The Pendulum of Good and Evil

Posted by Lorren on August 14, 2010

My husband introduced me to Dragonlance and the Dragonlance Chronicles trilogy shortly after we met. It’s amazing how insightful these books are.

Yesterday, I wrote about Cabaret. How that time period in the Weimar Republic was one of decadence. While many Germans may have attended the cabaret as a means to escape the harsh realities of life, the average German was not living like the cabaret performers.

In the Dragonlance Chronicles, a lot of time is spent on the pendulum of good and evil. If you get too far on either side, life is not balanced. While I believe that there is a flaw to this theory (true good is not self-righteous like the kind presented in the books), there is a truth to it when it comes to human nature.

In the movie Cabaret, the actors lived decadent lives. Their lives reflected a perversion of what most people find decent and good. The decadent entertainment was an escape from the difficult realities of life in Germany at the time. This could be seen as the “evil” side of the spectrum.

Germany didn’t stay in its state of hedonistic decadence. The Nazis came along. The average German didn’t see the Nazis as evil murderers at the time, and they weren’t, at first. They came along to clean up the population. They wanted to eliminate the decadence that was present, replacing it with a healthy, moral people. We know that in the process, they removed the Jews and those that didn’t fit in with their paradigm, primarily by sending them off to concentration camps.

There has to be a balance between running wild and doing whatever feels good, and forcibly making everybody comply to your standard of “good” by any means necessary (to the point of gassing dissenters). That is a state of freedom with self-restraint. Complete freedom without restraint leads to Weimar; forcibly conforming others to your standard of good can lead to Nazism.