What is the Nature of Evil?

Monday I talked about the final season of Amazon's Man in the High Castle.  One of the interesting things in that season was that it went into the past of John Smith and showed how he turned to the dark side.  It reminded me of a blog Michael Offutt wrote a few months ago talking about some people and calling them evil.

The thing is, I think just writing people off as "evil" is too simplistic.  Sure Hitler, Charles Manson, and so on are evil, but if we just say they're evil and leave it at that, it oversimplifies everything.  And I think it can blind us to seeing more of those people before it's too late because we can say, "Well, they were just bad apples" and not really think about what made them bad in the first place.

In the case of John Smith the show first shows the alternate universe him in "our" world.  In that world he's an insurance salesman and seemingly content husband and father.  At one point he talks to Juliana, the main character from the other world.  He tells her that in the army he got a battlefield promotion to command of a unit and found he was good at it.  When the war ended, he was glad to get out because he was so good at being in command.  In time he thought the ambition might consume him.

Later the show flashes back to 1946.  The Nazis have nuked Washington DC and forced what's left of the US government to surrender.  Smith and his wife have a new baby who's starving and sick.  A comrade in the army shows up with a Nazi armband and food and milk.  He says that Smith and other former officers can join up with the Nazis.  And while Smith doesn't really want to, he has to think of his family.  It'll only be a little while, right?  So he joins up and even allows a Jewish friend to be taken away to a concentration camp rather than risk death for him and his family.

There's that old saying that the road to Hell is paved with good intentions.  Or in this case I guess it's the road to Hell is paved with just trying to survive and keep his family alive.  It was sort of what George Lucas was trying to do in the prequels with Anakin Skywalker:  he wanted to keep Padme alive so badly that he wound up going to the dark side.  Since Smith doesn't leave the military that ambition he feared in the other world drives him to do ever more horrible things, until he's ultimately consumed by evil, telling his wife that he doesn't know how to stop and go back to life before the Nazis.

It's a good portrait in how evil doesn't just happen all at once; it gradually creeps up on people, so gradually they probably don't even notice it until it's too late--if then.