Conversations With Evil Men

I've spent an embarrassingly large portion of my life consorting with very bad men. Countless mad-dog-loner career criminals, staggering numbers of addicts and alcoholics, some of the kind who had poison for blood and hate in every thought, quite a few who claimed to be killers, and a very few who actually were. There was the guy who methodically knocked out every single one of his neighbour's teeth with a ball-peen hammer because he was late on a two hundred dollar loan repayment, the man who had spent the past seven years of his life sustaining his heroin habit by pimping out his girlfriend, another man who sustained his lifestyle by dint of extreme physical and psychological intimidation of his own mother, and a very softly spoken African of my acquaintance who had a little row of wooden figurines - one for every life taken - on his boarding house windowsill, and who was careful to explain that his collection did not include those he had killed at any distance greater than five metres. "It doesn't count if you don't see the light fade," he'd say, before donning his Dominos uniform for another night of delivering pizzas to pampered English kids.

The usual portrayal of men like this (and they're almost always men) is pretty two dimensional. The most sympathetic of fictional villains is generally, though not always, written by a person who at best has sympathy for them, but little to no real understanding. There are some stand-out exceptions. Raymond Chandler and James Ellroy spring to mind as authors who seemed to really understand what it is to be a bad man. Shakespeare, strangely, also makes that list. But the overwhelming trend is to hollowness - a sense that the villain exists as a construct to serve the righteousness of the hero, or the anti-hero, as the case may be. In fact, in stories which contain an anti-hero, this cyclostyling of the villain is often at its most egregious. The less 'heroic' the hero is, the more 'villainous' the villain.

In fact, the whole idea of villainy is prey to classist prejudice. The word itself derives from a French word for 'peasant labourer', and it's telling that of all the various terms for antagonists - blackguard, cad, devil, etc. - the one which has stuck in literature is 'villain'. There is a strong sense that the villain is somehow lower than the hero, that their desires are degraded and base, their motives carnal and worldly. One can see, in this binary categorisation, an echo of deep Christianity in the idea that simple human desires for power, sexual gratification, wealth, or revenge are somehow less worthy than more high-minded goals, and therefore deserving of defeat and punishment in the artificially just universe of literature. What's interesting about this is the fact that villains, like monsters, serve as unflinching mirrors held up to the very same qualities and desires which exist in heroes. The lust of the villain is offset by the purer spiritual yearning of the hero's love. The urge to vengeance in the villain exists as a counterpoint to the hero's high-minded service of justice. The villain seeks wealth and power as a bulwark against the world. The hero seeks it as a comfort and resource for their loved ones, or to perform some altruistic goal. The difference between the two is painfully subjective, and film and literature provide us with the illusion of objectivity by creating artificial flaws in the villain. Fanaticism versus faith. Random violence versus measured force. Fear and hate versus courage and love. But faith must always contain a seed of fanaticism, force isn't really possible without exactly that same rotten core of violence in the heart, and courage and love are practically dependent on fear, either as a thing to be overcome, or of the loss of that which is loved.

I remember sitting in a living room with three very bad men. Two were younger and one, let's call him One Shot, was older and acting as a sort of mentor for we three. It was the shank of a very long night, and we were enjoying that contemplative space in the grey of the dawn, sipping on the dregs of the alcohol supply and, for the moment, utterly relaxed in the strange liminal zone between an all-nighter and a three day bender. Moments like these can be very dangerous, as they are so often confessional. It's important, if you're young and inexperienced, that you be very selective of the people you do this with, as the confessions of some men can be fatal to the one acting as priest. But I digress. We were swapping stories about moments of fear. I don't mean stage fright or starting a new job or any of the other petty terrors of ordinary life, but rather the kind of fear which paralyses - moments when the balance of life and death hangs, pauses, and holds its breath for the kind of eternal brief second peculiar to existential danger. There were some excellent stories being told, of cars tumbling over and through roadblocks, kitchens awash with blood, knives and guns and mobs pummeling lone bodies with fists and bricks and bars, but I don't really remember them. Like movie villains, there was a kind of familiarity - a kind of sameness - to them all. Each one of those stories could have been mine or theirs or practically anyone's.

The one that sticks in my mind is One Shot's. I think I'd just finished telling some half-lying, mostly embellished story of being saved by dumb luck - the kind of story which is a compression, an indication, of a lifetime's worth of unmerited escapes. Immediately after I'd finished, there was one of those particular moments of silence which usually preceded one of One Shot's rare and quiet pronouncements.
"What about you?" someone had said. "I'm guessing you ain't scared of shit."
"Unconditional love," said One Shot, which, as you'd imagine, confused us enough to shut us all up. "The most scared I've been in my entire fucking life," he explained, "was when I had this woman. Longest I ever been with anyone. And I remember one day when she turned and looked at me, and all I could see in her face was pure, unconditional love."

I remember understanding this instantly. The terror of being suddenly naked before an image of yourself you know you can never live up to. A threat which cannot be defeated by anything in the armoury you've so painstakingly built, because the teeth of this enemy exist within the self. This has always struck me as the essence of evil men. Slice them how you like, at bottom they are formed by fear and necessity and pain, and so often the source of these is coded deep into the bones of a society which seems to simultaneously create, revile, and crave their existence. I've always wanted to catch that in a script or a novel or a story - in anything really. Mainly because there is a yawning gap in the portrayal of villains, and this gap is shaped pretty well exactly like that sudden revelation of One Shot's humanity. And because a gap in our literary portrayals usually corresponds with a yawning, egregious gap in our understandings of the world and of each other.

