My story: Why Evil Exists, and Why Heroes need Villains [Life][Philosophy]

Why does evil exist? More specifically, why does the world need villains?

My photo of the dark bus station at night. Sometimes a scary place to be alone at night.

In this post, I'm going to casually brush over some insights I've gained in my life regarding this subject. I am not attempting to argue anything definitively or all encompassing. I will be sighting examples of how evil has brought goodness out. Even I can plainly see acts of evil that have zero benefit to humanity, and I will not be discussing things of this nature. So let's just explore some possibilities. This is more of a storytelling type of post, with some wisdom of my own buried at the bottom.

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Heroes and villains come in all shapes and colors. In the world of comic books, I used to think of the DC Comics heroes as being 100% good, and the villains as 100% evil. In Marvel Comics, I used to look at all the characters as being shades of gray, with flaw and virtues encompassed in everyone. In the real world I think there are certainly examples of people who live in both of these worlds, being all good, all evil, or a mixture of both throughout life.

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It has been said that every hero needs a villain. We can look at classic heroes like Superman, and consider who would he have become if he never had an evil nemesis to oppose him. If General Zod had not attempted to rule as Supreme Leader of Earth, might Superman have been tempted to rule one day as Earth's unchallenged Supreme Leader? It took an opponent of greater powers than himself to teach him the unfairness of subjugating people simply because they are weaker.

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Wolverine of the X-Men, with his razor sharp claws and quick temper was never known for being the nicest person, but he came around and became a hero because of the experiences he suffered through. It made his resolve stronger than the Adamantium metal that coated his bones.

Though I do not pretend to be a hero, so some have called me one a few times, and I have been faced with villains of my own.

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A math teacher was failing me in the first few weeks of class, starting my senior year in high school. I always did well in math until I met this tenured teacher attempting to teach pre-Calculus. He never did question and answers in class, he only demonstrated solving equations from the textbook to complete the lesson plan. He solved equations using mathematical theories I did not yet understand, and so I performed poorly on my assignments and tests. My school counselor recommend I drop the class and switch to an easier math course so it would not affect my GPA to get into college. When I consulted the teacher about this decision, he told me something I'll never forget.

"You'll never get into a private university unless you pass my class."

These were not the words I wanted to hear as I was lining up scholarships, and getting ready to submit applications to various out of state schools I wanted to attend after high school. The only reason I signed up for his class was because I thought it might help give me a head-start, not to prevent me from getting to where I wanted to be.

I'll come back to this later.

There was a period in my life when I had been studying competitive partner dancing. My favorite dance at the time was West Coast Swing. I went to all the competitions in my area, participated in weekly classes and workshops, and took private lessons from various coaches from around the country to improve my abilities. People often accredited me as having creative ideas with rhythms and musicality. This is what I strived for, because the dance style was supposed to be improvisational. I always choreographed on-the-fly, in the moment, according to the abilities of my partner, and the flow of movement we felt at any particular time in the song. At the time I was moving up the ranks slowly in competitions, and I was starting to do well and place in finals at various events. 99% of the leaders I watched, all danced the same pattern combos they watched other advanced leaders do. No musicality. Always pre-meditated, with no style relating to the music.

Stylized photo. Yes, that's me, back in my hay day.

I attended a workshop with a world class dance coach who taught in a very non-traditional manner, incorporating knowledge he gained from around the world in all modes of dance, including his studies at Julliard. He would speak for 50 minutes about dance theory, mostly providing examples of why West Coast Swing is the hardest dance of the world. He told stories about all the hard lessons he learned in his career from other coaches. In the last ten minutes, after we had been sitting the whole while uncomfortably on a hard floor, he would give us an advanced pattern to attempt, or he would play a challenging eclectic musical style we had never heard before and ask us to dance it. Even though the workshop was for advanced students, we were all failing and feeling pretty miserable by the end of the third hour when he made us dance solo to burlesque music as if we were dancing at a stripper audition walking down the runway with him staring us down from the front. It was all beginning to feel very out of my element, and this was no longer an activity I felt like I could enjoy or benefit from. My leg was still half asleep from sitting on the floor for so long. I was wearing swing shoes, and he was having us rolling on the floor and doing stunts, and we hadn't even stretched or been warned to prepare to move in this kind of capacity.

This boy can dance. High energy beats are my forte. Here we danced a hustle to Rose Royce's hit single, Car Wash for an audience at a dance hall.

At the very end, he had everyone line up, and he announced in front of the class what each person's flaws were and what they should work on. Here's what he told me...

"The problem is you have no soul. It doesn't have any depth. You do not move in a grounded way."

He also told me to take some jazz, hip-hop, modern, or African style dancing classes. Actually I had learned some of all of these dances in the past in structured classes. They are not my preference, as I prefer dancing with a partner, but I can see how those dances might expand a person's sense of presence and range of motion.

What struck me so profoundly is how easily he told me that I had no soul. He might as well have thrown a brick at my chest. Half of the class held their breaths when he made his comment to me. As young adults, we were shocked that he would de-humanize any of us for trying our best, and say that I am less of a person in front of everyone. How could I not take that as a personal insult?

