Power of the Dark Side

by Pamela Jaye Smith

Inner Drives Center of Motivation - dropped Ajnas: consummate control dropped to corrupt power-mongering.

  A virgin carrying a bag of gold could walk safely from one end of the realm to another in Genghis Khan’s empire. What can your tyrant truly be proud of? The trains run on time (Mussolini’s Italy), everyone has medical care (Castro’s Cuba), or racial and religious persecution is forbidden (Lee Kuan Yew’s Singapore). And at what price to the people?

  Kermit Roosevelt helped put the Shah of Iran in power; there are great stories yet to be written about that, as well as U.S. manipulation of dictators during the Cold War. See the chapter on “Groupthink Stinks.”

  If you’re creating speculative fiction, where does the tyrant fit in to the Dark Brotherhood’s big picture? What’s the ultimate goal? Does she know, or is she a pawn?

  How can your protagonist take out the tyrant without another one filling the vacuum? Does she start at the bottom and get the people to rise up? Start in the middle and convert those who benefit somewhat from cooperation with the oppressor but pay a high price for it? Convince the rulers that a change would benefit them? How?

  What was this person like as a baby? Would they have grown up to be this bad regardless? Show us at least three pivotal steps.

  MAD SCIENTISTS

  The devas of ideas and inventions have taken over these villains at the expense of their humanity and common sense. The world of the mind is fascinating, mathematics has been called the language of god, and discovery is thrilling. But Asimov’s rules for robots to the contrary, machines have no conscience and scientific innovations have been known to harm humans.

  CHARACTERISTICS

  Smart. Very smart. Very very smart. Narrowly focused on their own discipline. Visionary, yet short-sighted. Fascinated with the physical world. Sometimes bordering on psychopathic, they truly do not understand emotions. Meticulous, measured, sometimes jealous of their inventions, but ready to techie-talk forever.

  A. IN ACTION

  Some people object to scientific progress on religious grounds; others want it to proceed slowly enough to reveal the downside before we’re in too deep. Mad scientists don’t give a flip about either, that’s why we have Bioethics. Scientists go through a peer review process before publishing in official journals so other scientists can check their work for accuracy and applicability.

  Real scientific innovation usually happens in secret government labs and then spins off into commercial uses: global positioning systems, digital cinema, the Internet, and who knows what else is in the pipeline?

  B. IN MEDIA

  Legend has it the fall of Atlantis was caused by proud scientists misusing their crystal power technology. In the Old Testament, arrogant architects of the Tower of Babel, intending to reach heaven, were foiled when Yahweh confused their languages; rather like when NASA used inches on one part of a Mars lander and metric on another… oops.

  Every sci-fi B movie you’ve ever seen. Dr. Frankenstein was a scientist; look what happened there.

  In Terminator, Battlestar Galactica, The Matrix, I, Robot, and A.I., the problems originated when scientists took machines too far towards artificial intelligence. The Dune novels take place centuries after computers have failed and human mentats do it all with sheer brainpower.

  In Antitrust, Ryan Phillippe plays a young computer genius drawn into the megalomania plan of a Bill Gates-like Tim Robbins determined to create a global satellite system, no matter what it costs in money or in lives.

  Nazi doctors, such as the sadistic dentist Laurence Olivier in Marathon Man, set a low standard for gruesome curiosity.

  C. IN YOUR CREATIONS

  Inner Drives Center of Motivation - Throat Center: intellect, invention, fascination with science and technology.

  Show how your scientist has different approaches and uses for hardware, software, and wetware (brainpower).

  Imagine the next-step-plus-one from a particular technology and have your character build it. Cell phones embedded in wrists and ears, large flexible TV screens you can unroll and hang on walls, your own stem cells turned into a personalized health tonic, genetically engineered chimeras (animals made of different species: lion-eagle, human-horse, anteater-pitbull).

