"I believe that what separates humanity from everything else in this world - spaghetti, binder paper, deep-sea creatures, edelweiss and Mount McKinley - is that humanity alone has the capacity at any given moment to commit all possible sins" (Coupland 3).
The opening sentence of Douglas Coupland's Hey Nostradamus! sets up an important theme: the capacity we all have for evil. Everyone has the ability to commit violence, as we see many times throughout the novel. In the school shooting, a group of students in the cafeteria kill one of the gunmen by laying a table flat on him and jumping up and down, crushing him to death. Jason, who, as Cheryl says, is generally "gentle" and "forgiving" (p.28), throws a rock at the head of one of the gunmen, killing him. Heather gets so frustrated and angry at the psychic, Allison, that she says, "I'm ready for murder" (p.184). Barb wants so badly to have a baby with Jason that, when a man in Las Vegas seems to get in the way, she murders him.
These people are not psychopaths or serial killers; they are average, "normal" people. And yet there is this darkness that comes out of them when they are pushed to the brink. As Cheryl says, "We're all equally on the brink of all sins" (p.34). We all have the potential to commit violent, savage acts at any given moment, because of the underlying darkness that exists within us all.
Coupland, however, is not saying that all of humanity is evil. We must realize that darkness is there, for otherwise we are being naive. But the fact that we all share this trait of always being just one step away from evil, this "capacity for slipping at any moment into great sin and eternal darkness" (p.33), makes us the same. It makes us equal.
This quotation from Chery sums up this topic nicely:
...the sun may burn brightly, and the faces
of children may be plump and achingly sweet,
but in the air we breathe, in the water we
drink and in the food we share, there will
always be darkness in this worl d.
(p. 42)
There will always be darkness in the world, for there will always be this darkness in us.
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5 comments:
I completely agree with what you and Coupland's characters are saying. Yes every single person has the capacity for evil. Whether we are serial killers or the most innocent beings we are still capable of it. Look at self defence as an example. Many of us would go to drastic measures to protect ourselves and the ones we love. Which is exactly what Jason did by throwing the rock. Therefore we all have that capacity and its a choice whether we turn to good or evil. But an interesting question still arises. If we do evil for self defence, such as Jason, are we good or evil?! Its a controversial topic but its a definitly a thought provoking question.
i dont think that throwing the rock in that situation can be classified as evil at all!
i would be evil to stand there and do nothing. Jason did the heroic thing.
I don't mean that throwing the rock was evil. In that situation, it was absolutely the right thing to do. What I mean is that the actual act of killing someone like that is a savage, dark thing - in this situation it was right but it does show that everyone has the ability to commit great violence against another person, when we are pushed to the edge and left with no other options.
Personally, I don't like the word Evil, it reeks of over-simplification. Too many times throughout history has that word been used to a dire effect.
I agree with what Cheryl had to say, I agree that everyone, at any time, has the ability to commit evil. I don’t know if I would classify Jason’s throwing a rock as “evil”, because of the extenuating circumstances, but when people are pushed to the edge, I think it’s possible for anything to happen. I think the good part of this topic is that everyone may have the ability to commit evil, but whether or not they choose to commit evil is a very powerful choice that we also all have the ability to make. Making the right choice is almost never very easy.
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