The Nature of Evil Study Questions
One. What is the stunning achievement of Night?
The book gives us a picture of unspeakable evil, a teenage boy’s firsthand account of the Holocaust, one that some people cannot comprehend or believe. This is "evil off the grid" that cannot be explained with words or exposition. Rather, we need a narrative, a rendering, a showing of evil. In other words, Wiesel has done the impossible: He's used words to describe the unspeakable.
Through this first-person narrative, we experience the horror of loss and evil as seen through the eyes of a fifteen-year-old boy, a boy who, before being taken away to a concentration camp, believes in the wisdom of his father and the justice of God.
These beliefs are challenged, or rather abolished, as Wiesel sees evil take over the world in the face of a silent God. He sees a world surrendering to evil as his father, an image of strength, can only watch on helplessly.
Another achievement of the book is the way it makes us examine the nature of evil. We often attempt to reduce evil to a theory to create the illusion of control but in reading Night we see that evil has an element of mystery that is unexplainable. Many people want to explain evil, reduce it to a scientific explanation because they can't accept evil, they can't accept an evil force and because they want to further their own theory as part of their self-interest.
Night the memoir is not a theory about evil; it’s a boy’s experience of evil, an evil of such magnitude that his faith is changed forever. He recreates the ordeal of going through evil no one could have imagined and what this ordeal did to his faith.
Two. Is evil the cause of the suffering inflicted on Wiesel and the Jews described in this book or is their suffering the result of a misguided, sincere ideology?
The best book I’ve read that addresses the way we look at evil behind the Holocaust is Explaining Hitler by Ron Rosenbaum.
Rosenbaum realizes a lot of people, including intellectuals and scholars, cannot accept evil; they’d rather find explanations that, explicitly or not, deny the existence of evil.
Part of this denial of evil is the need to say we are "rational beings" who can come up with a scientific explanation for everything. If we accept an evil force, we are showing signs of antiquated religious fanaticism.
So to avoid being "backwards" and "antiquated" in our thinking, we believe that horrible, evil things happen, such as the Nazi scourge, not because people are evil, but because people have childhood traumas or become insane, beholding to misguided, sincere beliefs. Or people have a chemical imbalance that compels them to do violence. Or there are political and social forces that lead to a type of evil behavior, sometimes referred to as the "banality of evil."
But Rosenbaum argues--and I agree-that evil is a diabolical force, a demonism, not necessarily in the religious sense, that animates Hitler and other evil people.
Many scholars reject the idea of an evil or a diabolical force. We can call such deniers of evil rationalists, those who believe there is a scientific explanation for everything. I should add here that the famous atheist Christopher Hitchens, no friend of religion, believed in an evil force and said Osama Bin Laden was guided by such an evil force. I mention this to show you don't have to be religious to see evil.
I would further argue that many people, including the nonreligious, believe in evil. They simply don't use the word evil. Rather, they use another word that I can't say here to describe evil people. The word begins with the letter "a."
I would further argue that Hitler and his Nazi minions were giant "a . . ." who used their ideology as an excuse to be big "a . . ."
What is an "a . . ."? A person who enjoys hurting other people for no other reason than the sheer pleasure of it. What is the pleasure? It's the feeling of power over the victim. This type of perverse pleasure is called sadism.
We can avoid the A word to describe such people. Other, better words for college writing are malevolent, sadistic, malignant. These adjectives mean the person is animated by an evil force.
A noun we can use is a sadist.
A sadist, who takes pleasure in committing cruel acts against others, is driven by an evil force.
These people are worthy of our hate. We hate them because evil is worthy of hatred.
But too many people deny evil and say we shouldn't hate people like Hitler. We should "understand" them. They argue that Hitler was not so much evil; rather, he was insane, a true believer in his own ideology and this wrong belief caused him to do wrong, but he and his followers were not evil.
These people argue that we are irrational, we are psychologically wounded, we are even mad, but we are never evil.
Rosenbaum, and I agree with him, rejects these over simplistic explanations, which evidence people are too frightened to face the brutal truth that there is evil in our world.
Some argue that Hitler was delusional, a sincere believer in his killing of the Jews as an act that was good for Germany and the world; he thought he was doing good like “killing germs.” I reject this view. Hitler took sadistic satisfaction in killing the people he hated. He used his “vision” as an excuse to exercise his cruelty.
Fatuous (Stupid) Theories That Excuse Hitler
Here’s an example of someone trying to say Hitler was delusional. It’s the ludicrous Hitler Billy Goat Theory . . . Theories such as this one are an absurd oversimplification of evil. Often these lame theories are an attempt at finding false comfort from denying evil. There is in fact no way to explain away Hitler’s evil. He was in fact evil and this makes the Holocaust not entirely explainable. There is an element of frightening mystery behind evil of this magnitude that escapes conception and language. We call this ineffable or inexplicable evil. Theorists and academics like to think they can explain anything, including Hitler’s evil, because such a view gives them the illusion of control. In other words, explanation becomes a sort of comfort or “consolation.”
Three. What is the danger of denying evil?
If we reject evil and explain bad behavior by saying we are sincerely misguided, insane, or chemically and/or neurologically imbalanced, we are saying we are helpless pawns to forces we cannot control. We are innocent, yes, but such innocence comes with a price, because we are slaves to psychological and biological forces and as such we have no free will. Having no free will, we have a diminished definition of what it means to be human. We are less human, more robot.
