The Dark Thing Inside, And Where We Put It

*trigger warning - mention of SA and violence

One day in third grade my kid came home with his eyes weirdly wide. His face was full of quiet terror. 

‘What happened, babe?’

‘Oh nothing.’

‘Yeah right. Tell me?’

‘Well, I…..’

It took him a while.

‘I… I kind of scared myself today.’

‘Ok? How did you do that?’

‘……I did something really bad.’

‘Mhm?’

‘Well…. See, this kid in my class, I’m not sure what his name is… (Lu never knows anyone’s name) …he kept trying to, like, tickle me? And I told him to stop, and he kept trying to do it. And I told him he needs to stop, and he didn’t. And then I…. I sort of… threw him over some desks?’ 

‘Desks plural? Was he ok? How did he react?’

‘Oh you know, the standard kid thing… he cried, he told the teacher…..’

‘Ok, understandable. What did the teacher say?’ 

‘He asked me why I did it.’

‘What did you say?’

‘I told the truth. I said I was REALLY sorry and I have no idea why I did that. It was… really scary.’ 

The school never called me over this incident so I am assuming his horrified face and genuine apology told them it was an impulsive reaction. He didn’t get in trouble, though we did have a conversation about safety and responsibility. But I had never seen him that frightened before. 

Just before bedtime he said ‘Mom? …Am I a bad person? ….…I really had no idea I was going to do that.’

I told him about the pre-frontal cortex and how we have to learn to control impulsivity and all that. But he remained spooked for a long time.

From the tile museum in Lisbon. That bird is concerned for our mental wellbeing.

There is a sort of darkness in people that is usually swept under the collective rug. We like to pretend it isn’t really there. It’s only there in the Bad People. Not anyone we know. Definitely not anyone we love. Christianity will pin it on Satan’s tricks. Because the priest would NEVER have. He must have been bewitched. We will often ascribe it to those we feel are different from us. It’s the immigrants who bring the crime. We would never commit crimes. We had no crimes at all before they came. 

But we are reminded time and time again that the darkness is everywhere. Ask Gisèle Pelicot. Ask Dominique Pelicot, for that matter. Heck, ask Jean-Pierre Marechal, one of Pelicot’s invitees, who was so inspired by his ‘mentor’ that he tried the same method on his own wife, Cilia, and invited Pelicot to join him, like any good friend would. 

How easy all that was! How easy for a man to decide to start drugging and sexually assaulting his wife. How easy for him to invite others to join in. How easy to get OVER EIGHTY TAKERS. How easy to remain undetected for decades, as even those who had the modicum of decency to refuse the offer apparently didn’t feel pressed to notify any authorities, or alert the victim, or anything at all. How easy to inspire others to try the same at home - such a good time it apparently was. 

Now when the whole thing is out in the open, suddenly everyone is trying to kick that tangled mess of horror as far away from themselves as possible. The mayor of the French village of Mazan immediately stated how while of course the whole thing is terrible, it really shouldn’t remain as a stain on their small community, because ‘most of the people who had participated had come in from other villages nearby’. You see, the villagers of Mazan would NEVER have. The perpetrator himself expressed remorse but explained how it was all because of his abusive stepfather and traumatic childhood. The protégé stated how ‘he loves his wife and would never have thought to do anything like this if his mentor (sic.) hadn’t guided him to it’. 

He’s just not, you see, that kind of person. He couldn’t possibly be. The darkness always lives somewhere else. It just comes to visit sometimes.

The phenomenon of ‘the darkness that comes to visit’ is well documented in times of war. People - mostly men - who in peace time would never have done anything particularly untoward are suddenly possessed by demons, and will commit indescribably horrific crimes on innocent people they randomly come across, under the veil of moral fog that war inevitably brings with it. 

And I believe that they themselves didn’t necessarily always see it coming - if you asked someone from Rwanda if they thought themselves capable of slicing children up with machetes BEFORE they had actually started slicing children up with machetes, they would probably have said ‘No, of course not, what are you talking about?’ If you asked a Serbian soldier a year before the war broke out would he ever carve up a village full of old people and kids, shove their bodies into reefer trucks, and drive the trucks into the river, he would probably have said ‘Are you nuts?? Is that what you think of me?’ 

Yet let the historical record show that these things were somehow done, not by some dark and demonic alien race but by people you might have been living next door to. They walk among us. 

This brings us to a natural question - how do we know it’s not us? What if it’s circumstance that makes the villain? Is there a situation warped enough where any one of us might do an unspeakable thing and later have trouble understanding how the hell it happened?

