“Lets face it, we all love violence.” Says James Spader in an episode of Boston Legal wherein he has to defend a guy who had used violent ways to get thing done. Of course in the end he ends up convincing the jury about the innocence of the man he was defending, but something about his way made me believe that it’s true.
Don’t we all love the bad guys and violence? Many of us get the newspaper and the first things we scan for is tragedy or violence. If we don’t find it we are inwardly a bit disappointed, on the other hand if we do manage to find a news story about it then it dominates our coffee-room conversations. So what is it about the bad guys that we love so much?
Recently I read “Hammer of the Eden”, a novel by Ken Follett. It was written from 2 point of views- the bad guy and the good cop. The only problem was that the bad guy view was so riveting and enchanting that it overshadowed the story of the cop. And in the end when all hell breaks loose and the bad guy lost, I couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed. You see what I did was to get to know the reasons behind the things the bad guy did and somehow I could empathize with him.
So this is how the thought process behind this piece of writing began. I was deeply perturbed because when I realized that I was unhappy about the ending of the novel, which made me panic. I thought that there must be something wrong with me because I was silently rooting for the bad guy to win in the novel. Then I realized something which may sound cynical but it’s the truth.
We are all human and however hard we try to avoid it, we just cant stop our conscience and humanity from playing a small part in all the decisions we make. So when we come across situations where a guy has done something bad, we tend to stop looking at that guy as a human. We judge him as a wrong doer and when that mentality is set, you just cant see beyond it. We don’t want to think that may be the person had a very pressing reason to do it, or may be that the person concerned should be treated with a little open mind. The media doesn’t help either. They constantly keep telling us how others were affected by this guy’s actions and how he didn’t even think for once before committing that heinous act.
We love watching him go down and when it is all over we wait for the next bad guy to come along. Why do we do this? Is it because such episodes are real-life entertainment? Or is it because of the innate human faith. Lets face it, we all live in a misanthropic world and we need to have a little faith to survive in it. So we look forward to events like these to reinstate our faith in goodness. We believe that no matter how bad a situation can be there will be dawn, however dark the path may be but there will be light at the end of it. And so when a bad thing happens we all live to bask in the rejuvenated faith that the goodness will have the final say.
Meanwhile lets not forget that the people are not bad, its the situations that make them act the way they did. And hang on to the faith because at the end of the day it’s the only thing that will get us through.
