We love our villains. In movies, it’s sweet stuff when a hail of bullets riddles a drug kingpin, an abusive mother gets her what-for, or an evil queen evaporates in a fiery plume of green fire. We want pure evil to suffer a painful death.

Unfortunately, true villains – completely one-dimensional, evil-to-the-bone, dog-kicking ones – don’t exist.

Movie villains hate little kids; they hate Christmas; they hate wildflowers on a summer afternoon. Disney surely deserves some blame, but at least he keeps them pure. If a movie flashback shows a young villain locked in a toxic relationship with his abusive father, it ruins the fantasy. Now we have to empathize; we have to understand his motivation; we have to feel sorry for him. When he’s ripped apart by Dobermans in the final scene, we can’t enjoy it as much.

General hate floats like a mist in our subconscious, hard to see and easy to ignore. On a conscious level, good people work hard to convince themselves they’re not bigots even though outdated, unquestioned attitudes float below the surface. If a random bigoted thought rises like a Magic 8 Ball prediction, they rationalize it away.

One rationalization tactic: Create villains. Dump the blame on them.

Here’s the basic formula:

1. Create a villain to hate.
2. Ignore any snippet of humanity this villain later displays, such as that flashback to an abusive father.
3. If a snippet of doubt should arise – if a Magic 8-ball thought floats to the surface – repeat the villain mantra and wait for doubt to disappear.
4. If an actual news discussion arises, shut it down by pointing to this villain as “proof that it’s their problem.” You might say: “I’m not generally a racist, but if I was, this person right here is the reason things will never get better.”

A fact to be understood upfront: Some villains choose to be villains and the hate that goes with it. Others do not. We don’t care, though. If no one volunteers to be a villain, we make one up. About 320 million people call the United States home. We only need one.

The problem with villain creation

It’s an illusion. It suggests the entire weight of a complex social problem can be boiled down to the words and deeds of one man, Dr. Evil. It cuts off discussion.

If open-minded Ken notes a few racist comments from his peeps and mentions it conversationally, bigoted Barbie shuts down discussion with her oft-repeated phrase: “Well, how about Dr. Evil? If this group’s ambassador hates us, then by God, I’m going to hate them back until he changes.” Discussion closed.

High-profile fake villains

• Kim Davis. The Kentucky clerk refused to issue gay marriage licenses, even though the courts ruled that she must – plus it’s her job. She cited her Christian faith as the reason.

Ms. Davis is a small-town clerk in a backwater town. (No offense to small towns.) There’s no “greater truth” to be uncovered behind Davis’ behavior. However, raising her to villain status allowed gay marriage supporters to burn her metaphorically online. It also allowed like-thinkers to raise her status to martyr – the flipside of the villain coin.

Davis did not incite American’s anger. America’s anger created Davis.

• Every Muslim terrorist. Twenty-three percent – one in four people on Earth – is Muslim. If terrorism was a religious calling card, the world would be facing a horrific battle for global domination that makes WW II seem petty. But it’s not.

There may be a scary number of Muslim terrorists, but the Godfather was somehow both Catholic and a mass murderer. Throughout time, a small percentage of all religious groups have managed to reconcile an okay-to-kill philosophy with a love-thy-neighbor religious belief.

• Rev. Al Sharpton. As a black civil rights leader, Sharpton doesn’t even have to speak – he just has to show up. Sharpton’s presence proves that angry blacks hate whites, and “Where was Al Sharpton?” criticizes an entire race if the man doesn’t consider a specific event worthy of his attention. Single sentences culled from Sharpton’s speeches are dissected, tweeted, discussed and ridiculed. As the face of black anger, he’s also the racial dartboard.

But Sharpton is one man and one opinion. Sometimes he’s right, sometimes he’s wrong. At the least, we should all be able to talk about his words – or even simply ignore him – without promoting him to villain (or hero) status.

At least Sharpton understands his villain status and considers it a worthy path, though. Davis never paid her dues, but she did volunteer for a villain position. Over 99 percent of the world’s Muslim population did not.

The joy of pure evil

Real-world villains are complex individuals. They have families, sex drives, religious beliefs, driving skills, pets, and a thousand other traits unrelated to an evil nature. All voices count – even those of fake villains.

But when we shut down conversations by citing fake villains, the evil is real even if the villains are not.

© SmithTakes.com