From the tile museum in Lisbon. That horse has seen some shit.

Looking at Israel right now we might get the feeling that these are just some sort of fundamentally different beings from the regular, normal person. Because who can demonstrate such giddiness, such glee at the most grim and soul-breaking acts of mass cruelty. Surely not someone like us. Yet if you start digging around through history, you find that most nations have had at some point their golden moment of bizarre depravity. My own Serbia sure did. Japan did. England did. Belgium did. Canada did. Germany did. China did. Russia did. The US sure as fuck did. It goes on and on and on. Is there any country that can be said to have never committed a disturbingly brutal atrocity and been very blasé about it in the moment? ….Maybe Iceland? I don’t know. Maybe I just don’t know enough about their history. 

So what do we make of this? We’re all secretly demons in human form? Each one of us carrying the potential for cruelty beyond measure if circumstances lead to our humanity switch being flipped to ‘off’? And what it usually seems to take to flip it is basically just someone telling you there will be no consequences for your horrible acts? 

We don’t like this thought. We don’t like it at all. It’s way more comfortable to imagine that THEY kill children because they’re evil immoral monsters, and WE kill children because THEY MAKE US DO IT, THE BASTARDS!

The darkness is something we are inexorably drawn to when we are young - this is why we have so much teenage cringe stuff with romanticized visions of violence or suicide. Most of us found that inner darkness really attractive at a certain age. The edginess of it, the inappropriateness. The ideas of madness, self-harm, love that causes pain. Murrrrder. Evanescence. (The band, not the concept. Maybe also the concept). When I first met my husband we were both just shy of 18, he had a very realistic metal replica of a Colt .45 and damn we loved the aesthetics of that thing SO MUCH. The fact that ‘dark romance’ is currently such a massive genre shows it doesn’t really go away. 

Also all the forensic and true crime shows everyone is so obsessed with. What’s with that? Why was literally every movie I ever watched growing up basically about murder? Why are we so obsessed with murder? And not just any murder - the most disturbing kind imaginable. Psycho-killers make a tiny fraction of actual crimes committed irl, but a massive segment of movie murderers. Because they’re just so deliciously, tantalizingly warped and twisted. As close to demons walking the earth as we can find. And we can’t get enough.

So there’s a part of us that sort of wants blood. In some cases vicariously, in some cases directly, on our hands.

What do we DO with that?

Acknowledge it, for one thing. Not that I am saying that every single person wants to commit violent crimes. Of course not. But I am saying that it isn’t some weird, alien, distant thing to our species. Let’s not pretend our particular group is somehow exempt. 

Sublimate it, when we can. The sublimation of Eros and Thanatos, and their frequent intertwining, is basically the subject of most of our literature, poetry, film making, theater. Some people like to play pretend, roleplaying being menacing, or being menaced. 

Harness it. Some people take up extreme combat sports, some people join the police, the army, the navy. The French Foreign Legion. A gang. Some people travel to Israel to fight for the IOF. Find technically legal venues for morally circumspect desires. I saw a spoof ad once for the Foreign Legion, and it stuck in my mind - it said ‘Join the Foreign Legion! Travel the world, meet interesting people, and kill them!’ Seemed fitting.

I don’t entirely understand how we have war. I don’t understand how we have rules for it that are supposed to be ‘civilized’. As if you can make an act of trying to end the lives of people on the opposing side ’civilized’. I really think we should just pick the strongest person from our side and their side and have them arm wrestle for it or something. Roll D&D dice.

Fritz Haber, a German Jewish chemist, invented a method of capturing ammonia to make artificial fertilizer. The method is still used today and has saved countless people from starvation, allowing us to mass-produce crops. His invention was further developed into deadly mustard gas, killing near 100,000 soldiers in WWI and bringing him the dubious title of ‘father of chemical warfare’.

Far from being troubled by this, Haber was proud that his invention had served his country and protected their troops. He said he didn’t see the difference between killing the enemy with a bullet, or with poison gas. In a sense, I absolutely see his point. While it’s clear that different deaths can carry different degrees of suffering, how preposterous of us to claim that the methods WE choose - sniper bullets, massive bombs, exploding pagers?? - are righteous, and merciful, and appropriate, and kind, while whatever the heck the opposing side happens to use is barbaric, monstrous, and beyond the pale. 

How profoundly disgusting to try to morally relativize the barbarity WE want to inflict, while at the same time frantically hand-wringing and pearl-clutching at whatever response our barbarity elicits. 

So where does this leave us? Monsters all? Full of latent guilt? Ticking time bombs? 

Or just human, with all the convolutions that word brings.