Democracy Has Always Been Elitist

The etymology of the word 'democracy' is often rather sloppily rendered as 'rule of the masses', on the strength of the word 'demos' meaning 'the people' or 'the masses'. This isn't really correct. A deme, in ancient Greece, isn't some amorphous population group but rather an administrative unit. I'd say that crossing the word 'electorate' with the word 'village' or 'town' (in a corporate sense) would be the most accurate way to understand what the term refers to. Which means that the idea of democracy, in its earliest and purest form, is more about systems of power than it is about some Marxist interpretation of popular rule.

And when we look at how Athenian democracy actually ran, we can see the template for all future kinds of democracy as well. In essence, once we get past the central idea, the actual operation of democracy is rooted in limitation or control of the franchise or, to put that another way, placing limits on who can vote and who is qualified to stand for office. In the Athenian system, this was done through the simple mechanism of citizenship. Some historians argue, in fact, that the whole idea of citizenship was invented to serve this franchise limiting function of democracy. The requirements for Athenian citizenship are actually quite draconian by our standards. It initially boiled down to ethnicity, with potential citizens needing to prove some generations' worth of residence in their particular deme, and/or membership of their tribe. Women were famously excluded, as were slaves, and so were many of the poor by virtue of needing to have completed a term of military service - the equipment and free time required to participate in the hoplite formation were beyond the reach of most poor people. Many of the most bitter constitutional disputes in ancient Athens had to do with citizenship - to whom to grant it, and what its requirements were. In the period following the Persian wars, the morphing of Athens into a naval power meant commoners completed military service at rowing benches, and foreigners flooded into the city. This caused quite a lot of Athenian heartache, and was solved by creating yet more controls in order to limit the influx of new citizens. So it can be seen that the first and purest democracy was primarily preoccupied with limiting or controlling access to it.

We can also see this pattern in communist countries, most of whom think of themselves as democratic. China is a good example, as at local and provincial levels they have elections, and they also have a kind of ersatz (though not well understood) parliamentary, or at least assembly, based system. In China, which is nominally or socially communist, we get the strange anomaly where membership of the Communist Party is actually quite exclusive. Political officers are present in most schools, and their role is to look for the most able and most doctrinally sound students in order to mark them for potential party membership in the future. Sure, the upper echelons of sovereign and executive power are not directly accessible by the people, but on many coarse measures, China is about as democratic as we are. Sure, it's an oppressive oligarchy, but the simple fact is that they are able to claim, without looking completely insane, that they have democratic mechanisms, and these mechanisms are very similar to the ancient Greek ones in that they primarily exist in order to confine actual power to an elite while simultaneously encouraging popular involvement and participation.

But by far the most predominant and egregious example is representative democracy - basically the system in use in most of the western world. The vast mass of the people are effectively cut off from the actual running of their country. The actual mechanisms of executive power are surrounded by a constitutional ring of steel, with the state holding more or less absolute monopolies on the enacting of legislation and the use of force. Every few years voters can choose the people who are going to rule over them, but like the hoplite formation, there is in fact an effective property qualification for office. Basically, the amount of time it takes to run, the licence fees, the cost of media - even simple stuff like the cost of corflutes and posters - make it highly impracticable for poor people to stand for office. Sure, it's possible in theory, but it's far far easier to run for office if one has access to property, leisure, and significant sums of cash. And then there's the attitudinal aspect. We need only look at the recent election of Zali Steggall in Warringah - correctly hailed as a breaking of the deadlock of the two party duopoly of Australian politics. If we look unflinchingly at what exactly made her viable and attractive as a candidate, some uncomfortable truths emerge.

What made Zali attractive? Well, let's look at the aspects of her which were used to promote her. Firstly, there was the name recognition and moral connotations of her past as an elite athlete. Then there was her highly successful career in the law - an elite profession which is further seen as eminently suitable owing to the fact that politicians are lawmakers. And then there was the perception that she was 'experienced at high levels', and talk of her more than average intelligence. Put simply, the thing which made her most attractive as a candidate for democratic office was not the 'anyone but Tony' aspect - multiple candidates have run against Tony to near zero effect. No, what made her viable in the public's eyes was the fact of her belonging to an elite - to several elites, really.

This kind of limitation of power is, at its best, designed to actually facilitate rather than debar popular participation in rule. But the important thing about a system of power is that it needs to be understood. I see a disheartening number of people with little to no understanding of how their state is actually run, and therefore of actual and existing avenues to the creation of change and the application of leverage. This mass ignorance creates a situation where power is more and more monopolised by special interest groups and lobbyists, who are probably the people best acquainted with these systems. And it also creates the very dangerous situation where the people cease to understand how they can interact within the system, which inevitably leads to apathetic non-participation, or a kind of frustrated impulse to either bypass or destroy the systems they don't understand and feel (technically correctly) are disenfranchising them.

Both of these are recipes for disaster, and it's actually down to each individual citizen to fix this. We can blame fatcats or media or alien lizards as much as we like - the simple fact of the matter is that we ourselves are ultimately responsible for the types of government we have, and we shape this reality through a combination of what we consent to, and the extent to which we can be bothered understanding it.