I enjoy superhero films: they’re fun to watch, they generally support justice, fairness and good and depict them winning, which is cathartic. Most people enjoy imagining themselves with the power to vanquish evil but the knowledge to avoid the story's pitfalls: 'if I were superman I'd never let batman humbug me with a Kryptonite shotgun'.
There is a problem with a lot of fantasy fiction, including all major superhero franchises, fantasy and even a lot of sci-fi: that evil has a face. Not literally: a lot of the time it’s a secretive organisation that deliberately conceals its identity. But metaphorically, in that there’s a clear target for the protagonist to fight.
This can be very important for antiheroes, an obvious next step after too many stories about pure, good heroes. An antihero is flawed; a somewhat bad or dislikeable person. But with a greater evil to face, they can be redeemed by serving justice and good. Without that clear and obvious greater evil, an antihero is the baddie.
This naturally leads to interesting narrative tension and drama about cleansing individuality, how much can you trust monolithic forces of good once you've served them, whether they’re actually good at all, and so on. It depends on the world the author has set up.
Still, stories rely on human conflict. And evil is often a purely evil person or group who deserve to be fought, and who have enough power to make the superpowers of the protagonist valuable in opposition to them. There must be a face to evil for there to be the human conflict stories crave. This isn’t the real world.
In reality, to borrow someone else’s coinage, evil is
banal. Evil is the consequence of thousands of petty acts of greed,
selfishness, thoughtlessness and spite. Evil comes from the systems we enact
and accept that have terrible consequences but which rely on no single person
completely understanding and manipulating the system: in fact, it arises
precisely because no-one with enough power bothers to understand and fix the patterns
of behaviour, laws and infrastructure that have arisen haphazardly over history
and combine to cause harm. Evil happens because no one person is responsible and everyone can forgive themselves for their own minor contribution to it.
It's a bit of a cliché of a stupid campaigner to say ‘fix/break the system’, but that’s not because such an idea is foolish, but because such people often spout such phrases without ever defining exactly what system, or how to fix it.
There are a lot of harms in the world and therefore a lot of fixes needed to our systems. To show that I have more than a single sentence in my thoughts, some examples are: lobbying and our democracy, in which money buys votes through campaigning, and therefore politicians sell influence to the rich, undermining the whole idea of democracy in which all citizens have equal power. Or our housing, in which locals restrict new building to preserve the area as they know it and to inflate their property values, but locals everywhere do the same, so that everyone’s children can’t buy anywhere nice and ‘nice’ areas fade without a population to support.
A lobbyist just wants the best for his client because his job depends on it; he’s probably good enough at making silly ideas sound believable that he is deceived by his own rhetoric. His client has produced the most optimistic forecast of outcomes for whatever loophole in the law, tax break or outright change in policy is most profitable because individuals in the organisation want to believe. The politician, the lobbyist, the workers at the company: all are a bit lazily and self-interestedly working towards a negative outcome. Not even the company’s CEO is an evil mastermind (most CEOs seem to be solidly mediocre intellects); senior staff will rely on pre-existing beliefs, confirmed by the Chinese whispers of reports within the organisation working up to them.
This is how I understand the banality of evil; it is petty-minded people making the easy choice in small situations either without knowing or caring about the wider consequences of everyone behaving the same way. It is hundreds of thousands of people all forgiving themselves for dashing over a junction when the light has gone red for them, all combining to hold others up and make roads less safe. Evil is the sum of millions of people doing slightly selfish things because it’s easy or small and they forgive themselves because they 'know' in their hearts they’re good people. Or occasionally people doing larger selfish things because the opportunity is right there and the rewards too great.
But the consequences don’t disappear just because we all forgive ourselves. Millions of people driving to work rather than taking public transport and bicycles creates rush hour traffic jams, air pollution and climate change: abstract problems that we all know aren’t masterminded by Lex Luthor or Sauron or Thanos.