  Your modern scientist could discover that seemingly primitive practices might be remnants of high technologies: herbal medicine = pharmacology; sky myths = astronomy; migration myths = plate tectonics; chant and dance = stimulation of certain brain regions, etc.

  Subscribe to Science News, Scientific American, and Skeptic for general information and provocative mad scientist story ideas.

  You have to break eggs to make omelets. What’s your mad scientist willing to sacrifice for science: their position, reputation, a child, the planet?

  Everybody needs a Rosebud (the sled from Citizen Kane). What’s the tender moment or childhood token that could weaken this antagonist?

  PYCHOPATHS, PEDOPHILES, AND

  SERIAL KILLERS

  Science has taken a lot of the onus out of madness by revealing how chemicals in the brain influence our feelings and actions. But rather than seeing them as engines needing a tune-up, we mostly still view these people as vicious, irredeemable monsters.

  CHARACTERISTICS

  No conscience. No empathy. No connection with any normal human emotions. Robotic. Or, a hyper-activation of selected emotions such as rage, lust, or cruelty. Study psychological profiles to better understand these types. Sometimes very charming but having the “evil twin” aspect at work when they kill.

  A. IN ACTION

  History reveals these people sometimes as rulers, sometimes as aberrations reviled by society, but always present in every time and place. Everyone knew Roman Emperor Nero was an evil nutcase, and in Farewell Brave Babylon Saddam Hussein’s pilot recounts that he sensed pure evil the first time he met the Iraqi dictator.

  People who’ve been in combat sometimes admit to having felt these sensations coursing through them as they fought for survival, but their feelings are temporary.

  Brain science and psychology note a lack of brain wiring in psychopaths and similar offenders. There’s a broad spectrum of guilt, but apparently some people simply don’t feel any. Then there are those who feel guilt, remorse, and revulsion but are powerless to stop themselves. With some notable exceptions, most of these types are men, which leads to all sorts of speculation about “testosterone poisoning.”

  B. IN MEDIA

  History and horror films have given us Freddie Krueger of Nightmare on Elm Street, Jason of Friday the 13th, England’s Jack the Ripper, Hannibal Lecter, Ed Guin, and Norman Bates of -Psycho.

  Sometimes these people think they’re doing the world a favor by wiping out bad people, like Kevin Spacey in Se7en. Sometimes they’re mindless zombies like in Night of the Living Dead. In the films Jacob’s Ladder and Serenity, it was government experiments gone bad that created the mad killers.

  An interesting study in paedophilia and incest is to try and find the dividing line between inappropriate affection and criminal lust. Why is Brooke Shields’ sexual experience in Pretty Baby art, but Leland Palmer’s love of his daughter in Twin Peaks is criminal? Watch Stanley Kubrick’s A Clockwork Orange for a troubling close-up of violent sociopaths.

  C. IN YOUR CREATIONS

  Inner Drives Center Motivation – Root: death, killing, survival.

  Because it’s hard for ordinary people to understand how psychopaths function, show us the background incidents that stifled their development, shut down their emotions, or damaged their brains. Not to excuse them but to add conflict to the situation… can you blame someone who doesn’t know any better or who truly can’t help themselves?

  Confront the legal dilemma of whether or not to incarcerate people who are insane.

  If a person truly believes they’re meant to wipe out corruption, might they be right?

  If you could rewire our brains, how would you do it? What would result?

  Are some people just born bad? If so, why? W
hat do you do with them as a parent, teacher, friend, colleague, law officer?

  CONCLUSION

  There are all sorts of fascinating and dramatic ways to be bad. Your unique insights and elaborations on these characters will enrich the various archetypes.

  7.

  GROUPTHINK STINKS

  Stereotypes, racism, classism

  Cultural clashes

  Kids and cliques

  Child warriors and child workers

  Vandals, Goths, Golden Hordes

  Soldiers of God

  Organized religion

  Organized crime

  Corporate corruption

  Secret societies and shadow governments

  Big Brothers and bureaucracies

  Evil empires

  War, huh, what is it good for?

