Reforming The Complete Monster

Every Complete Monster, both real and fictional, has his or her reasons for crossing a Moral Event Horizon. While those reasons may explain why they became the way they are, they don't justify or whitewash them.

Maybe. I was thinking more of people like the Japanese Unit 731, the Hutu militia responsible for the Rwandan genocide, a great part of the Waffen SS, the Croatian Ustasha, the Serbs in charge of the rape camps in Bosnia, the Khmer Rouge etc.

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You think that all or most of the people who belong to any of the above organisations are irredeemably evil?

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

Eh, it's easy to call them "evil" and "irredeemable" and "monsters", but if we were in their place (from the start, I mean, not just before pulling the trigger) we would have done the same, so I'd say Complete Monsters don't exist in real life. With the right circumstances, pretty much everyone could be redeemed.

edited 23rd Jun '11 3:42:27 AM by Dealan

I agree with just about all of that.

I think it's possible to classify actions as good and bad, mostly, but not people. What people do is, by and large, determined by their situation, and there are so many variables in situation that you could never say 'whatever situation X was in, s/he would always choose the morally worst option'.

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

Those who ordered and commited these atrocities are.

I'm still interested what kind of sympathy you would have for a murderer or a rapist.

I'm just sticking to the definition of Complete Monster which perfectly applies to the examples I listed.

edited 23rd Jun '11 3:47:41 AM by AdeptusAlpharius

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I'm sorry, what was that definition again?

And just to reiterate: yes, I can feel sympathy for a murderer or a rapist, or anyone, really. I don't consider myself an especially nice person, so surely there must be others out there.

By the way, not to derail the thread and certainly not to start a massive, interminable debate, but purely out of personal interest, can I ask whether you believe in the death penalty for those you deem to be Complete Monsters?

Yes. Again.

edited 23rd Jun '11 3:56:37 AM by cityofmist

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

My first reaction to that was "rape is not that bad", but I've got a feeling that it'd be misunderstood. My point is, you can't define a person just with one word. He murdered innocents. He raped innocents. He ordered for the deaths of thousands of innocents. But that's not all he did. There's more to a person than his crimes. So yes, I can feel sympathy for murderers and rapists.

(And yes, I can't see where I went out of the Complete Monster definition.)

What is written in the main page of Complete Monster. Especially the five points that are listed, you can't miss it. To be honest I never seriously thought about the death penalty, especially since in Germany where I currently reside and in my native BiH it has been abolished. Maybe I would oppose the death penalty, not because I would shed a single tear for those criminals, but because I might concider this form of punishment as "barbaric". Literal life imprisonment should be enough. If you mean with sympathy that everyone has a right to live and the right for a fair trial, then I agree.

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The description for the trope page is a very narrow, specific one, and you've just sweepingly condemned thousands of people to it. You mentioned the Waffen SS, for example; do you genuinely believe that everyone in it personally committed actions that were unbelievably heinous, had no justification or excuse, had no altruistic qualities whatsoever, and never felt the slightest flicker of remorse for anything they did, which are the four points out of the five you say are your definition of 'complete monster' that are applicable to real life? Do you think that everyone who has ever raped another human being perfectly fits that checklist? You are either beyond cynical, or not thinking this through.

edited 23rd Jun '11 4:11:23 AM by cityofmist

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

Feel free to explain why not whithout sounding like a Nazi apologist.

The Holocaust was even back then concidered as especially vile. Henious actions in real life are serious business by default. I have no idea what can excuse something like a genocide. It is especially easy to commit an industrialized mass murder if you are devoid of empathy like in this case reducing Jews, homosexuals, handicapped, gypsies etc. to vermin. And finally I can't see how to redeem them without sounding like an apologist. In fact, many of them were even proud of what they did.

As for a rapist. If it is a special kind of evil, YMMV. Personally at least, I think it is henious just like murder. As said, point 2 is played straight by default. There are many reasons that can explain why someone would commit rape, but I do not see how rape can be excused or justified. I may be not a psychologist, but don't rapists in general lack of empathy, especially for their victims? Especially those who feel no remorse for what they did? The last point is a bit tricky depends on how much you are willing to forgive.

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Two words: Mob psychology.

Even taking that out of account, I do not have to be a Nazi apologist to say that not everyone who was involved in the Holocaust, every single person, was utterly evil and without redeeming features. The sheer numbers of people make that statistically implausible.

On a related note, a couple of weeks back I was having a long discussion with some friends about whether, if we'd been living in 1930s/40s Germany, we'd have gone along with or been involved with the Nazis. Most of us came to the conclusion that we would have, on the basis either that we'd have been fooled by the propaganda, etc, or that we'd have gone along with it to avoid trouble. I don't think any of us are irredeemably evil because of that, but you could extend that to say that by your logic if we had been living in that time period we would have been, and thus avoided being Complete Monsters by sheer coincidence.