But some people are more responsible than others. That politician who spends time with donors and gradually absorbs their opinions from greater exposure to them as much as genuine corruption; or who spends time with them and grows to like them, and then wants to do nice things for people he likes: that politician chose to campaign for a job that he is unfit for. By doing it badly he is morally liable for the consequences. Some jobs carry responsibility with them, morally if not legally.
We have struggled to make directors of companies liable for the wrongdoing of the companies they run: the law requires active malice to be proven (my words: the law probably isn’t quite so clear, but does need it to be proven that the directors knew about wrongdoing). This fundamentally misunderstands what evil is. Yes, every so often there is a psychopath who forgets to give himself plausible deniability and goes outright sadistic; engaging in demonstrable lies or malice.
But the truth is that wrongdoing occurs more as a sin of omission; bad things naturally happen, and it is the job of the people in power, who have been trusted with making things run well, to actively find and prevent it. A director of a company should know about wholesale illegality, and if he doesn’t then he is liable by negligence. If the company is large enough, or works in an important enough sector, people’s lives depend on him, and not knowing is not only corporate manslaughter, but individual manslaughter.
Being a CEO or director of a company should be a responsible position that only sober, thoughtful people take on; people skilled and knowledgeable enough to know that they can understand its operations and make reasonable efforts to prevent bad things happening.
It is people in power who are more morally responsible for the evil that besets the world, not because they actively do evil, but because with power comes responsibility: they could prevent it if they had the will or the intellect, whereas the rest of us simply cannot change it. Politicians should tax carbon emissions rather than subsidise them; CEOs should demand the truth rather than punish those who tell it as ‘not fully on board’; managers should insist that underlings work contracted hours rather than greedily enjoy overwork or even push for it to meet their own personal targets.
There are people who are malicious. Most of them do not trouble the world in general. Most people who do obviously nasty things are partly doing the first form of evil: being a bit selfish and thoughtless, except that they have become accustomed to more selfishness than the rest of us. People who are caught up in their own needs and hopes so much that they forgive themselves greater wrongs to satisfy themselves, or who have mostly only known being selfish and nasty and use that as a baseline; or who have been allowed to get away with progressively nastier behaviour; or who have suffered a lot and want to take something back from the world, leaving the problem of balancing the evil they do and the evil they have suffered to everyone else.
It is as this petty-minded selfishness gets hold of power that we get to the other end of the range of evil, that stretches from harmless, average people doing minor things through to the stereotypical villain.
We must understand the villains of the real world as otherwise average people who have power. They are plagued by their own personal insecurities, inadequacies and biases, unable to use their power to do good, which is complex and requires constant attention and dedication. In this they are identical to average people. It is always easier to do a less good option. It might be skimping on materials; it might be bending the rules or the evidence to meet safety standards; it might be choosing to trust a flawed computer system rather than rebuild it. Or it might be repressing your population rather than earning their acceptance.
If power brings responsibility, and the excuse ‘I didn’t know’ is unacceptable for people who should have known, then evil isn’t underground organisations hiding themselves from us: it’s in the recognised organisations that inadequate people use to wield power inappropriately. Government isn’t evil, but specific governments and ministers can be.
Emperors Putin and Xi; wannabe emperor Trump; jumped-up mediocrities like David Cameron and Gideon Osborne; hopeless inadequates like Liz Truss and Marine Le Pen; and parasitic enablers such as Nigel Farage, Aron Banks, the Koch brothers and Rupert Murdoch are the closest we have to evil.
These people choose to wield power evilly for their own self interest. It’s probably never fully malicious: knowing full well that they are doing bad things and enjoying it. There is always a combination of the delusions and stupidities already mentioned. Putin probably believes partly in a greater Russia, although he also believes in enriching himself at its expense. He probably partly personally resents the West and its distaste for him as well as carefully antagonising us as part of international power play.
Trump is a bundle of narcissism and senility; he promotes racism and hatred because it buys him the adoration he craves from those who were already tending towards those beliefs, not just because he evilly wants to undo American ideals.
