The Good, the Bad, and the You and Me
We ponder whether our heroes and villains are as clearly defined as we like to make them out to be?
Mobutu’s Zaire was a pretty grim place. To say it was corrupt is kind of like saying that Justin Bieber gets a couple of teenage girls twittering. Put bluntly, at the time of his dictatorship Mobutu’s personal wealth exceeded that of his country’s national debt, yet the average Congolese couldn’t put food on the table while “The Leopard” was in power.
It was under his regime that rebel leader Pierre Mulele was lured back from exile with an amnesty promise, then – according to Michela Wrong in her harrowing biography of Mobutu – tortured to death by soldiers. “His eyes were pulled from their sockets, his genitals ripped off, his limbs amputated one by one as he slowly expired.” This unthinkable procedure was mechanically performed by once ordinary Congolese citizens.
On the other side of the spectrum, a few years ago, a man named Wesley Autrey jumped onto a New York subway track to save the life of a complete stranger. Autrey held the man down between the rails of the track while the train passed over them both, clearing their heads by a mere centimetre. Others did nothing to save the man, but Autrey acted, some may say, heroically.
What do these two stories have in common? Well, nothing, of course. Except that they make one think. One person gouged out a supposed enemy’s eyeballs, while the other risked his life to save a complete stranger. Are these two people a respective villain and a hero? Is evil or goodness an attribute deeply ingrained in each of these men? Or are we all simply products of our society who, when put to the test, will act according to our circumstances?
The jury is still out on what makes a person either a hero or a villain, but according to Scott Allison, Professor of Psychology at the University of Richmond in the US and co-author of the book, Heroes, What They Do and Why We Need Them: “There is no doubt that some people are more inclined to perform heroic acts than others.”
“One could say,” he argues, “that the subway hero was predisposed toward behaving heroically, while other people in the subway (who did nothing) were less so.”
Allison adds that none of us truly knows how we would act in an emergency until such situations confront us. But clearly, some people have the moral courage to do the right thing in the right situation.
The Bad
Swinging to the dark side, it is pretty encouraging that many experts believe that very few people are intrinsically evil. According to Allison, Phil Zimbardo, a famous social psychologist, puts it this way: “There are a few bad apples out there, that is, people who are intrinsically bad. We tend to see the world as composed of good and bad apples, but the reality is that an apple is only as good as the barrel it’s in. If you put good apples into a bad barrel, the apples will go bad. This explains why perfectly decent people can be drawn into bad behaviour – they find themselves in situations where strong social pressures can lead them astray. Unruly mob behaviour is a classic example, as is corporate corruption.”
Terry Eagleton, author of the book On Evil, has a somewhat less conventional understanding of evil. “It is supremely pointless,” he says. “Anything as humdrum as a purpose would tarnish its lethal purity.” Which brings vampires to mind. Most vampires were pretty decent people before they had their necks pierced. They may not have been heroes, but it is safe to say that the majority did not spend their time indulging in mass orgies and blood sucking frenzies. And while we all know that vampires are not real (don’t we?), it is still interesting to consider that it is only when they are faced with eternity and a complete lack of purpose that they turn into the proverbial villains that they are.
In real life, one cannot pinpoint good and evil as one can in comic books and soap operas. So why do we insist on trying? Why do we need heroes and villains? “People love all-or-nothing thinking, as it appeals to our mental laziness,” explains Allison. “Also, there’s something unnerving about seeing everyone in the world as a shade of grey. Greyness suggests unpredictability. We are motivated to predict and control others’ behaviour, and the best way to do that in a clear fashion is to label people as good or bad.”
And while villains like Jeffrey Dahmer and that freaky Austrian basement dad prove that there are a few genuinely bad people out there, luckily for us, Allison is convinced that most of us can and will easily choose to do the right thing when there are situational pressures to do so. “The challenge for any group or society,” he explains, “is therefore to construct situations that encourage heroic behaviour and the best of human nature to emerge.”
Human beings are remarkably sensitive to situational cues regarding appropriate behaviour, he explains. “We have a great capacity for both doing great good, as well as doing great evil, and it is often the situation we find ourselves in that determines which direction (good or evil) we take.”
The Good
This is one of the main reasons we need heroes. For a society of people to survive and to thrive, we need a set of positive behaviours that are identified as culturally valuable, explains Allison. “People who best embody these values are deemed as heroic. We show great reverence for heroic people so that we can educate our young about what behaviours they should emulate.”
Allison goes on to explain that it is so easy for any of us to show our dark sides, and that we therefore need to always strive to do and be our best, so as to bring about happiness for ourselves and others. “History has proven,” he says, “that the gap between the best and the worst of human nature is smaller than we think it is.”
While it is rather daunting to think that a fine line between nature and nurture could have us either diving under subways to save a stranger’s life or hacking off limbs to appease our leader, a more encouraging way of looking at the situation is the notion that heroes and villains represent the two ends of a continuum of good and evil. Rather than cape-toting, gun-wielding superpowers, they can more simply be seen as the extreme manifestations of our own good and bad impulses. And, in Allison’s words: “We need them both, if only to remind us of what we are capable of becoming.”
Check out Scott Allison’s blog on Today’s Heroes: http://blog.richmond.edu/heroes.
Story by Roberta Coci
