Trauma, Villainy, Therapy

 Is anyone else disturbed by the implication in pop culture that we can create evil through torture?

The orcs in Lord of the Rings. The demons in Supernatural.

These are creatures that have become monsters because they were hurt. And this is something that goes beyond, like, brainwashing. These are creatures who are inherently evil, who used to be good or at least normal, until their fundamental natures were changed by pain, and now they're irredeemable.

That is so deeply concerning. That is so very far from okay. The idea that sufficient pain cannot only take away everything you are, but take away any chance that you could ever be in any way worthwhile again?

It's not exactly wrong that having been hurt makes you more likely to cause hurt, in some cases. You're injured, you're frightened, you're traumatized, and so you lash out in preemptive self defense. You cause pain to avoid experiencing it, because you'll be punished for not punishing others, or because anyone who can get close can hurt you, and hurting them instead keeps them far away. And the fact that you've been hurt before doesn't justify hurting others, even if it sometimes explains it. But hurting others because you've hurt before doesn't make you evil. Hurting others doesn't make you evil at all—people hurt each other all the time, through accident or carelessness, in moments of selfishness that they regret later, in impossible situations where someone is inevitably going to be hurt, and you just have to decide who, or how much.

The idea that you can render someone truly evil—not careless or selfish or deeply afraid, not inclined to do bad things because the consequences are unbearable, or because they don't know better, but evil—that if you just hurt someone enough, they will come to find joy in hurting others—I'm letting this sentence run on and on because I just don't have words for how bad that is.

Sometimes, you are a Good Guy, and you are in a Bad Situation. Sometimes it's kill or be killed. Sometimes it's kill or let someone helpless and relying on you be killed. I get that. But in situations where we have villains who were tortured into evil, the good guys generally seem to be aware of the whole torture situation. And despite this knowledge, it never seems to occur to them that these characters are anything but pure evil. That they may be acting under duress, or that they may have been so hurt by the torture that they don't understand the full weight of the atrocities they're committing, beyond the fact that committing them will spare them from further pain.

Why are we not trying to spare them, in a fight where we can afford to? Why are we not taking them alive? Why are we not trying to help them?

Orcs don't need death; orcs need intensive therapy.

If you see someone working for the Bad Guy, and you know that that person was not previously evil, and that they've undergone significant torture, then your duty as a Good Guy is to knock them out and drag them to the hospital!

It just really concerns me that there are multiple fictional worlds where the second most evil creature you're likely to encounter is only evil at all because they were hurt by the most evil one.

Real life people, in the here and now, get tortured. Torture is a real thing that really happens.

How do you think it would feel? To go through something like that. To be rescued. To be safe at home again. It's over. It's over. Maybe it comes back in your dreams every night. Maybe it's never over, not really. But right now you're safe on your couch, and you turn on the TV.

And you see someone there who's been through what you've been through. But they don't get to go home. They don't get to recover. They get to be irredeemably evil. The thing that happened to you happens to them, and it turns them into a monster.

How would that feel?

I read somewhere that part of the reason the Silmarillion wasn't released in Tolkien's lifetime was that he wasn't satisfied with the origin story he'd given the orcs. I hope that's true. I mean, he's Catholic! The theological implications there...

If evil is created by pain, does that not imply that each small hurt we suffer makes us somehow worse? That those who have endured the most are worth the least?

(That absolutely does not hold up, theologically speaking—did Christ not suffer? And Job? Moses? David? Joseph? Peter? Paul?)

Anyway. No one is fundamentally, irredeemably evil, and if they are, it’s not because they’ve suffered. Get Orcs Therapy.