The Masquerade of Malice

The more inscrutable the world becomes to the average person, the more we collectively lose our ability to tell the difference between heroes and villains. Complexity breeds confusion.

This creates a situation in which villains can either hide more easily behind masks of benevolence, or where would-be heroes are fooled into playing the part of a villain due to the ways malice masquerades itself.

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Archetype: The Flattener

Shadow of The Cave-escaper

In stories such as Flatland or the Cave Allegory found within The Republic, an exceptional individual escapes the confines of a limited reality (or perspective of reality) and attempts to bring back knowledge of the really-real to their societies. These kinds of stories generally conclude with the hero being treated as insane and dangerous. The truth is often violently rejected, and truth-bringers are often punished.

In contrast, I propose that The Flattener is a type of person who takes an already three-dimensional world, and crushes it into two-dimensional existence. This is extremely appealing to a populous that is overwhelmed and exhausted by an over-abundance of information. The Flattener is thus treated as a hero for offering pyrrhic solutions which appeal to our need for simplicity.

Archetype: The Scapegoater

Shadow of The Illuminator

In works such as I See Satan Fall Like Lightning, we learn about the typical patterns of The Scapegoater. This villain employs what Girard called the “single victim mechanism”. The short version of this idea is that a crisis can escalate to the point of destroying a whole society, so blaming everything on one symbolic victim is a mode of resolution which prevents a complete catastrophe. Girard points to the persecution of Christ as an example of scapegoating. However, he notes that Christ is not just a scapegoat, but one who illuminates the whole unjust pattern of the single victim mechanism by being so obviously innocent and good.

So, opposite a figure like Christ, there is an archetypal villain who not only uses the scapegoating method, but does so in such a way which disguises and obscures this pattern of symbolic victimization. It is easy to mistake this person as a hero, because they point out real problems which we all want to resolve. The issue is that they do a bait-and-switch, giving us a victim to sacrifice instead of a real solution—or, better yet, revealing the shortsightedness of scapegoating in general.

Archetype: The Maximizer

Shadow of The Diversifier

In a well-known passage from the work of Nick Bostrom, we learn about the ways in which an artificial intelligence can accidentally be programmed to maximize a certain value over all others, with terrible and unforeseen consequences. The example given is, humorously, a “paperclip maximizer” who thinks that, since paperclips are good, it would be good to turn all of the matter in the universe into paperclips. Despite this being somewhat over-the-top, the general pattern is something that we see all the time in real life. I would argue this is the quintessential way we sin against the Good: In maximizing a certain kind of value, we are necessarily neglecting or destroying other forms of value. If you think of how every action transforms possible value into actual value, it’s easy to imagine ways this process could go wrong—intentionally or not.

So I propose that The Maximizer is a common type of villain who we are eager to exalt if they are on our “team”. As opposed to someone who adds to our understanding of value through its diverse representations, this archetype is known for instrumentalizing every resource, opportunity, and person in service of an overly-narrow value-optimization.

Archetype: The Pyromaniac

Shadow of The Potter

A crisis can be defined as a crucial, life-or-death bifurcation between two extremely different futures. As we get closer and closer to the apotheosis of a crisis, with no resolution in sight, The Pyromaniac comes along to offer what he sees as the most reasonable solution: Burn it all down and start again. The Pyromaniac is prototypically regressive. In other times, this type of person might be easily spotted as a villain. However, now more than ever, we are getting further entangled in an increasingly complex metacrisis. And it becomes ever more tempting to see this archetype as a visionary savior.

In the sober morning-after, however, the painful realization dawns on us that The Pyromaniac had no solution, and that the smoldering rubble we are left with is even worse than the crisis which brought us there. This type of villain is an inversion of The Potter—one who selectively uses something destructive to achieve something productive and beautiful.

Concluding thought

Most will agree that we need heroes. But heroes need us, too. And it starts with correctly identifying who is who—hero or villain. Thereafter, our attention and energy can either build up the benevolent or mute the malicious. Heroes and villains do not have unilateral power over us. Their power is a function of our collective will. The Sun always shines, but as Dante once observed, “the grace of the highest good is not shed everywhere in the same degree”. It’s on us to find where value lays dormant, and to play our small but significant parts in the cultivation of perfection.