a simple view of evil

I've quoted from Douglas Rushkoff on this blog before -- and I guess I'm doing it again tonight. I was just browing some blogs and this paragraph caught my eye.

In the absolutist, polar world view, evil quite clearly exists. All enemies are a single thing. Now, the enemy is flying planes into us, so we've got to go there and get them. Think of it more like a father protecting his house. One day, a robber breaks in and hurts one of the kids. Dad buys a shotgun, and you better not be caught riding your bike across his lawn.

you can read the whole post here.

It's this idea that evil exists as a force which is whole, coherent, continuous that I've been opposing for years to my friends who embrace Fantasy Literature as a genre. I read my share of Dragonlance Chronicles and dipped several toes in the fanasy streams (on the sly of course) when I was a kid...but ultimately that:

Choose your destiny! way of thinking lacked an ability to translate to the reality that I lived in. Because the evil that I participated in -- was so much more boring! So dull! So petty!

But for many people the Evil Empires and Axes of Evil are so much easier to use to understand the world. Because it's so much easier to like ourselves when evil is so clearly recognizably the *other.*