Protagonists with Black and White Insanity · 8:31pm Mar 3rd, 2018
We all like to believe we are right. After all, all villains are the heroes of their own stories, but then there is Black and White Insanity, seeing everything as one extreme or the other. If the world was that simple, then there would be no nations with five, six, or even nineteen-party political systems. We'd be reduced to only two parties, the right and wrong. Most people would pick the party that was right and let the stupid few pick the one that was wrong. Well, life isn't so simple. Instead, life is a matter of which issue takes time, energy, and resources first rather than what's objectively right and what's objectively wrong. Sure, overlap exists, but the problem doesn't change.
So in literature, why do we do some protagonists have Black and White Insanity? A character that hold themselves to the highest level of purity are often never truly pure at all. First, it halts character development if the protagonist has this perpetual mentality of perfection. After all, why change anything if it is already perfect and good? Isn't it a terrible idea to fix something that isn't broken? Another problem is that, without character development or revelation, it has the added side effect of making the character come off as completely unsympathetic. In other words, supreme arrogance reigns free with these characters.
The second reason is how they measure morality. Morality is not a scale. That would first imply that there was an objective system of weighing good deeds, something most religions no matter how fanatical don't indulge in. This also implies that bad deeds can be simply undone with a good one. A woman cannot simply commit murder, get pregnant, birth a child, and get away with murder because the imbalance of losing life was corrected by gaining life. That doesn't suddenly undo the deed as if it was a misspelled word on a dissertation you wrote for class.
...Can I pick your brain?