Now, returning to the earlier story about the Math teacher.

I dropped that teacher's class.

I applied for the college out of state that I had my heart set on.

They accepted me.

When I received the acceptance letter, this acheivement was the ultimate thrill, beyond comparison.

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Keeping up my grades in college to keep my scholarships was the hardest thing I had ever done, but I had the best experience of my life, and I graduated with honors. I learned more about myself and the world around me in those years than I ever could have imagined.

I attribute my success to the math teacher. If it wasn't for his efforts to thwart my success, I wouldn't have been as determined every step of the way to prove my math teacher wrong. That is how bad I wanted to come out a winner.

Now back to my experience with the dance coach.

I think the reason why the coach had said "You have no soul" to me is probably because someone had said the same thing to him once. This coach always walked around like he had a chip on his shoulder. Many of the other coaches did not seem to get along with him, and the ones he did hang out with seemed very fake and unauthentic in their dealings with him and others. He always seemed insecure to me, because he would be at competitions constantly looking for certain people to be around, like they were his security blanket.

Years later, I discovered I also had some insecurities about myself. I was developing a psychological disorder with symptoms of irritability, sensitivity, social anxiety, stage fright, fear of crowds, fear of speaking, fear of being open, strong introvert tendencies, and depression. Let me be clear, this is not who I was, but this is what I was becoming. A hollow version of my former self.

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I went on a five year journey to try to heal myself of these ailments. I consulted many experts and mentors, and discovered most of the advice they were giving was total crap. Their methods were a waste of my time, and were costing me a lot of money too. I wanted to punch everyone who told me "Just be yourself", because I hated the person I was becoming. Why would I want to be myself if it was making people not want to be around me anymore? Why is everybody treating me like I don't have a problem, and I should grow up and get over it? I was starting to feel like it was the fault of the people I was interacting with. Everyone felt like greedy, attention-seeking, needy, toxic people to me, and I had nothing left to give. My cup was empty, and it had been dry and festering for years.

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One month I spent trying a new method. I found out about it on the internet, from research I had done. I didn't tell anybody what I was doing, and I focused my energy daily on it. It was a guided meditation CD, to help me to open my thoughts into memories I hadn't thought about since before I became a psychological mess. The CD also contained words of encouragement that almost seemed magical to me, because they were the words I had been wanting to hear from my friends, but none of them dared to say. The CD probed my mind with the deeper questions I had been wishing my family had the guts to ask. Even though the voice recorded on the CD wasn't a real person, I knew that the person who recorded it truly felt drawn in to help his listeners in a meaningful way, and he cared about the impact his words might have. My soul was unearthed. The voice was rescuing me from the tar pit I had been stuck in. My mind and soul was covered in a lot junky thoughts and beliefs that didn't need to be there, and the real me, the new me, was free for the first time in a long time.

At this dance festival the exhilaration was obvious. I was so happy to get that spay tan off.

The truth is, I had a soul all along, it was just being hidden and darkened out by others around me. People putting me down all those years for their own advantage, and I was starting to putting myself down. The toxic people around me, like this coach, were putting me down constantly to make themselves feel better about themselves. They treated me as though I was a doormat, and as long as I was reminded how low value I was, then they didn't have to feel so lowly about themselves.

Unfortunately that meant I ended up dumping a lot of friends over the years in my recovery. Mostly I let them slip away over time. A few, who were inserting themselves as obstacles in my way, I had to take a stand and assert myself. I became stronger for it. At the cost of losing these friends, I gained in self-empowerment.

Everything that I knew to be true in my talents and abilities was affirmed in my self-awareness. I knew that I had value, and people began to respect me once again. In time, I became a dance instructor. I started making finals at competitions again, and moved up in the rankings. People were now paying me money because they wanted private consultation on how they could become a better social and competitive dancer.

In all of my years of teaching, I have tried to never attack a student personally, and always be clear that any errors that I show were merely mechanical in nature, and something they can overcome with practice. I never make anyone feel like they are bad for making a mistake. Often times I will catch my students becoming angry and frustrated with themselves for making simple errors, and I remind them that this anger is a habitual error too that affects the dance partnership.

"Laugh, wink, or say something silly if you catch yourself in a mistake. Don't stop the dance. Perfection is boring. Variety is interesting."

Now that I have grown so much in my knowledge of who I am and the type of person I want to be, I am happy to say that my soul if very full and able to give back to the world in so many ways. I feel like I can be a benefit to others who are going through the same challenges and experiences that I faced. My patience with myself and others has always been my rock center, and that is more important to me than any judgements a person might pass on how they think I should be. My skin is practically bulletproof, fully impervious to harm from death-ray words meant to cause irrepairable harm.

That is my story today, and how villains capable of doing evil in this world can be important motivators to train tomorrow's heroes for the future. The world will always need powerful heroes, and sometimes those heroes need powerful villains too, more than they realize.

Thank you for reading my story and my thoughts. Did it given you an adrenaline charge of super powerful thoughts of your own? I'd love to hear about it in the comments below.

Have a super-duper day!