In the right situation, I'm pretty sure I'd be capable of doing stuff every bit as bad as most of the people you say are Complete Monsters. In the right situation, probably a slightly different one, so would you. Just about everyone would. So you can either say that the entire human race is evil, full stop, or that doing bad things does not make you irredeemably evil.*

edited 23rd Jun '11 6:11:41 AM by cityofmist

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

I have felt sympathy for someone who victimized me.

When I was a baby, my parents discovered that my uncle was physically and sexually abusing his kids (then 11 & 14). They called social services and ended up with custody of the two kids.

Both of those kids, at some point after moving in with us, started to sexually abuse me, and they continued for several years until they left home - the older one ran away and decided not to return, the younger one sexually assaulted a classmate and my parents realized he was a danger to me.

Their actions left deep psychological wounds, that I still haven't completely recovered from. There is no way that what they did to me could be considered acceptable. And yet, I feel sympathy for them. They were hurting far worse than I ever have. They had been taught from a very young age to view abuse as acceptable behavior. Their father even forced them to abuse each other, in order to train them to be perpetrators. (He enjoyed corrupting people.) If I were raised in the kind of environment they'd been raised in, I'm sure I'd have been an abuser as well.

Feeling sympathy for them, to me, means caring about their well-being and understanding what caused their actions. It does not mean condoning their actions. I have not forgiven them and I will never forget. But they are human beings, doing what they thought they should do under the circumstances.

edited 23rd Jun '11 6:38:58 AM by Ettina

If I'm asking for advice on a story idea, don't tell me it can't be done.

If you were already slightly bigoted and you got 10 years of nazi-propaganda telling you that untermenschen should be wept of the face of the earth it would be kind of hard to feel empathy for those that have been painted as the evil enemies of your country. And the industriality of the murder makes it more easy to commit the genocide because you wouldn't be face to face to the victims. While I agree it was horrible and the greatest shame in the history of mankind I think it should, as a lesson for the future, not be forgotten how dangerous propaganda and indoctrination can be.

If any question why we died/ Tell them, because our fathers lied -Rudyard Kipling

I hoped that by those involved it would be clear that I ment those who did it out of xenophobic and genocidal frenzy. There were a lot of Punch Clock Villains, yes. But my point is that your motivation and background does not excuse you from voluntarily commiting henious atrocities of which magnitude and consequences you are perfectly aware of.
I must applaud you for being able to openly write about it here in such a board. Second, the only reason I would have to care for the well being of a Complete Monster is that even this person is still a human being who still has human rights like it is propper in a civilized society (even if said person went too far). Personally I think that no messed up childhood is going to be a valid excuse for being at worst a menace to society. For good or ill, your actions speak louder then your intentions and background and some scars you have stay forever.

I wish you luck and strength for the future. True. But would I look morally any better if I still happily and voluntarily participate in a genocide? No matter how much in this scenario I would regard Jews as vermin or as a threat or both, I would still not be excused from actively participating in history's biggest mass murder.

edited 23rd Jun '11 9:12:15 AM by AdeptusAlpharius

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There's a fairly wide gap between not excusing someone of their crimes, and saying that those crimes mean the person is wholly evil with no redeeming features.

Scepticism and doubt lead to study and investigation, and investigation is the beginning of wisdom. - Clarence Darrow

I guess what I don't like is that Complete Monster is a judgment of decency, which seems beside the point. I mean, given how unusual my moral system is, most people are indecent to me in some way, but I don't advocate punishing people for that. It's all a matter of whether or not someone needs to be killed or confined to protect others (and this includes people I wouldn't even call evil.)

That's Feo . . . He's a disgusting, mysoginistic, paedophilic asshat who moonlights as a shitty writer—Something Awful

It really bugs me when people refer to Hitler as a CM. He had like, six degrees of separate from any direct actions done, which meant complete emotional detachment. If you're gonna argue for anyone, at least do it for Mengele.

edited 24th Jun '11 6:44:16 PM by MrAHR

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That's why crime lords are OK dudes. They don't get their hands dirty.

Also, that argument would work if Hitler wasn't emotionally invested in pretty much every aspect of his regime, throwing his romantic bluster into shit as mundane as civic architecture. The man was a hateful nut who laid out his plans explicitly in Mein Kumpf, and everyone around him should has seen it.

I'm not saying it makes him a saint, I'm saying there is a difference between ordering a guy to kill someone, and killing someone in cold blood. Both are douche moves, but one is a lot easier to do, and requires less moral worrying.

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