Do you ever think to yourself 'maybe I am an evil person'? What made you think that?

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I walk on a number of wild sides. For one, I’m a bit of a closet sado-masochist. Not that that’s rare, but sado-masochists don’t often consider themselves as evil. Well, I dive deep into the psychology behind evil, so that I can understand and empathize with it.

Being willing to empathize with evil is but step one on the road. One of my favorite shows is Breaking Bad, along with the prequel, Better Call Saul. I’m always quick to gloss over Mike’s slide down towards evil, make excuses for his actions, how he helps people do awful things.

Always it’s with utilitarian ethics as a salve. I’m with Mike when he decides to work for Gus on the pretense that Gus making and distributing methamphetamines to the people of New Mexico is better than the Salamancas doing it. It’s not like there are a whole lot of other opportunities for Mike to make a difference right?

It’s the logic of someone who has gone so far down the garden path of evil that they can’t see the bigger picture. Only deal with your immediate needs. I choose not to judge the characters of Breaking Bad or Better Call Saul because I have examined evil enough to realize the shocking truth.

People aren’t evil. No person is truly evil. Evil is not a property that humans have or possess, even when those people are contributing to actual evil.

No, evil is a situation. The Bible, if you read between the lines, is pretty clear as to what constitutes evil. Evil is a situation in which the goodness and truth of the Lord simply cannot get through. Good people in evil situations cannot help but contribute to the evil.

Humans, through their limited natures, can’t help but do this. The prophets in the Bible are there to let us know when our actions are only ever going to create more hell. Humans rarely listen to prophets, but at least they can now understand why their lives have become hell when it happens due to the warning.

But evil isn’t really what the question is about. We are born with and taught certain morals, ways of acting that we know are good or bad. Evil might be a situation, but being wrong is a choice we make. You know the right and proper way to act, and choose a different path because that’s just what your body, mind and being tell you to. This doesn’t make you evil, just wrong according to a certain prescribed set of morals.

I said earlier I’m into sado-masochism. This means I enjoy thinking about people getting hurt, wounded, attacked. A certain part of my being yearns for power and control. That I can assault someone’s sense of self in a way that I can control, while my sense of self can remain seemingly unaffected. That I can play the part of Oscar Wilde’s character Dorian Gray, who for frankly infernal reasons can experience the selfish pleasures of selfish actions, while pushing all the consequences off onto, well anyone and anything but me, in Gray’s case, a painting of himself that took on all the aspects of sin that Gray would have had to take on if he hadn’t made the hellish bargain.

I love stories for this reason. You can do anything you want to a character for any reason and because the character isn’t actually a person, you can only be rewarded for making a good story, or ignored for writing schlock. And there aren’t any limits. If I want my protagonist to suffer endlessly for centuries, prolonging the sweet relief of death, nobody’s stopping me, and not even God would judge me harshly.

The worst punishment for a bad story is indifference. And evil and cruelty and harshness in a story in no way makes it bad. If anything, adding more cruelty and harshness can only make a story better, as the point of a story is to isolate and illuminate the part of human spirit that’s immune to such things. More cruelty in a story has to be met by more pluck.

And so the real-world consequences of my sado-masochism play out in the minds of the people who read the stories I enjoy. When the conceit of the story strips away all your inner defenses and you’re forced to deal simply with the cruelty of someone who makes you suffer for no other reason than that they can and will.

Because when you get right down to it, cruel characters aren’t as interesting as the protagonists that have to struggle through them. A cruel protagonist has to be matched by an even crueler world. Only in erotic literature can masochism be its own reward.

Does it make me evil to want the kind of evil to exist that brings out the best in people? It sounds to me very similar to the operation of God, why does God allow evil to persist?

I think the more exposed you get to the weird logic of ethics in the face of the divine, the more you get, well, comfortable with evil, even if it’s just in story form. And that will put doubts in the heart of anyone.