When I was sixteen years old I got a kicking outside a nightclub at two o’clock in the morning. It would not be the last time I would be faced with such a predicament but on this occasion it taught me a strong, harsh lesson not only about being a man, but about being a man in Ireland, which I’ve come to understand is a wholly unique perplexity. As everyone in Ireland knows except, as it appears, the police, the drinking laws in Ireland are rarely, if ever, enforced and so that night my sixteen year old self wandered the halls of this nightclub, pint in hand, seeking out the company of some charitable female who would put up with me for a few hours.
It happened then that I chanced upon one young woman standing by the side of the dance floor moving here and moving there. I made my move. Up I dandered and said “hello”. She turned away so I figured she was shy. Not to trouble her much more, I turned to leave when I felt, to my surprise, a hard kick to the back and it wasn’t a new dance move either. I turned to spot a bulky fella with a cigarette dangling from his mouth staring through me, gorilla stanch and all. As it turned out he had developed himself a wee thing for the same wee girl I’d just wasted my “hello” on and he wasn’t impressed. Behind him stood a row of more empty looking fellas with more cigarettes dangling and more gorilla stances and very serious expressions indeed. They meant business it seemed but then, as I was to experience, those were fierce expressions not uncommon to the hallowed halls of Irish nightclub establishments. I just got better at avoiding them or confronting them I suppose.
Anyway, on this occasion I turned away and walked off. Still, as it turned out, a note had been made of my face and afterwards, outside the nightclub, as my futile search for female company continued, the same fellas from inside caught up with me and decided to initiate a game of football using my head as the ball. I consider myself young at that time and therefore inexperienced in peace negotiations with people who appeared to care little for my life or death so I remained with head in arms and waited out the punishment for my crime. Eventually I was prevented from dying by an older Good Samaritan who intervened because he couldn’t “stand seeing young fellas be treated like that”, so he said.
Now, as I said, I learned some invaluable lessons that night and two, in particular spring to mind. First, I learned never to lie down again, and I never did. Second, and the most profound, as I lay having several men attempt to remove my head from my shoulders with their feet, I realized then I was looking squarely into the faces of sincere evil. Consequently, it would be that stone cold stare emanating from their faces that I would encounter on many more occasions in many other settings.
Love/Hate is currently one of the most popular shows on Irish television. It is a fictional depiction of the lives of several characters operating within the criminal underworld of Dublin City. It is one of the most violent and emotionally disturbing programs ever created in Ireland and to me it is an excellent presentation of what true evil looks like. If you are under the impression that evil looks like what we see in “The Exorcist” or some other horror movie with spinning heads, deep raspy voices and red eyes, then you need to reevaluate your concept. Evil is much more subtle and the genius of evil is that it is less obvious, very crafty and often imperceptible to human minds which consider behavior a mere personal human choice.
In episode two of season 5 of Love/Hate there is a funeral scene where a priest reads a homily for a man who had been, without remorse, suffocated, forced into a suitcase and dumped in a canal. In the homily he reads scripture from Romans 3:13:
“Their throats are open graves;
Their tongues practice deceit.
The poison of vipers is on their lips.
Their mouths are full of cursing and bitterness.
Their feet are swift to shed blood;
Ruin and misery mark their ways,
And the way of peace they do not know.
There is no fear of God before their eyes.”
These are strong words, with a power I have rarely heard at a real Catholic mass but they are words that highlighted perfectly the nature adopted by those being portrayed by the show.
So what is this evil I refer to? The greatest evil of all, is when we look at another person and, in our eyes, we make them less human. We dehumanize. In almost every act portrayed by the characters of this show, dehumanization is the evil vehicle adopted to justify the most animal acts. Think of this and take time with this statement: if the devil hates humans, and he cannot physically distort our humanity, then the next best thing he can achieve is to distort and reduce the vision of our humanity held by other people.
When a person looks at another and considers them less than human they can then justify all forms of actions upon that person. They can murder or tear them apart in as many ways as their imagination allows. They can commit adultery against them ignoring the deep hurt that could be suffered by the other. They can reduce women to objects that gratify only their sexual demands, never considering that the person they objectify has a family, that they love and they have goodness and worth. To these people, friends exist only to keep them company, while the friend’s good is secondary and maybe irrelevant. Wives and children exist to satisfy a craving for familial life, a shadow of holiness to be returned to after gratification is received in other ways like drink, drugs, or sex.
Figures of authority become barriers to a freedom to satisfy every emotional whim as the person strives for wealth, power or physiological sensation. They must be either destroyed, or tolerated with disdain. Those who no longer provide some form of comfort or use are tossed aside or ignored.
Every evil act, and every sinful act for that matter, involves us making someone less human in our minds. The robbed is less human to the thief. The woman is less human to the pornographer. The child is less human to the abortionist. The talked about are less human to the gossipmongers. An employee is less human to the boss who treats them badly. The drug user is less human to the drug pusher. People are judged not by their human goodness and worth but by their function to you and their use to society. This is evil.
All the above evils and many more are displayed in full glory in Love/Hate. Yet for some reason it is a show, which attracts. We are drawn in by it mysteriously. Young men are attracted by the toughness and seeming impenetrable personas of what is presented as masculine. Young women are offered a vision of the woman who seeks out and can’t resist that pseudo power. It is all cleverly packaged material. We wonder how closely it resembles reality.
And that, my friends, is the point. It resembles evil and it resembles what humans are capable off. It resembles what we could become. It resembles the attraction we feel to evil and sin and how that attraction can catch hold of us, twist us and ultimately destroy us. There are men in our world who are so far gone no words can turn them back. This show exposes absolutely why we should, with all effort we can muster, reject this lifestyle being proposed and why we must return to the only salvation we have, the beautiful virtue of Catholic Truth. What is offered by our faith, which has been a rock in Ireland for centuries, is the only remedy to ensure we do not degenerate further into the cesspool on display in Love/Hate. It brings no joy, no satisfaction, no happiness. It offers only ruin. There is no middle ground in the battle for souls.
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