Evil Can’t Create, It Can Only Invert
William Blake was wrong to say that Milton was “of the Devil’s party without knowing it.” In Paradise Lost, John Milton demonstrated a breathtaking vision which is the last thing that a poet of the ‘devil’s party’ is capable of doing. If you want to see a work of the ‘devil’s party’, Netflix has a cartoon ‘reimagining’ Cinderella’s stepsisters as the misunderstood heroines. This devilishly unoriginal work follows half a dozen similar revisionist reworkings of classic children’s stories so that the villains are the heroes, e.g. Maleficent, Wicked, Cruella, for the same reason. Members of the ‘devil’s party’ don’t create: they take what someone else made, and invert it. Understand that simple reality and you will understand the macro and the micro struggles all around us. When Muslim terrorists hijacked planes and flew them into buildings, they weren’t creating anything, but they also weren’t just destroying things, they were inverting them. What evil does isn’t mindless destruction, th...