Liz Truss is clearly entirely deceived into believing that
anarcho-capitalist ‘economics’ must work, and since it didn’t and doesn’t when
she proposed it, is delving deeper into conspiracy theories about left-wing
saboteurs cancelling her government. She has faith in a false doctrine that she
couldn’t be bothered to explore and fully understand before ruining the
country. She thought that depth of faith would be enough. It never is. Depth of understanding is required.
And so on and on. Villains have power because we are all villainous (broadly: I’m sure that you and your friends are notable exceptions) and it is power that makes us evil. There is no fundamental difference between the thousands of people disturbing their neighbours at night in residential neighbourhoods and the powerful man dispossessing thousands of people because of his whim or his friends’ wishes.
The way to change this is to have sensible, thoughtful people in power who will ensure that the people who join them are also sensible and thoughtful. This is hard: how do we get those people into power and prevent them being corrupted by temptation? If we give the job to an individual, we don’t solve the problem; we have the same problem of how to select that individual.
If I were superman, I wouldn’t fight evil by defending one city in the world from muggers. Even the most prolific muggers couldn’t kill as many people in that one city as air pollution does. The implicit message that evil is either lowlifes attacking us from the bottom or exceptional individuals who need special power to defeat is misguided.
Evil is all around and in us, permeating everything, and the struggle to be good is the struggle to find and fight evil without also tearing apart what is good.
The world is an awful place. We have come far from our more brutal past, but if humanity survives a few more centuries, it will look back on now as also barbaric and grim. Caution in the face of such ongoing suffering is tacit endorsement of it. The world is burning; millions die in war, famine and drought. Millions are being slaughtered in ethnic cleansing in Xinjiang; millions die from obesity, cancer and ageing; the seas contain roughly 1% of the life they once did, and we are still dredging the bottom with giant concrete blocks to weigh down the nets that gather what little remains.
Why would anyone start with a couple of lowlifes hoping to earn enough to buy the next meal and maybe some drugs to numb their minds?
If I were superman, I’d be spared any worry about getting caught and tried. The only moral thing to do would be to use the great power I had to affect all the systems of the world, and the quickest route would be to make them work for me.
Our problem is that having power in intrinsically nice; it feels good and everyone wants it. This means that people who can’t or won’t do the hard work of doing good with it still pursue it. If having power made one a target; if it carried serious risk if anything went wrong; then you’d think carefully and have to be very sure. Only the completely deluded and intelligently well-meaning people would dare; the latter because they would be willing to sacrifice themselves to do good.
Selfish people wouldn’t bother; they’d laugh scornfully at the daring self-sacrificers and stay in the junior middle-management roles where they would be safe from whatever risk is it. And the greater the risk, the fewer of them would expose themselves.
If I were superman, I’d not bother setting up a system of tests or assessment to choose who should have power. I would outsource that judgement to the individuals themselves by changing the rewards they faced. They wouldn’t be just removed from power: that means that there’s no downside from having a go at being powerful. If thousands or millions suffer because of you, you don’t get to retire to overpaid public speaking, think-tank events and country houses. You go straight to the grave.
I’d not limit myself to one country either. It’s a small world now, and we all depend on each other for goods and services as well as for peace and carbon emissions.
If superman existed and were moral in any way, he’d kill emperors Putin and Xi on his first day. Then he’d turn to less evil or less powerful people: American and European promoters of bigotry, hatred and economic ruin, then South American and East Asian; then African dictators and military leaders.
In his spare time he would research other powerful people: the Forbes billionaire list and those who have looted whole nations but aren’t listed by Forbes, such as Russian oligarchs and CCP apparatchiks. No billionaire deserves to be a billionaire and very few are working to do more good in the world than appropriate taxation would do. Many actively promote bad economic policy and suffering. They would be next.
Owners and editors of toxic media empires would follow. Information is power, and disinformation might not materially hurt anyone, but it is the underlying cause of most other abuse, fanning the flames of banal evil everywhere.
At this point superman would be global enemy number 1. All people in power would be horrified; either because they’re next on the list or because they think that an international murder-spree can never be justified and that the job of good men is to compromise with evil and let it gradually win. The world would be searching for Kryptonite, but they don’t have much time. To many delusional idiots, his actions against evil would make him a supervillain and the challenge would be to defeat him without a superhero to help out.
