and torture for vengeance, so long as it was someone scummy enough. This I saw all through the 80s, again among "nice" respectable moderate New Englanders of middle class and above, embraced thoroughly in the 20th century version of the Revengers' Tragedy, the Violent Action Movie in which the villians were almost always Asian or swarthy, but might be a perverted WASP, in which case it was alright to kill them for what they had done to the Designated Victims, who were always attractive and pitiable, which is what sets them apart from Bystander Casualties, which don't really count. (Bystanders, aka Redshirts, can usually be recognized because they're dorky, ugly, and/or mean or stupid, but not enough to qualify as Villains.)
This is why I made myself unpopular in HS and college by gloomily predicting the return of the Games, btw, and being pooh-poohed by my sane, reasonable teachers and elders. Bloodlust cannot be sated: the Terror should have taught us that, two hundred years ago.
More recently, this came up on Usenet discussions of fantasy, and the phenomenon of the immoral good guys, who are not presented as flawed heroes who need spiritual help and redemption, but au contraire the presentation is meant to make the audience feel guilty for being too wussy to approve of torturing Evil Minions, a process which was aided by the literary device of the puppy-killer - that is to say, the Evil Villain and his/her Minions were always shown to be worse than Our Heroes, no matter how unsavory they might be drawn, by virtue of the fact that they were willing to kill sweet little puppies, so to speak - the Villain in the first Goodkind book who molests and tortures children to death to enhance his power being a classic case in point. Thus, we can do anything short of that, and break all the rules - rule-breaking itself made a Nietschean virtue, in fiction as in the "real world" - in order to bring about the "greatest good of the greatest number."
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the same culture was also okay with vengeance
Date: 2005-03-19 12:50 pm (UTC)This is why I made myself unpopular in HS and college by gloomily predicting the return of the Games, btw, and being pooh-poohed by my sane, reasonable teachers and elders. Bloodlust cannot be sated: the Terror should have taught us that, two hundred years ago.
More recently, this came up on Usenet discussions of fantasy, and the phenomenon of the immoral good guys, who are not presented as flawed heroes who need spiritual help and redemption, but au contraire the presentation is meant to make the audience feel guilty for being too wussy to approve of torturing Evil Minions, a process which was aided by the literary device of the puppy-killer - that is to say, the Evil Villain and his/her Minions were always shown to be worse than Our Heroes, no matter how unsavory they might be drawn, by virtue of the fact that they were willing to kill sweet little puppies, so to speak - the Villain in the first Goodkind book who molests and tortures children to death to enhance his power being a classic case in point. Thus, we can do anything short of that, and break all the rules - rule-breaking itself made a Nietschean virtue, in fiction as in the "real world" - in order to bring about the "greatest good of the greatest number."
As Chancellor von Bethmann-Hollweg said in '14, "Not kennt kein Gebot" - that is, "Necessity knows no law" - which is exactly where we are today, as a society.