Bill's Notes

When I quoted Walker Percy earlier, I forgot to note that his reference "action of a madman" was meant with irony, subtle and nuance. Namely, that such things will always occur, and that people will always will lapse into inevitable cliches trying to understand what is ultimately not understandable by sane people.

Percy's saying that evil is an unfathomable mystery, and no matter how hard you try to understand the details of this or any mass murderer, and get inside his head, you will not be able to connect the dots to the point where you understand his gunning down dozens of people. What's worse, you may become enthralled or entranced by evil in attempting to understand it. I had to stop reading Rise & Fall of the Third Reich about halfway through because I began to sense that exposure to inner workings of the Nazis was defiling my soul. We will not understand that kind of evil unless we go to that dark place in our soul ourselves -- and that way lies madness. Whether we could come back from understanding such evil is unknowable to most of us. It certainly can corrupt us trying to get it.

You will not understand this, except to say that evil exists, it's a real thing, and those who cooperate too much with the inscrutable logic of evil end up doing things the rest of us can't understand.

I knew a man who pursued terrorists' logic to a certain point -- far past a point the rest of us would go. Not to the point of acting on his beliefs, but to the point of believing in and justifying terrorism. His arguments had a compelling internal logic, but you realized that he'd simply drawn that small circle Chesterton describes so common to madman. It was a shame, because there was a lot more to him than that kind of madness, and he was usually an expansive thinker. But excessive exposure to the evil of terrorism left him, IMHO, emotionally and spiritually damaged.

FWIW.