God's least favourite slug

Sir, are you happy?

I’m really happy

But Jesus—

the original point (cruelty is easy and you're not special for choosing it) is solid! that's a meaningful statement about behavior and responsibility. but then suddenly we're in this whole cosmic discourse about Good and Evil like they're stable categories inherent with meaning instead of messy human constructs.

The line from Ursula K. Le Guin in The Ones Who Walk Away from Omelas is about the aestheticization of suffering, it's critiquing the idea that pain is automatically profound. It is not a blanket statement that evil is simple and goodness is some higher intellectual state but once it's been pulled out of context and stacked with other quotes, it starts doing that work anyways.

Same with Brennan Lee Mulligan. If you read the full quote, he's very clearly talking about writing antagonists and how motivation works in narrative, very much shaped by a DND framework where morality literally gets sorted into alignment boxes. That's a storytelling tool, but not a comprehensive theory of harm. And even within what he's saying, "selfish impulses" are only the surface layer. The interesting part is often why those impulses exist, and what conditions produced them.

because... Wanting money or power isn't a single thing. The person hoarding wealth out of entitlement and the person grasping for it out of desperation might both function as villains, but the moral and material realities behind those desires are completely different. Calling both "banal evil" erases the context that actually explains anything.

And then when you've added C.S. Lewis into the mix, the whole stack starts radiating a very specific worldview. One where goodness is elevated, purifying, almost transcendent, and evil is base and primitive and interchangeable. That framework isn't neutral. It's deeply shaped by Christian moral philosophy whether people consciously recognize it or not, so the post isn't just making an observation about behavior, it's quietly importing an entire hierarchy about virtue, purity, and moral worth.

What really bothers me is the implication that goodness is this rare, complex, adult achievement while cruelty is childish and simple. Because in the real world? It is the adults who teach the children who it is acceptable to mock, exclude, exploit, or fear. We model cruelty, we normalize it, we reward it, and then we turn around and act like moral clarity is a maturity milestone instead of something shaped by one's environment.

And honestly, goodness isn't always complex or beautiful anyway. Sometimes it's mundane. Sometimes it's habitual. Sometimes, it's messy or ugly or compromised. Turning it into something "glorious" feels just as flattening as calling evil boring because it aestheticizes morality instead of examining it.

So yeah, cruelty can absolutely be easy. But that's not really because it's shallow or trivial, it's because systems make it easy, because fear makes it easy, because it's learned early and reinforced often. And goodness isn't rare genius; it's just way harder to sustain when the conditions around you don't support it.