Assignment 1:5 – Evil

Your task is to take the story that Kings tells about how evil comes into the world at the witches conference [In “The Truth About Stories” ] — and change the story any way you want — as long as the end remains the same: once you have told a story, you can never take it back. So, be careful of the stories you tell, AND the stories you listen to. 

–

I told my daughter a story that some might argue she was too young to hear. It was a story about evil, and how it comes to be in the world. I didn’t do this to scare her. I did it to make sure she knows her responsibility to act against evil in others and in herself.

I told her about a time when I was a young woman. I had just turned 19, and I went out to a club to celebrate my birthday. I was naive then in a way that I no longer am. I believed in my heart that every person on this earth had the best intentions, although they varied in the strength of their conviction to be good. Evil was weakness, and I pitied those who practiced it. On this night of celebration, I felt carefree and joyous, a couple close girlfriends at my side. I looked to new faces around the bar as friends or lovers waiting to be found. The man who found me was not a friend though. He was an evil that I had not known existed. Some part of him, perhaps born, perhaps bred, wanted to be violent. It was his nature to be evil, and he was not apologetic or regretful about it. When he approached me on the dance floor, I did not know yet of his nature. I flirted with the sting of alcohol on my breath. I told my friends that I was leaving with him, and they gave me a knowing wink. It wasn’t until we stood outside waiting for a taxi that I saw his true nature come alive. He whispered in my ear things he wanted to do with me that I was not interested in doing. I understood that some people have different preferences, and that’s okay, so I communicated to him where my preferences differed from his, and I thought that would be the end of it. But he did not care about my preferences. He did not care that I was a human being.

I tried to walk away from him, back to my friends, but he restrained me in a chokehold. I screamed and he pressed his arm harder into my throat until I could barely breathe. The bouncer standing outside the bar saw this. People walked down the street laughing and talking as if I wasn’t in danger. He stopped my breathing just long enough for me to pass out, and for some reason the taxi driver took in this man and a helpless, unconscious girl without a second thought. I don’t know what these people did think when they saw me; that this was all a joke and I was actually okay? All I know is that evil came into my world that night for the first time, and I saw it in two forms: evil in a person’s nature, and evil in those who failed to protect me.

Some people say my daughter was too young to hear this story. But, of course, it is too late. For once a story is told, it cannot be called back. Once told, it is loose in the world.

This story was inspired by a conversation with my father about evil. I asked him where he thought evil came from and he replied, “Evil is when good men do nothing.” This is his paraphrase of a quote from Edmund Burke, not that my dad remembered the source!

I found this to be a really interesting idea particularly because I learned about the bystander effect in an intro psychology course I took in first year. The murder of Kitty Genovese in 1964 sparked research into this area. Genovese was stabbed outside her apartment building and then raped over a period of about 30 minutes with 38 people later admitting to having heard her screams without acting on the situation. Does that mean those 38 people were evil? Well, the bystander effect theory helps explain how good people can be passive bystanders. First, the more bystanders there are in an emergency, the less likely any of them are to act as there is a diffusion of responsibility, making each bystander feel less responsible for helping. They may believe that in such a crowd there must be someone more qualified to help than them. Second, bystanders are affected by the attitudes of those around them. If they see others remaining calm, they believe that what they are seeing is not actually dangerous, and that their initial interpretation was a mistake. Interestingly, one of the most effective ways to combat the bystander effect is to teach people about it, so they are aware of the pressures acting on them when confronted with a situation that requires action.

I find the bystander effect to be particularly enlightening in terms of rape culture, and how it is able to persist in a society that deems itself forward-thinking.

Have you ever been a bystander, either active or passive?

Thanks for reading,

Caitlin

–

Works Cited

Dwivedi, Supriya. “Rape culture persists in our legal system.” Toronto Sun. Postmedia, 4 Feb. 2016. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.

Keltner, Dacher, and Jason Marsh. “We Are All Bystanders.” Greater Good: The Science of a Meaningful Life. University of California Berkeley, 1 Sept. 2006. Web. 4 Feb. 2016.