooked as being crooked. 

Modern story telling purposely creates “greyness” in its traditionally evil characters. Gangsters and murderers, with a family in the Sopranos, the Phantom of the Opera re-written to make Erik a sympathetic character, maybe the Evil Stepmother was just neglected as a child and a big hug would cure her. The teenage witch converses with the Devil, but it’s cute okay and she just uses her magic to change her clothes. However, real stories with people who engage in real witchcraft, in real gangs, with real murderers and monsters, reveals that these sympathies in story telling are nothing more than an insult to the real life victims these monsters claim.

What of redemption? What of the stories of people who once did evil deeds and then changed their ways? This potential for redemption is what separates true monsters from human beings. But this redemption is not a redemption from society but from God. If a violent criminal has proved himself unfit to live with decent people, untrustworthy of it, his potential for redemption is between him and God, and not the business of ordinary people to take a chance on him again and again.

The witches in Hocus Pocus were so undeniably vile—killing innocent children in order to steal their youth—that it is truly a vile sort of person by extension who would sympathise with them and try to make their actions seem “justified” due to some previous grievance in their back story. Redemption, when it comes to evil characters re-imagined, is always a watering down and justification of objectively heinous and evil crimes. The Sanderson sisters were just “misunderstood” don’t you know? There is no pathos, no truly redemptive arc in which they regret their evil, there are only excuses provided as to “why they did it”. This is no repentance, it is re-branding.

Count Dracula is probably not real. But Evil is. And to diminish it in our story telling is to make us more vulnerable to it in our real lives than we would be if we were at least armed with the clarity of vision to distinguish it.

We must tell stories again where the monsters are monsters, in their true, gory forms. Dracula is a blood sucking demon. Witches are evil consorts of the devil. Ghosts are dark energy. Dragons are not potential pets to be tamed but dangerous creatures of mass destruction. All of this may be “fantasy” to some, and yet even to those people, they should understand them to be powerful metaphors for the evil that can exist in the world. Our response to stories about evil, ought to be how to defeat them, not how to re-brand them.

Thank you for reading!

Happy Halloween!