I like the idea that all emotions can be reduced to two: love and fear.
This reduction suggests that love is good, fear bad. That simple breakdown worked for me. Until I read the graphic novel Watchmen by Alan Moore.
I don’t pretend to know Moore’s intended moral, if he had one, but when I closed the cover and went for a walk to process what I’d read, an unexpected one smacked me in the face.
Love, not fear, is the cause of the most horrific acts in the world.
Fear is too cowardly an emotion to lead to really massive atrocities and deeply sickening deeds. Fear is the root of all petty, passive aggressive, shady, slimy, duplicitous, and lazy acts. But the really awful stuff – war, genocide, grotesque murderous plots – are motivated by love.
The idea that love could be behind evil unsettled me. But it’s not love in general, not just any kind of love. One kind of love is the root of all heroism, courage, innovation, exploration, progress, and growth. Another is the root of the darkest acts.
Watchmen’s parallel plots all revealed the same kind of love as the foundation for the greatest evils. Love of anything other than self.
Stick with me. I didn’t say loving anything other than yourself always leads to bad things. But if the most foundational love you have is not for yourself, your identity, your values, you can quickly become a monster. Any love beyond love for your uncompromisable core must be built on top of it. When love for something else supplants it, blindness and madness have an entry point.
Love for family, country, ideals of justice or fairness, the good opinion of others, fame, progress, or anything else are at bottom of the great crimes. No one starts a war or ethnic cleansing campaign based on fear alone. It’s not strong enough. Unfettered devotion to some collective identity or ideal outside oneself is the only thing strong enough.
The doers of the really vile deeds in Watchmen were those most deeply motivated by a love for something noble, driven in singular pursuit of it to commit heinous things. When love of self – a commitment to the values that make up that self – is supplanted by love of something else, the foundation is lost and there’s no telling how far you may stray. You only break eggs if your love of omelets is greater than your love of being true to your belief that you ought not break eggs.
To truly give of yourself, you must first have a self to give. A commitment first and foremost to love yourself and not compromise what you know you are at your core is a prerequisite to other kinds of love that won’t go bad. Unrestricted sacrifice of the self to something else may lead you to commit things you’d never imagine.
At the end of the day, you are the only thing you can really control, hence the only fate you can be fully responsible for is your own. If you weigh yourself down with the fate of other things, you may lose yourself in the process and be left with nothing but the Nuremberg defense.
For this reason, Rorschach emerges as the closest thing to a hero in Watchmen.