The origin stories of superheroes and villains are the same.
When we are faced with a ‘terrible person,’ modern psychology immediately goes to explain why they did what they did. The man who beat his child, was surely beat himself. People go to their therapists for reassurance about their own actions; the therapists unpacks them as the downstream consequence of childhood wounds. In this framing, there is no sin: people are deprived of core human needs, and as a result they lash out.
But the framing of this matters a lot. Let’s go back, for example, to child abuse. 40% of child abusers were abused themselves as children. One might be tempted to extend to them extra grace then: ‘how could you have known better?’ But the feel of it changes when you consider that 75% of individuals who were abused as children, do not go on to abuse themselves. That means that the majority of the victims of this sin, break out of it. Perhaps they even break out of it because they know how terrible it was to go through it. In this framing, the abusers who ‘pass it on’ are extra culpable, because they specifically should know better.
[maybe start with: there were X child abusers in the US last year. 40% of them were abused themselves as children. Would you give them a more lenient sentence?]
The sin done to you, is a proximate cause, but not an ultimate one (Guns, Germs, Steel).
I’ve been reading through some Girard and reflecting on his cycles of violence and non-violence.
What if sin is specifically when someone chooses to pass on an evil done to them? That actually, when you go to your therapist, who explains that you fight with your wife because your dad fought with your mom, you are being faced not with the sin of your father, but with your own sin. Because many people were in the same situation as you, but the good ones said ‘never again’ while the lesser ones chose, fully knowing how terrible the consequences were, to do it again themselves.
Many people harp on Steve Jobs for his difficult childhood, and how being abandoned then later adopted shaped him as a person. And yet he did the exact same thing to do his own daughter, who he barely acknowledged for decades.
We say that the victims are almost justified for propagating violence. But I say that the victims who don’t, are virtuous, and that those who do, are doubly full of vice because they alone have full knowledge of the damage of the violence.