If we reject evil, then no one is accountable in a court of law. Every evil act can be explained by the "Twinkie defense," the infamous defense that a killer went on a murder spree because of a sugar overload, which caused his brain to go haywire.
Four. What is the either/or fallacy of evil?
When it comes to looking Hitler, people are often divided into two camps There are those who believe Hitler to be a cynical manipulator while others believe Hitler is a sincere madman, but in fact he can be both. Often in life we start out dishing out B.S. to others and if people believe in B.S. we start to believe in it. That’s the beginning of going crazy. Evil can result from someone who is both delusional and consciously evil. It’s not an either/or proposition. All of us are clearly a mingling of unconscious and conscious impulses.
Five. Can normal people turn to evil?
The short answer is yes. Our longing to believe in a authority figure, our need to belong to the tribe and conform to its ways, our willingness to be obedient to the powers at be often compel us to do evil while cowardly denying responsibility for our evil. Think of all the German citizens who collaborated with the Nazis in the name of obedience.
However, let’s be clear: While we all have evil in us that can be triggered by societal pressures such as the need to conform or the need to obey authority, Hitler’s evil is “off the grid”; he shows an evil that lacks the controls and boundaries we associate with a sadist and a sociopath.
Let us not compare the evil of a sadistic tyrant to a bunch of cowardly sheep.
Six. Was the Nazi evil dependent on Hitler?
Even with Europe’s Christian-based history of anti-Semitism (hatred of the Jews), it appears the Holocaust needed the Cult of Hitler’s Personality to fuel something as unspeakable as the Holocaust. Hitler had the will: Killing six million Jews didn’t help Hitler’s war cause. He didn’t kill them because he had to. He killed them because he wanted to. One compelling and convincing theory is that Hitler’s evil was a form of art, a lifestyle, complete with architecture, design, music, clothing, etc.
Seven. What does Hitler teach us about evil?
Evil is associated with sadism, which means taking perverse pleasure in inflicting cruelty on others. As an amateur psychologist, I would make a comparison between Hitler and the BTK serial killer, not on all levels, but on this one: It appears they both took sadistic pleasure in controlling and torturing and killing others. Evil can reach a magnitude, as in the case of Hitler and the Nazis, that is not entirely explainable. In an evil sense, Hitler became a “hit,” a “blockbuster,” a phenomenon for which there is no explanation or formula.
In the entertainment industry people try to come up with hits all the time, like Spice Girls or Twilight series or Tim Tebow or Justin Bieber. Evil is born from a lack of authenticity.
Hitler was a quack, a fake, a charlatan, a mountebank, a clown who became a hit and when people took him seriously he took himself seriously and became a true believer in his own B.S.
Evil can be so horrific that many are compelled to explain it away with a stupid theory. Some people can’t accept “evil without the fig leaf of rectitude.”
In other words, people have to believe, as an article of faith, that evil is driven by a sincere madman. Not so, argues Rosenbaum, and I agree with him.
Eight. What are some distinguishing characteristics about evil?
If we look at Hitler and Osama Bin Laden, we see some parallels that give some insights into evil:
1. Delusions of grandeur and perhaps clinical definition of narcissism: inflated self-regard
2. Sense of rectitude (being right) that no one can challenge.
3. Surrounded by sycophants so no reality check resulting in solipsism (your self becomes your only reality, a form of insanity).
4. Vain belief that you have special knowledge that the world's idiots cannot understand so it's your right to will your vision on the rest of the world. This is a vehicle for exercising your control over others.
5. Sadism: you enjoy hurting and killing others and use phony ideologies as your vehicle for this.
6. While many serial killers suffered abusive childhoods, Hitler and Bin Laden apparently did not. They do evil for its own sake. "I do it because I can." Evil is a pleasure, an imposing of the will over others, not to achieve anything other than the sense of power from asserting such a will.
Writing Options:
Was Hitler's Final Solution, which resulted in the Holocaust, the product of evil or the misguided vision of a sincere ideologue?
What has happened to the idea of evil in the face of psychology and science? And what are the consequences of explaining away evil? This is a two-part essay.
Examples of Thesis Statements You Shouldn't Write
Don't write a thesis that is too broad, general, or obvious.
Hitler's evil spread across Europe.
We need to study Hitler's evil.
No one knows what evil is so it's stupid to call Hitler evil.
Why is McMahon so obsessed with Hitler's so-called "evil"? Is McMahon a religious fanatic? I think McMahon is trying to make us religious and I resent this. I hate his class and I refuse to write this essay.
Why call Hitler evil? He was simply wrong about his solution for the world's problems. People make mistakes all the time.
All of us are evil.
Let's stop talking about this fiction McMahon calls evil and talk about the real forces behind Hitler's bad deeds, psychology and biology.
Calling Hitler evil doesn't help us understand Hitler.
We've allowed fake science to explain away evil.
More Successful Thesis Statements
Hitler was not a benign creature with a twisted vision but rather an evil-inspired demagogue evidenced by _________, __________, __________, and __________.
McMahon's focus on Hitler's "evil" fails to bring us to a closer to an understanding of Hitler's motivations, which can be explained by established psychology and sheds light on Hitler's five major unconscious motives.
These so-called "unconsious motives" the writer speaks of are mere speculation and cannot proven. They tell a story about how people do bad things that allows us to deny evil. But we deny evil at our peril. Hitler in fact embodies "off the grid" evil evidenced by __________, __________, ___________, and _____________.
Bogus science has created the delusion that there is no evil in this world. Science denies evil in five major ways, which include ____________, _____________, ____________, and ______________.
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