Rob Kall: I, I couldn't hear you, you watch what? I couldn't hear what you said, you watch what?
M.E. Thomas: TV shows like Snapped, Snapped is a TV show where people get upset about something, they kill somebody so they, they snapped. The people that you never thought they would be killers, and then in a certain situation they do become killers. Because they walk in on their spouse having an affair, or somebody does them wrong and offends them, or even road rage. You think about road rage, and something so simple has somebody violating a social norm while driving, leads other people to react violently. Very angrily and violently.
And all of this stuff is kind of swept under the rug, for the most part we don't even like to, I think most people don't like to think that they could be capable of doing these acts of evil. Or these acts of violence, or these acts of anti social behavior.
So it's easy to just, especially in television or books, to give one character all the bad acts. Because bad stuff has to happen, right? So give it all to one person, and then just call them evil or call them a sociopath and just leave it at that. And I think that's very disingenuous, and I think it's very, it's it hurts society in the long run, to oversimplify the nature of evil that way. I think that we should be looking more at, answering these questions, or at least asking more of these questions.
Rob Kall: Okay. So what other questions would you ask about evil and evil characters? Cause I'm still talking to you about villains and stories.
M.E. Thomas: Right, villains and stories, they, I think Iago is an interesting example of a villainous character. Why does he do particularly the things that he does? He does not seem to have a motivation, he's not trying to necessarily win a kingdom or steal away the bride from a fellow, he's trying to just play with people. And what makes him be that particular way?
First of all do we think that it's evil that he's trying to play with people? I don't know, you know, I think that the the questions about evil are, well you in your transcript you talk about Osama Bin Laden, right? From the, the transcript that you just posted online. Osama Bin Laden is evil, but in a lot of people's minds he's a hero, right? So there is context to the idea of evil, there is context to the idea of what makes a villain.
If somebody like Dexter is a, is an absolute evil person, if he's killing just anybody off the street. But if he's killing other serial killers he's a good guy. Then I think that, it suggests that there's a lot of complexity to our idea of what constitutes evil, and what, what in our mind is considered moral behavior, and what's considered immoral behavior.
Next Page 1 | 2 | 3 | 4 | 5 | 6 | 7 | 8 | 9 | 10 | 11 | 12 | 13 | 14 | 15 | 16 | 17 | 18 | 19 | 20 | 21 | 22 | 23 | 24 | 25 | 26 | 27
(Note: You can view every article as one long page if you sign up as an Advocate Member, or higher).
2
2
1
