My teacher had had enough; she turned off the VCR. The room was dead silent.
For the previous three minutes, our 11th grade English class had watched a scene from Helter Skelter, a film based on prosecutor Vincent Bugliosi’s account of the Manson Family murders.
We watched a scene in which actor Steve Railsback portrayed Charles Manson testifying in court. I chose it as part of our group assignment’s book report presentation because I felt that in order to truly understand the evil nature of these people, one needed to see their twisted pathos on display. Railsback captured the essence of Charles Manson perfectly, even hauntingly, and it was too much for my teacher to look at. It disturbed her and she had to turn it off.
It disturbed me too. It still does; evil has a way of doing that.
I’ve long had an interest in all things related to criminal justice. I went to college for it, got a degree in it, and since then I’ve spent an inordinate amount time researching very bad people and what they’ve done to each other — large scale and small scale — throughout history. Here is what I concluded, and I came to it very early on:
The propensity of human beings to do evil to one another is unimaginable.
I filter the world through that lens, and as a result, tend to listen up when others scoff at outlandish, kooky conspiratorial claims about acts of evil happening in the dark underbelly of our world. I’ve read enough, researched enough, seen images often enough, and listened to first-hand accounts enough to know this stuff happens. It happens every day.
This came up last week when I began seeing Facebook posts postulating on the absurdity of the Q movement and decrying those who see merit in the Pizzagate allegations. The media fact-checkers are convinced it’s too crazy to be true. Could there possibly be a vast network of pedophiles and Satanists practicing their dastardly craft while hidden in plain sight? Could there be a worldwide cabal of traffickers preying on children and transporting them across borders? Could there be a strange subset of individuals with a penchant for cannibalism?
“Get out of here, Vince. That’s just nonsense.”
Well, perhaps so, when we’re talking about specific people and places. But history, scripture, federal and state indictments, and whistle-blower accounts all testify to the fact that every one of those things have happened, still happen, and aren’t all that uncommon.
I once knew a man whose adopted daughter was rescued from Satanists who conceived her with the expressed purpose of ritual sacrifice. There are stone structures and historical sites where such things occurred all over the world. Author Mary Roach has an entire chapter in her book Stiff detailing modern cannibalism. It’s a great book, but skip that chapter, trust me.
Prominent people are on record telling their stories of abuse, and many others have either been cancelled or found dead after leveling allegations or investigating widespread sex trafficking. Is it that hard to believe this is rampant?
We don’t bat an eye when we see the Coast Guard take down a mini-submarine loaded with millions of dollars worth of cocaine, so why do we find the notion of those monsters transporting children too fantastic? We know the drug traffickers are ruthless murderers. It stands to reason the sex traffickers are even more so. Do we minimize the scope of their reach just because we don’t want that reality to hit too close to home?
“Come on, Vince. It’s absurd to think celebrities and world leaders could be involved in this stuff.”
That we find it so hard to believe powerful people are complicit, if not guilty, of such awful crimes is frustrating for those of us who’ve seen the images, heard the tapes, and know the history. Evil people look just like you and me, and are all the more brazen when cloaked with the air of respectability. The propensity to write it all off as conspiracy even though we can see police rescuing children daily in raids has a name: Cognitive dissonance.
The idea that people we’ve grown to respect could be treating children the way a cat plays with a mouse is too much for us. We loved Tom Hanks in Big so he couldn’t possibly be a pedophile. Sure, his Twitter account is full of images of children’s shoes, and yeah, sure, a hallmark of sexual predators is that they collect souvenirs of their victims, but hey, I’m sure it’s just an oddity. We can’t believe that connection, so we discredit anyone who dares suggest it.
We can clearly see a naked child using a bed sheet to climb out of the window at Buckingham Palace, captured on a tourist’s video. But the idea that someone in there could be a pedophile is too much, so we jump to accept the explanation that comes out much later saying it was part of a publicity stunt for a television show. That lines up with our worldview, evidence or not, so we go with it because it’s easier. And nobody bothers to ask the Queen if she signed off on such a public desecration of a historic landmark.
“Nothing to see here! Move along, people.”
We like to believe that people are basically good, but they’re not; ask any cop, social worker, pastor, or historian. People do awful things to each other, things we don’t want to talk about, things we don’t want to know about, things we want to get away from, like a foul odor upsetting our Sunday stroll through the meadow. But the odor is a warning, just like the low battery chirps from a smoke alarm, and we all know how annoying those are. How often have you just pulled out the battery to deal with it later on?
It’s much easier to write off stories that haunt us, lest we face the reality of living in a world steeped in them. Our default mode is to shake our heads in disbelief and move on with our lives rather than really examine what others are saying — in some cases, for years. We pass on by, just like we do to those people with clipboards outside the grocery store, asking us to join in a petition we don’t have time to consider.
There are a lot of people out there saying what we don’t want to hear. How many of them have we ignored this year? It won’t kill us to stop and listen once in a while, because some of them may have important things to say.
Perhaps the next time you hear about a Hollywood celebrity involved in Satanic ritual, or a powerful individual preying on young people, or a conglomerate of media heavyweights fact-checking the allegations out of the public sphere, you might want to check out a few documentaries, sift through a few boxes of legal discovery, or examine the case files of convicted monsters.
You might just get a taste of the evil history the record keepers haven’t yet scrubbed from existence. Or, if the real thing is too much to take in at first, you might start with 1976’s dramatic reenactment of the Manson Family in the film Helter Skelter. But be warned, even it is hard to watch, because it really happened.
It’s much easier to just turn it off.