  “If everybody else was jumping off a bridge, I suppose you’d want to do it, too?!” an exasperated mother replies to her child’s outrageous request. The child’s answer of course is, “Yes!”

  Groupthink drives one of the biggest industries on the planet — fashion, and its ancillaries diet and fitness. Political correctness is a bow to ethnic groupthink. Many armed conflicts are symptoms of groupthink gone bad. Lines of lemmings jumping off Arctic cliffs and rows of soldiers marching in lockstep signify the downside of groupthink. Groupthink is so prevalent we even measure time and the progress of a culture by it, using terms such as zeitgeist (the spirit of an age, when everyone thought such-and-thus) or “The Age of Reason,” or “The Hippie Era.” Such monolithic backgrounds can provide looming opposition for your heroine’s individuality.

  There are different kinds of groupthink.

  1) Hive-herd-tribal instinct. It causes us to huddle in times of danger, to shun the “other,” and to cluster into strata, cliques, and castes. It is our animal nature.

  2) Seemingly rational thinking. A group of individuals makes decisions contrary to their own needs, which supposedly fulfills the needs of the group, e.g. soldiers in combat giving their own lives for others, for principles, or beliefs.

  3) Forced groupthink. An individual or small cluster of people impose their will on a much larger group through the use of force, fear, propaganda, desire, faith, or any combination thereof. Murderous military dictatorships and repressive religions fall into this category.

  These can be powerful sources of opposition for your protagonists, whether they’re struggling to rise above conformity (“I just gotta be me!”), trying to alert others about the danger of their ways (“I got a bad feeling about this”), or trying to foment rebellion against oppressors (“Soylent Green is people!”, or “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take it anymore!”).

  STEREOTYPES, RACISM, CLASSISM

  Evil is often a good that’s been held onto for too long. Our animal nature and the isolation of primitive peoples has left remnants of what used to protect us — fear of “the other” who might carry diseases for which we have no immunity. To preserve itself, the herd kills or abandons runts, the injured, the weak.

  Science now pinpoints the location in the brain that recognizes and recoils at “the other,” and species separation is so strong we still marvel over stories of cheetahs adopting baby baboons or pigs and turtles forming friendships.

  As our higher minds and more open hearts embrace differences within the unity of all life, our primitive survival instinct still emerges in horrific ways.

  A. IN ACTION

  Throughout history, invaders label natives as less than human, even if the natives have built extensive cities, amazing temples, and sophisticated societies. Hey, if your weapons are bigger and more effective, you’re obviously a better species, and those “others” are unworthy of living except as slaves.

  Recent American foreign policy has been accused of selective salvation: we went into white European Bosnia to stop genocide, but not into black African Rwanda or Darfur.

  In India, lower castes make up 80% of the populace, though the Untouchables have made significant progress in claiming rights and access to avenues of self-improvement.

  Thought processes are not immune to persecution either, as seen in the execution of intellectuals in the killing fields of Khmer Rouge, China’s Cultural Revolution, Nazis burning books, religious fundamentalists banning books or killing authors, and repressive regimes exterminating the press.

  B. IN MEDIA

  Othello, Heart of Darkness, Heat of the Sun, Upstairs-Downstairs, Gunga Din, Sharp’s Rifles, The Raj Quartet, Fahrenheit 451, In the Heat of the Night, Nine to Five, The Killing Fields, Hotel Rwanda, Before the Rain, In My Country, Driving Miss Daisy, Crash, Lord of the Flies, Lost. The operas “Lakme” and “Aida.”

  That early Star Trek episode where the people with the left side of their faces are white and the other black persecuted those who were just the opposite. Dr. Seuss’ Sneetches.

  C. IN YOUR CREATIONS

  Inner Drives Center of Motivation - Root & Lower Solar Plexus

  This is such an instinctual drive that your otherwise high-minded characters could be struck at a gut level, then realize what they’re doing, and logic their way out of the reaction. People unsure of their own identity tend to define themselves against the “other.”

