Evil, Insanity and the "Arts" of Horror
In the name of artistic liberty and freedom of expression, "novel" writers, directors and producers have long entered into a vicious race in order to excel each other and indeed themselves in scenes of violence, insanity and bloody horror! Their single goal is profit at any and every cost. They capitalize on and exploit the darkest bestial instincts of man, while society stands idle if front of the perpetual subtle crime committed against young and old right inside their homes.
The best technological achievements of man - TV, Computers, Video, DVD, and classical Cinema - have all been put in the service of the prince of Death, in a gigantic effort to produce a generation of brutal and emotionless species that will best resemble our ancestors, the cannibals.
Lukewarm or nihilist critics and analysts, as well as psychologists, turn up quite often on TV hypocritically arguing about the effects of bloody products of the so-called horror "artists" - agents of darkness - only to confuse the viewers even further. How can one assess if something is good or evil, when one does not believe or cannot see the difference between them? And how can one assess the negative effects on human psyche by watching bloody violence, when one doesn't have the slightest idea of what "psyche" is? How can the blind lead the blind to a safe harbor? They cannot.
Indeed, I am not sure as to if the drama we are witnessing in front of our eyes is the outcome of absolute insanity or the natural process towards the return to cannibalism. I always believed that in Universe nothing is static. If something does not evolve towards a higher state of existence, then it naturally and unavoidably regresses toward lower primitive states. Unfortunately humanity has long chosen to regress to its beastly origins. Human beings, or, rather, anthropoids, found spiritual evolution boring and irrelevant, while the World's religions have made their best to make God and spiritual principles sound ridiculous.
So, humanity now stands in a frightening void of absolute principles and values. In this day and age, everything is relevant; therefore everything is permissible, especially, when it is dressed with the cloak of art and brings profit. The "artist" is a kind of a guru who mercilessly decides and produces bloody trash for the "entertainment" of a degenerated generation. Nowadays, blood and violence are the necessary ingredients for the success of a production.
But why on earth do I bother to write such an article? Do I have much time and energy to waste? Am I a kind of masochist, myself, often returning to the place of crime to preach to deaf ears? Or, am I doing this in order to argue about the obvious? Is it necessary to prove that human psyche is like a field producing fruits or weeds, depending on its cultivation or lack if it? Is it important to explain that the seeds we sow in our souls will produce fruit after their own kind? Do I need to prove that minds and hearts saturated with blood and violence - usually blended by sex - will become perverted, hardened, insensitive and potentially dangerous for their environment? Have we, peradventure, arrived at a point where it is necessary to convince people that violence, bloodshed and death are evil?
I am afraid the present day insanity has gone so far and so deeply in our hearts and minds that we are no longer able to distinguish black from white, right from wrong, the logical from the absurd, the good from evil. I remember once I had posed to a discussion board the question: how much makes one plus one? I couldn't believe my eyes when I kept receiving answers saying that one plus one may equal three! And the posters were not joking at all. They just believed in the popular "philosophy" that everything is relevant and that there are no absolute principles and values.
Who is going to stop this madness? I am afraid I cannot see any "saviors" in the horizon. The democratically (laugh!) elected governments do not want to censor horror productions (books or films) from fear of being called undemocratic and fascist! Poor things... So they stand-by indifferent, simply legislating heavier penalties for the offenders, even the capital punishments in some "enlightened" States of the USA. It never occurs to them to examine their own responsibility and contribution towards crime, if only by neglecting to protect vulnerable citizens from systematically being exposed to the popular culture of blood and violence.
The Church? What about the Christian Church? Is there any hope from there? You must be joking... How can a religion based on a blood doctrine be against blood and violence? History proves the opposite. Oh, I have said this before and it is getting boring... In the best case, the Christian Church is busy creating instant "salvation" doctrines (myths) in order to "save" its members from an afterlife hell. Regarding the present hell, which our rotten culture established and reinforces daily, Christians whistle indifferently, if they don't actively contribute by producing their own horror novels or films...
Oh, well... I wish I had something more optimistic to say in this article. And the question always arises: aren't the consumers responsible for swallowing all the bloody stuff the producers throw at them? They certainly are. However, the consumers are like the sheep and the producers are, should be, the shepherds. If the shepherds wanted to lead the sheep to healthy green pastures instead of pushing them to dark and bloody precipices, they certainly could. Man is born an animal, and it is left to the parents and the educators to elevate anthropoids to their humanity. Deeply in man's core, yeah even in that of the bloodiest criminal, is the divine seed, the essence of God in us. It is up to the educator and the enlightened religious leader to draw this out, make it grow, and bring into fruition.
The critical question to be answered urgently is this: does man want to remain a beast or does he/she prefer to be elevated to its human stature? And another one: does man prefer life to death? Unfortunately, where we have arrived as society, we need to start learning the alphabet of "good" and "evil" from the beginning. We need to start from zero point, emptying our minds from all rust therein. Hard work, I am afraid. "Death is easier", someone yelled...
About the Author
Maria Seferou was born in an agricultural family of Dendron, a small village of Peloponnese, Greece. She studied Civil/Structural Engineering at National Technical University of Athens and had a successful 20-year professional career both in Greece and in England. For the last 21 years she has been a writer of non-fiction books and articles on religious, philosophical, political and social issues.