Finding Beauty in the Beast

Most of us grew up listening to fairy tales, stories of how good triumphs over evil. Beauty, courage and kindness are considered heroic, and the villains are portrayed as scary, selfish, jealous and devoid of any 'desirable' human sentiment. Reality is hardly that simple. Nothing is ever black and white, everything possesses infinite shades of grey. There's a quote by Janice Lee that I came across a few years ago that hugely impacted the way I see the world- "Draw a monster. Why is it a monster?"

The Context

The good, the bad. The kind, the cruel. The love, the hate. The sane, the insane. The difference between them is always set by those who are in control of the narrative. Consider the following examples.

1. Jack and the Beanstalk- Jack trespasses on the Giant's house, steals from him and eventually kills him. But somehow, the villain in the story is the giant.
2. Sleeping Beauty- The prince kisses a girl whilst she is sleeping, without her consent. How did sexual assault become a tale of heroism?
3. Charlie and the Chocolate Factory- Willy Wonka enslaves the Oompa Loompas and makes money from their hard work, finds creative ways to torture children who don't 'behave' and even attempts to separate Charlie from his loved ones. Yet, he is not considered a villain.
4. Peter Pan- Not only does he cut Captain Hook's hand, he feeds it to a crocodile, condemning Hook to a life of torment. Peter Pan is the hero, and Captain Hook is the villain.

The list is endless. In real life, people can't be classified as heroes and villains. Everyone is bad in someone's story, and everyone's good in someone else's.

In a movie called, 'Vikram Vedha', there is a constant battle between the hero, who is the cop, and the villain who lives life by his own rules. During an encounter between the two, the villain says, "You think there is a hard line separating the good and the evil. It's not a line, it is a circle and we all inhabit within it."

Most of our moral ideals are fruits of what we are exposed to and what we are taught. During a debate with a friend, I said that it is a privilege to be able to recognise and act on what the right choice is, this doesn't give us the right to shame anyone who might not have the same luxury. He said that it doesn't exonerate anyone who contributed to cruel acts. Maybe it doesn't exonerate anyone, but it does help us understand.

The System

If we separate the monstrous deed from the doer, who is a human being with a beating heart just like ours, maybe we would be able to understand better that people are a product of their environment.

The Stanford Prison experiment was conducted in 1971 by Professor Philip Zimbardo. He randomly divided student volunteers into two groups- prisoners and guards. The students were asked to play their role in a prison simulation. Slowly, both the prisoners and the guards started to embody their roles. The guards started to treat the prisoners poorly, humiliating and degrading them. The prisoners started to slowly accept this abuse as well. The experiment was stopped in just six days after assessing the alarming psychological damage caused to both groups.

Many question the ethics and validity of the experiment. However, there is an element of truth that can be found in this scenario. The guards' behaviour was a product of Zimbardo's experiment. Zimbardo said that he experimented to "illustrate the ease with which ordinary people could be led to engage in anti-social acts by putting them in situations where they felt anonymous, or they could perceive others in ways that made them less than human, as enemies or objects.” 

There's a poem by Nikita Gill called 'The Truth About Monsters', which says that every monster once was a "human being with soul as soft as silk". Someone stole this silk. She says, "When you see a monster next, always remember this. Do not fear the thing before you, fear the thing that created it."

None of this serves as evidence to exonerate anyone's sins and crimes but rather focuses on rehabilitation and the chance to ensure history doesn't repeat itself. Not just for the perpetrators of the present, but for perpetrators and victims of the future whose fates could be changed.

I have always loved this quote by Mark Twain, "Who prays for Satan? Who, in eighteen centuries has had the common humanity to pray for the one sinner that needed it the most?" Well, it is the twenty-first century, and about time for a change.

During one of our ethics lectures, a doctor told us this story. If there is a flash flood that occurs periodically and people are drowning, we need to focus on saving those who are drowning. But we also need to allocate resources in an attempt to stop the flood from recurring or to find a way to minimise its effects. So, an important question is, how can we change the system that churns out monsters? Where does the problem lie?

The Reality

The world is how you view it. Beauty is in the eye of the beholder. A lot of people are good. A lot of people hold the door open for the person after them, a lot of people offer their seat up to the pregnant lady on the bus, a lot of people play with their kids for five more minutes, a lot of people smile at complete strangers and say hello, a lot of people will comfort you if you cry. A lot of people are good.

I bought a parsley plant in January and my flatmate immediately said, "Niv, the plant looks dead." It wasn't dead, the stems were just bent. At the shop, I saw the bent parsley plant and I reached for one of the other plants and felt a little guilty. I thought about how a lot of people might ignore this little one. Someone has got to love the bent ones. That's the story of how I bought Penny. She's thriving now.

The glass doesn't have to be half-full or half-empty. Penny made me realise that the glass can be refilled.