It’s kinda the point of Pratchett that these men are the same. One just has the guarding dark. So you don’t wander around in the cityscape of your mind with a lantern, but lock it up in a prison with walls of code…Isn’t that pretty much the same thing? One could argue it’s a better thing — a sated predator is less likely to attack.
Okay, I have to concede that that’s an angle I hadn’t considered and I’ll have to do so.
But my concern really addresses the fact that, when fantasising about such things, rather than sublimating them via videogames, instead of a simple “so, I kill him/her/them”, I increasingly imagine ways in which to inflict a long, drawn-out death that involves torture, humiliation, degradation … the things that differentiate the evil man from the good — meaning I increasingly fail the test.
That’s a rewording of Paarthurnax’s riddle: What is better to be born good or to overcome your evil nature by great effort?
I’ve always sided with the side of overcoming evil nature by effort. It implies choice. Agency. So what if you do like it? I think I’ve gotten to know you well enough to know you have little issue abstaining where and when you have made the choice it is important to do so.
Hmmmm … I think it academic really. It is, without a shadow of a doubt, better to be good than evil … and how one achieves that status is immaterial.
After all, the idea that one form of good is somehow better than another is a bit foolish … rather like the idea that good cannot exist without evil — which is clearly bollocks, because a world without dry land would not mean the water were not still wet.
You’re right that I’d probably have little difficulty abstaining in the abstract. My concern lies with the idea that there’s no way of knowing how I’d react to the idea of doing a Dexter and excusing my behaviour with “But I’m making the World a better place at the same time” — as I said, apparently, the second time is easier … and that’s even if you don’t find you actively like it.
Of course. Otherwise the exploding donkey would have been my favorite.
Methinks the lady doth protest too much.
As though being killed by having an exploding donkey catapulted onto your head were, somehow, not humiliating.
A rose by any other name, my dear … would smell just as shit.