  Be sure to show us the distinctions and some background as to how it came about. To deepen drama, show the value of separatism to a character or group, even if we don’t agree with their reasoning.

  Even if your character succeeds in breaking down barriers in this story, keep tension in the resolution by showing that it’s not a timeless global cure.

  Show actions counter to the stereotype, but also show why the stereotype exists, correctly or incorrectly. Until we understand a thing, we can’t defeat or dissolve it.

  CULTURAL CLASHES

  Traditions, taboos, and superstitions spawn practices seen as perfectly natural to local practitioners but often horrifying to others. They include oppressive polygamy (multiple wives), genital mutilation, cannibalism, ritual sacrifice, and the like. Being local, they often arise to meet perceived societal needs. Being human, they often give sanction to our dark Dweller.

  A. IN ACTION

  European Christian colonizers were appalled by the nudity and seeming promiscuousness of native people; the indigenous people were appalled by the cannibalistic rites of Christian communion — eating the body and drinking blood of their god?!

  In some African tribes, widows undergo sexual cleansing to prevent haunting by the husband’s ghost. Each village has a designated Cleanser to have sex with widows. It’s a job-for-life and generally considered a dirty job, but somebody’s gotta do it.

  Conflicts over veiling of women continue worldwide as tribal group-think clashes with modernity. In Czarist Russia, and recently in Afghanistan, men were put to death for the length of their beards.

  B. IN MEDIA

  In some African and Islamic cultures apparently fearful of female sexual power, young women are circumcised to ensure fidelity and marriageability. Other females perpetuate this practice of mutilating their daughters, often as babies, so they can fit into the local groupthink. Beyond Honor shows this in contemporary Southern California.

  In Deepa Mehta’s film Water an innocent child bride is exiled to the widows’ compound. Less brutal than suttee, where widows are encouraged to burn alive on their husband’s funeral pyre, it still allows the family to claim her property yet avoid supporting her.

  The TV series Big Love is about polygamy among American Mormons.

  A turning point in Braveheart occurs when Wallace’s sweetheart is subjected to le droit signeur, the right of the local lord to deflower all the virgins under his rule on their wedding night, a practice which may have been an old system to keep bloodlines strong and ensure familial loyalty.

  Ritual cannibalism is a mystical way to incorporate the energy (deva) of the eatee (you are who you eat). Greek myths track the cursed Atriedes family through generations of tragedy, begun when Tantalus cooked his son Pelops
into a stew for the gods. Shakespeare followed with Titus Andronicus and Julie Taymor directed the movie of that play.

  C. IN YOUR CREATIONS

  Inner Drives Center of Motivation - Lower Solar Plexus, Sacral, & Root: all tribal, separatist motivators.

  Have someone in your story explore the core practical intent of the practice. Was it originally to protect women from unwanted sexual attention, to protect men’s egos from unwanted sexual demands, to save poor villagers the burden of caring for widows, to reiterate the group customs and maintain order, to protect an insular tribe from outsiders’ germs, etc? Dig beneath the superstitions and get to the evolutionary psychology behind the acts. Why did this continue? What has changed? Can it be discarded now?

  This is a perfect setup for a fish-out-of-water story.

  Add an ironic twist as the horrified hero eventually sees some echo of the practice he condemns at work within his own system: cannibalism and the Christian Eucharist; le droit signeur and stomping the glass at a Jewish wedding; Aborigine circumcision rites and freshman hazing, etc.

  One value of war and conquest can be to shatter old beliefs and move culture forward. Focus on a couple of characters and show differences in how they deal with these challenges: abolition of slavery, women’s freedoms, etc.

  Initiation rites for moving into puberty often involve trials and pain to prove one can mold into groupthink. Some say American boys, deprived of initiation rites, don’t know how to grow up and become men. Create rites, besides gang initiations, that might accomplish this.