In your opinion, what makes someone a good person or a bad person? Put yourself in Santa's fur-lined boots for a minute. Do you keep a checklist of "good person" adjectives and draw a dividing line based on the number of checks? Probably not. First of all, we often judge people without knowing them well enough to come up with a respectable checklist. Secondly, people are tricky - literally and figuratively. We are untrustworthy and unstable, prone to fits of kindness and unkindness alike. We also intrinsically elude any kind of definition. The preservation of our identities depends upon our abilities to adapt to a radically wide spectrum of situations. It is not always "good" to be "good" or "bad" to be "bad"- in other (less ideologically loaded and heavily quoted) words, each of us is a good and a bad person, for better and for worse.
I may have upset some people by that last statement, but I can assure you that such was not my intention. I do believe in God and in Satan, but I am not going to get into religion here - the ideology is too overwhelming. "The Book" in the title of this blog post refers not to the Bible (though it is an excellent book), but rather to collective works of a particular brand of fiction in which the line between good and bad is clearly delineated. The Harry Potter series, Wrinkle in Time quartet, and Hunger Games Trilogy are three of my favorite young adult series. Thematically, these series have few things in common, but what they do have in common is this: while or after reading them, the reader knows who is/was good and who is/was bad. Most importantly, this distinction exists and is obvious even as the reader recognizes that the "good" characters are flawed. We all know that Harry Potter and Katniss Everdeen can be moody and even hateful and that Meg Murry can be insecure and impatient. And we wouldn't want them any other way. We want our heroes to be like us, to be someone we could potentially be. What we don't want is for these shortcomings to become the enemy, as they so often do for us.
In a previous post, I defined insecurity as fear of compromising one's ego. If that is the diagnosis, here are some of the side effects: self-destructive behavior such as drinking, doing drugs, eating disorders, self-mutilation, etc. and antisocial behavior such as avoidance of social situations, not listening or talking to people, violence, etc. Insecurity is our most real, most terrifying enemy. We are the enemy. When we fight others, we are actually fighting the parts of ourselves that feel threatened. What is "bad" is that which does not promote or at least placate our sense of our own goodness. This black-and-white model does not fare well in our grayscale world. That's why fiction is much more satisfying than reality.
The outrageous success of series like Harry Potter and the Hunger Games cannot derive solely from exceptional writing or even from their remarkable heroes. These stories depend as much upon their villains as they do upon their heroes. Without Voldemort and his baddie cohort and the Capitol, these stories would be too familiar. Inner conflict would become the central driving force as it is in our lives. We've had it up to here with inner conflict! Give us soulless snake-human hybrids and a government that puts us in an annual contest to kill each other anyday! Anything to make us stop fighting ourselves! We all want to be the heroes within ourselves, but we don't want to (and can't, in my opinion) destroy the villains within. So we dream about a reality in which the presence of a separate evil renders us wholly good if we side against it. Another reason to love fiction... not that I needed one.
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