The Complexity of Evil

I think one of the traps that many of us liberals fall into is the assertion that those responsible for the injustice in the world are not the equivalent of silent film villains. These antagonists are evil incarnate. Their physicality is meant to incur nothing less. They are typically spindly characters with skeletal, long fingers between which they twirl their greasy, pencil-thin, jet-black mustache, grinning sickeningly and beady eyes twinkling over a beaked nose as they merrily watch the damsel in distress struggle against her dubiously tight ropes as a train barrels ever closer. These characters are one-dimensional, driven by an all consuming vile emotion, such as greed or lust or jealousy.

It's all too simple, we argue, for today's multifarious leaders in such a complex world to be compared to these characters. Even I have found myself at the defense of men and women who deny sick people life-saving medicine because billionaire companies like Pfizer don't want to lose a penny. I've explained away the complexity of those who rob indigenous citizens of land they've tilled for centuries so that space can be made to extract oil. The list goes on. What about the governments who charge the poor and thirsty for water they can't afford because the West wants them to privatize. Or organizations as great as the UN who simply ignore the pleas of help in times of genocide, refusing to even call it by that name because it means countries with soldiers and resources to spare will have to come to their aide. I've argued it's too easy to just say they're greedy or selfish. Or have even been excitedly reminded of the same argument by one of my favorite SIT teachers if students balked at the sheer cruelty of the IMF and World Bank loan regulations.

Yet I'm starting to wonder if we're explaining away some of the problem. People are complex. I would never argue that. But they are also driven by greed just like that villain. I'm not talking about the kind of questionable acts that are brought on by desperation or ignorance, but the kind CEO's of multinationals participate in daily. And just like in the movies, it's still wrong. Simply wrong. There is a myriad of examples of this simple greed in books such as John Perkin's Confessions of an Economic Hit Man, where men and women goad and manipulate leaders into accepting loans that cause their countries to be indebted to the West forever. Or in Jawara and Kwa's Behind the Scenes at the WTO where men are moved to tears during negotiations. Some men because their jobs as pharmaceutical agents are threatened when Southern countries begin to demand affordable generic drugs for their dying masses. Others because of the hopelessness in their countries when the generic drug production is denied as even a topic of discussion at the Doha Round. To me, this seems simple. Greed does motivate people to do awful things and just because our complex system allows it, even encourages it, doesn't mean we should write it off as too complex to be labeled as such.

If everyone started working against a natural tendency to dominate, acquire and destroy, maybe our complex system's foibles could start to become as recognizable as a skinny man in black attire, twirling his moustache and staring hungrily at an innocent youth.