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- #21
Jabrosky
Banned
This may be tricky because I want my antagonist's ideology to be unsympathetic. I need something for my audience to root against. I can see it having certain attractive qualities that seduce people of a certain mindset, but it's important to me that it have destructive effects in the end.What I would do is make sure the ideology is not itself entirely "evil." To me, the most interesting ideological villains are probably the ones who not only don't "see themselves as evil" (which few people do), but who actually see themselves as doing good through their ideology–as opposed to simply using it as a reason to commit their self-centered deeds.
Consider the potential for "evil" in an evangelist. Or an imperialist. Or both. You mention Nazism: stack that up against the "White Man's Burden" and tell me which you think caused more damage. And yet, unlike the Nazi power figures–most of whom were psychopaths or kleptocrats–the average European missionary genuinely believed that he was not only doing good, but doing an absolutely essential good: he was saving souls. As well as bringing civilization, education and material advancement, the Euros being "superior" in these. (Anyone who has watched At Play in the Fields of the Lord has a ready visualization for this. Or The Mission… though for present purposes the first is the better example. I highly recommend both movies, even apart from present purposes: both are gorgeous, brilliant films. That both have Aidan Quinn in them is, I assume, largely a coincidence. )
Early socialists and communists absolutely believed what they were trying to do was "good"–no matter how many people had to die in order to bring that good about. Some, I imagine, still do. "The greater good" is the also motivation behind many dystopias, Brave New World probably being the paradigm example.
What makes ideological motivations more interesting is if, to at least some extent, the ideology does have some laudable aspects, ones that any reader might recognize and sympathize with… even if the reader can't sympathize with the package as a whole. Communism, for example, sought to free the lower classes from their serfdom (real or effective)… and in some cases it did just that, even if in most cases it merely transferred the lower classes to a different form of serfdom. Nevertheless, it often improved the lot of the affected. The French Revolution may have been (okay, was) one continuous bloodbath, but it resulted in significant gains for the masses in the long term. The early centuries of Islam saw an increase in religious freedom most places it reached–as well as an increase in scholarship, education and social mobility, the latter especially notable amongst ethnic minorities. Introduce some ambiguities in the impact of the ideology, and you have yourself some true, believable real-world depth… and a villain that readers aren't sure whether or not they ought to in fact be rooting for, at least some of the time.
Having refined this ideology, I would describe it best as an aggressive brand of monotheism that seeks to supplant the country's polytheistic state religion and then spread across the world, wiping out all other religions. I guess the attractive quality it presents could be the promise of world peace under a single ruling authority.
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