The replacements in power would need to decide whether to continue to be evil or to promote good. If they buy time by promoting and doing good, that should get the world accustomed to how life could be. If they don’t buy themselves time, they go.
The globe couldn’t make and deploy Kryptonite weapons and defence measures quickly. It’s not like the pandemic, where co-operation can be open. If it’s open, superman will interfere. Further, he’s not trying to defend a target; he doesn’t have to wait and be shot with special weapons or bask in a Kryptonite vapour. He can hit a target in an instant. Rebuilding infrastructure and finding defences will take time, and superman can blend in. Tracking him down by scanning whole populations (if he kept his identity secret) would take even more time. He wouldn’t be stupid enough to do all his research from a home, unmasked, IP address.
Years later, after governments had resorted to civilised rule and billionaires didn’t exist, it wouldn’t matter if superman was caught or not. Maybe he gets to live and wait a few hundred years until the world has deteriorated again. Or maybe he is caught and tried at The Hague. It would be a worthwhile sacrifice. Billions of lives improved; millions saved. Not from an outside enemy, but from ourselves and our own systems.
For those of us who dream of a better world, that’s a nice fantasy. It doesn’t have to be a fantasy though. A few simple tweaks would have a similar effect, in our own countries at least. If we changed the law so that government ministers, CEOs and company directors had to prove that they had been managing risks appropriately, the cast of powerful people would change entirely.
It wouldn’t be a big step. It’s not ‘guilty until proven innocent’; it’s that negligence has a different burden of proof. In negligence, someone has taken on a responsibility and if that isn’t met then the punishment for failure must apply. There doesn’t have to be a wider precedent for all law. The crime isn’t one of ‘directly causing harm using [government/company]’; it’s of ‘allowing the organisation to cause harm’. If the company did harm and you were in control of it, there need to be special, demonstrable circumstances that explain how you didn’t allow it but it happened anyway. If you weren’t in control then you deceived the people who paid you to be in control, and you owe damages of all your wages plus whatever benefits might have happened had someone better actually had control, which we might define in statute.
Government ministers might not like that; we might need a phased introduction, with the rules applying only to senior civil servants at first until the next election, at which point people will have had time to study/retrain and decide if they want to take that risk.
We would need a similar law for misinformation. It doesn’t cause harm directly, so penalties relating to the harm caused won’t work. However, we don’t need to calculate the harm; we just need to require it to be undone. If a falsehood required at least as prominent a correction then media outlets would suffer from promoting lies. If your next front page must read ‘we were wrong, and here is an explanation of the same length as the original article’; or you are forced to pay online advertisers to tell your entire audience ‘we were wrong’ then editors will work hard to publish only journalism, not quotations of untrustworthy sources. Sometimes a story will be wrong despite their efforts, and that’s ok: a cost of doing business.
It is awe-inspiring that the people ruining the world get away with it and we punish minor, mindless brutes committing petty crime while telling stories about supervillains who plot to ruin the world. In Britain, Nigel Farage, Aaron Banks, Boris Johnson, Liz Truss and Rebekah Brooks head the list of people who have cost a nation with output in the trillions of pounds roughly 10% of its GDP.
We could enact a second change to our law that would reprioritise financial losses. At the moment we regard financial crime as somehow lesser than violent crime. But money saves lives; we buy cancer drugs, doctors, hospitals and nurses with tax revenue, alongside community care, suicide prevention, traffic safety etc…
If roughly £4m saves one life, then losing the country £400bn is mass murder of 400,000 people. It might not be quite the same, as £4m is a marginal cost and it probably gets more expensive the further from the marginal case we get, but if you lose that much money tough luck.
400,000 sounds like a lot, but think of all the hospitals we haven’t built, the NHS waiting lists getting longer, the staff shortages, collapsing concrete… 400,000 is a lot of lives, but £400bn is a lot of money.
When we have made powerful people fully responsible for what they do with that power, we won’t need superman. We will be a supercountry, and that’s better than any one man.
