Frank Sinatra’s “My Way” played as I sat in my room at dawn. It is dark, and the phone is situated at the other end of my room; I like the ambience, and it leaves me with almost no distractions aside from the amorous ceiling. Before the song played, I had been pondering evil. I know these topics have been exhausted over the past 3,000 years, but our, and more importantly, my confusion persists.
As Frank sang, “I did what I had to do, and saw it through with no exemption,” something lit up. I like “My Way,” seeing it as an earnest claim to one’s entire life, with its good and bad, even better, all the actions one has taken because they ultimately led him to where he is, satisfied at his deathbed. But that’s also where my problem with it lies: it’s fundamentally the “oh, well, fuck it” song.
The words sing of glory and pride that one claims simply by following through with their ways until the absolute end, simply because it was their way to the “ultimate” status. This abstract interpretation perhaps rids the song of any bit of subjectivity, but this is precisely the key to what I was thinking earlier. This is not merely narcissism, though I believe it to make for a meaningful part of it.
It’s this idea of the greater good. Ironically, evil bolsters this idea. All malevolence obsesses with the benign and the noble. And with us, humans, we’ve never been evil. No one dares to side with the devil, yet that’s exactly how we end up on his side. In the fog of all zealousness for “good”, or perhaps, the perception that one’s actions are always in the way of “good”, we commit to the pattern of hereditary idiocy. We create atrocity.
Genghis Khan believed himself to be the punishment of God, and if people hadn’t been sinful, he wouldn’t have been sent. The European colonizers believed that they were doing the native inhabitants a favor by colonizing them, civilizing them and introducing God to their lives. Hitler believed he’d be doing Europe a favor by ridding it of Jews, whom he deemed barely human.
These people aren’t psychopaths. Categorizing them allows for a slight bit of sympathy stemming from an argument of reduced accountability. No, they are fully in control, and they wouldn’t like to think otherwise because they’re obsessed with control. Perceiving them as a cartoonish, special kind of evil not only infantilizes them, but it also births a naive reading of history and a grave misunderstanding of the nature of one’s self.
It, surprisingly, takes very little to be in the shoes of Genghis, Hitler, or even Netanyahu. We see to our ways and are insistent on having it be our way, because we believe it to lead to the “greater good”. A kind of solipsism that we could barely admit, because we externalized this self-indulgence and projected it on the image of good.
The greater good proved itself to be the fundamental casus belli for all of our wars, personal and political. All of our crusades are righteous crusades. On our way to “good”, blood is a river to cross and people are merely mountains to scale. When we’re on the other side and it appears as though all we’ve left behind is evil, with not an ounce of decency on the horizon, we’ll boast about how it was “our” way, how necessary it was, and some of us would even do it again.
At a lot of times, I wonder what the rationale was behind the devil’s leap of faith out of heaven, sealing his fate behind him forever. Then I remember all that had been done in the name of the greater good, and barely that. The magnitude of pleasure he takes in playing the arbiter of virtue alone, at least to him, could be worth the gamble of eternal suffering.