Voldemort the evil overlord

[Caius Marcius]

No: HPFGUIDX 10573

--- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, " Charmian" <sashibuya at h...> wrote:
> --- In HPforGrownups at egroups.com, Flourish <slytherinkeeper at y...> 
> wrote:
> > Amanda said:
> > 
> > > Not necessarily. Melodrama is not as predictable as
> > > practicality, because
> > > melodrama requires the ego to do grand, glorious,
> > > weird things which make
> > > sense only to the ego, and are viciously hard to
> > > predict or guard against.
> > 
> 
> Hmmm. I'm going to be contrarian here and argue against evil 
> overlordism in a general sense. I'd have to argue that being a 
> flamboyant, cape-wearing, mwa-ha-ha-ha, pointless-bravadoing, 
> irrational supervillain is overdone in fiction, and is indeed 
> predictable. 

The following passage may be of interest.

	- CMC

[begin quote] It is permissible to portray evildoers in a story for 
children, so as to keep the picture simple.  But when the great world 
literature of the past – Shakespeare, Schiller, Dickens – inflates 
and inflates images of evildoers of the blackest shades, it seems 
somewhat farcical and clumsy to our modern perception. The trouble 
lies in the way these classic evildoers are depicted. They recognize 
themselves as evildoers, and they know their souls are black. And 
they reason, "I cannot live unless I do evil.  So I'll set my father 
against my brother. I'll drink the victim's suffering until I am 
drunk with them!"  Iago very precisely identifies his purposes and 
his motives as being black and born of hate.

But no; that's not the way it is! To do evil a human being must first 
of all believe that what he is doing is good, or else that it's a 
well-considered act in conformity with natural law. Fortunately, it 
is in the nature of a human being to seek a justification for his 
actions. 

Macbeth's self-justifications were feeble – and his conscience 
devoured him.  Yes, even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination 
and spiritual strength of Shakespeare's evildoers stopped short at a 
dozen corpses. Because they had no ideology. 

Ideology – that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification 
and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. 
That is the social theory that helps to make his acts seem good 
instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear 
reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was 
how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking 
Christianity; the conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the 
grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the 
Nazis, by race; and the Jacobins (early and late) by equality, 
brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience 
evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions
.[Ideology] is the 
precise line the Shakespearean evildoer cannot cross. But the 
evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and 
clear.

	- Alexander Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago, Book I, 
Chapter 4