The "Mediocrity of Evil"

Had the TV on last night while I was in the other room doing dishes, so I don't know what the context was, but there on the screen was a guy holding up a copy of Ayn Rand's novel, Atlas Shrugged.

Given our current sociopolitical milieu, it reminded me of what Ayn Rand labeled "The Mediocrity of Evil." That is, true evil isn't necessarily a supernatural demon from hell or a 14-year-old nut-job with an AK-47 who was educated in a terrorist grammar school. Rather, evil is the guy who says, "If you've got more than I do, you're going down."

To expand on this a bit, History Channel ran a series of shows about a month ago on the Seven Deadly Sins: Pride, Lust, Anger, Gluttony, Sloth, Greed, and Envy.

Why envy? If you look at a lot of TV commercials -- honestly, a useful gauge for what America believes is attractive and desirable -- envy is something to envy.

A while back there was that shampoo commercial, or was it for hair dye?, that had a model pleading rather smugly, "Don't hate me because I'm beautiful." She does kinda make you want to smack her one. Her conceit knows no bounds. She just assumes your whole life revolves around having beautiful hair.

More recently, we see a soccer mom driving her kids around in an SUV. Her daughter in the back seat remarks that one of the neighbor moms said they were "spoiled." The soccer mom asks, "You're spoiled?" The little girl says, "No." Implying that it's the soccer mom who's spoiled because she gets to drive around in the big SUV. The soccer mom sort of grins enigmatically -- Gee, she scored a big one there.

The Seven Deadly Sins TV series emphasized that envy doesn't consist only of wanting what someone else has, but wanting to take it away from them, or wishing some sort of horror upon them because they have something more than you do.

So many examples of this in literature. I was a lit major and had to do a paper on what the heck were Iago's motives in Shakespeare's "Othello." Othello was happily married to a beautiful woman named Desdemona. Iago was supposedly a friend of Othello, but engineered a plot to convince Othello that Desdemona was cheating on him. In the end, Othello strangled her.

Iago is one of the better known villains in literature. But the play nowhere states forthrightly what Iago's motives are for devising Othello's misery and downfall. I saw a production of this play with James Earl Jones as Othello and Christopher Plummer as Iago. Plummer played Iago as though Iago were gay and in love with Othello, and therefore jealous of Desdemona. It worked OK as drama, but jealousy and envy are two different things.

I used to live in the city of Chicago. Walking to the strip mall a few blocks away, I passed an apartment building that had a parking lot in the back. The public sidewalk went right along this parking lot. Going to the mall one day, I noticed that someone in that building had just acquired a really beautiful Cadillac. It was midnight blue with gold-colored fittings -- like the door handles were gold, the grill gold, etc. Probably not real gold, just golden, but it was a beautiful car.

Unfortunately, this car occupied a parking space right next to the sidewalk. I wondered how long before it was keyed up.

Within a week, sure enough, someone just couldn't resist destroying that beautiful car. They'd scratched a rough sketch of certain parts of the male anatomy and a couple nasty words in the Cadillac's satiny dark blue surface.

Why? Though it's totally predictable, it isn't funny or endearing in any way. I still can't imagine being inside the head of the person who did the damage. That would be the real nightmare -- having to live with such seething anguish day in and day out because someone else has something that you don't have, blind to everything else and devoting time and energy to wrecking everything that's truly beautiful.

Like the head-case who threw red paint on Michelangelo's "Pieta." Why?

Heard a story about a family in Jamaica. The father had landed a job at the local bauxite plant -- bauxite is used in making aluminum. Anyway, the plant paid really good wages and everyone in the neighborhood wanted to work there. And one day the mom in this family did her laundry and hung it outside on a clothesline to dry. And one of her neighbors came along and cut out all the pockets in the clothes. Why?

Wreaking vengence upon the successful because they're successful? Does that make life better for anyone?

In another case, I knew someone whose daughter was accepted at a magnet school for gifted children. The family went out of town for Christmas that year and when they returned, they found that their home had been vandalized -- and by neighborhood kids who despised the daughter for her gifted status. They emptied the refrigerator all over the furniture, spray-painted obscenities on the walls, peed (and worse) in the carpets, etc etc.

Why?

This is surely one of the uglier sides of human nature. Can someone please explain it?

Anyway, I think this is a large part of what Ayn Rand referred to as the Mediocrity of Evil. Do you hate someone because they're better than you, or is it really that you hate yourself because you judge yourself as being somehow not-so-good?

In either case, it seems to be related to the whole "victim" attitude: "I'm useless and hopeless and someone else owes me for it."

It's difficult to imagine devoting your life to destroying other people whom you perceive as being better off. So very negative, consuming yourself in destruction, and ultimately so self-destructive. Isn't making use of what you do have and what you can do a more positive and beneficial approach to life -- for yourself and everyone else?

The thing to keep in mind is that people do this to themselves. They're the ones who place more value on others and upon the things that belong to others, than they do upon themselves and what they have. Who cares what anyone else has? All that matters, really, is what you can do for yourself and your own. (see my blog from Feb. 2009, By your own lights.)

You do need a degree of personal freedom in order to do this. You have to determine your own values, assess your own capabilities, and then be in a social and political environment that lets you go for it and maybe even cheers you on.

I suspect that envy is what's behind socialism. Some people are rich, so they become targets for those who aren't. Never mind that the rich spend all their time thinking up ways to make money and probably ignore or never appreciate very much else in their lives. They have money. They own things. You don't. So let's go after them? Why?

Or else the rich are people with really unique and creative ideas who managed to put those ideas into practice by inventing useful products or by providing services everyone wants. Really, for self-made millionaires, their wealth is a gauge of how much they've contributed to everyone else's well-being. How can anyone hate them for that?

Socialism doesn't raise people up; rather, it only lowers the status of the relatively few who are wealthy. No matter how rich Bill Gates is or the Kennedys, if you divide their wealth amongst 300 million people, there's just not enough to elevate the general standard of living. But you have managed to bring down the wealthy. You've managed to take away any incentive they might have to create new and better tools other people can use to better themselves, or for the rich to invest in those who do have the ideas for these innovative products. For what? Exactly what purpose is served?

You've demolished success, wrecked personal achievement. Now you can bask in the glory of.... what? I suppose the destruction of the world as we know it does provide an excellent excuse for whining about your own miserable situation.

I don't get it. It's like watching the World Trade Center going down, and then the videos of that weird-looking hag in Syria or someplace with the dirty, crooked teeth, dancing in joy. Why? She's ecstatic at the deaths of almost 3,000 people who were strangers to her. That is evil, that really is.

Misery loves company. Is that it? How very mediocre.