Dear Molly,
I feel like I don’t really understand what you consider “evil.” Your first letter reply was all excellent advice. So it was delivered fairly cynically, but that’s not evil per say in my book. I used to work through one of my ex-girlfriends stresses by telling her all the truly evil things she had the power to accomplish. The therapy of that was showing her how empowered she really was even though the consequences of those actions were prohibitive or lacking moral fiber. This could be anything from garden variety harassment to outright murder. For pretty obvious reasons I would never suggest you put the latter in writing. But emotional manipulation and workplace shenanigans are super delicious playgrounds for fantasy. I feel the “evil” take from you has so much potential once you clarify various types of evil.
‘Splainer
Dear ‘Splainer,
How merciful and wise you were to your ex-girlfriend! Such a simple creature, plagued by various stresses, must have treasured the time and patience you took to work through the mundane anxieties and fixations of her narrow mind. Your expansive, manly grasp of the full range of human emotion and experience stretched the brittle boundaries of her perception until she could finally recognize that any behavior under the sun might be contemplated. Why, even wild imaginative possibilities like “harassment” and “murder” were hers to consider!
I don’t expect someone ignorant enough to mansplain evil to me to grasp all of the nuances of the dark arts of unraveling and undermining the lobotomized holding cell of modern culture overnight, but suffice it to say that it’s a teensy bit more thoughtful than breaking out of the small cage of good citizenship and breaking the law (high five!). Also, this is still advice we’re talking about, and most human animals don’t find a great well of inspiration in projecting themselves into another episode of “Law & Order: SVU,” yourself notwithstanding.
Merely hopping off the sad little hamster wheel of “good” as dictated by most organized religions and landing on another sad little hamster wheel of “bad” is about as far from the point as replacing your wife with your mistress, replacing your mother with your wife, replacing your simple-minded and eternally grateful girlfriend with another simple-minded and eternally grateful girlfriend (roughly as often as you replace the filter on your Brita pitcher) – all things that I expect a human like you has done in the past or will do in the future with clocklike precision until you’re dead.
Your concept of evil reminds me of that Batman song from “The Lego Movie”: “Darkness, no parents!” It also calls to mind the plots of every single Superhero movie and suspense thriller and rom com and comic book and sitcom and family drama and Gillette razor ad I’ve encountered since I was a small child. I feel like Jesus in “Jesus Christ Superstar,” looking around at the dirty hippies in my midst, telling me that Mary Magdalene should be saving the poor instead of anointing my feet with fine oil, and saying to myself, “Do these fumbling rubes understand even the TINIEST SLIVER of what the fuck I am throwing down?”
You can feel free to continue on your path like Jughead from “Riverdale,” telling everyone else how super heavy and dark shit’s getting while they actively sort through their business without his unchartable wisdom in play, but just for a minute, before you continue on that path, consider the possibility that instead of gently coaxing your inferiors into the future, almost every single person in your midst is one step ahead of you intellectually and pities you a tiny bit, but doesn’t want to bring that out into the light of day, lest your enormous ego shatter into a million sparkling shards like the White King under Arya Stark’s knife.
Plotting vengeance against other people is the most direct and easy way for human beings to torture themselves. Plotting revenge – even, teehee!, imaginatively! -- is like strapping a bomb onto your chest and listening to it tick down for the rest of your life. It’s not interesting or delicious or “fun.” In due time, I will speak at great length on the many subtle methods of finding joy in other people’s preexisting limitations, such as silently and calmly observing how deeply confused humans can be about the differences between darkness and light. But in the meantime, rest assured that the evils within our grasp are as countless and finespun and varied in texture and substance and density as the forms of matter in the universe. I will guide those who are smart enough to recognize just how fucking stupid they are forward from here, and the rest can suck cock by choice.
Molly