On the Destruction of Man

How is a man destroyed?  Is it through a grievous defect of character?  Is it through a series of uncontrollable circumstances that place him in an impossible situation?  Is it through a man’s own cultivated perversion?  Are these destroyed men dealt a bad hand from Fate herself?  Or are they twisted sociopaths who get their due?

I’ve been thinking about those questions thanks to The Brothers Karamazov.  Looking at Dmitri, especially, I wonder how he could get so carried away about Grushenka and how he could be driven to shed blood, and here is the key part:  I wonder how different Dmitri and I are.  In looking at Dostoyevsky’s characters it seems to me that even the worst protagonists maintain their humanity.  In looking at the different paths to destruction I feel that the destruction doesn’t fall upon the individuals like lightning, rather it moves upon them with slow progressive steps; that its grip gets tighter over time and that bad decisions are the fruit of previous bad decisions that seemed less important, but that the cumulative result is utter damnation.  It is as if a soul is ruined by continuous little missteps rather than by amoral fist-shaking in the face of God.

It sobering to me that such a progression may be accurate; that those who are “dead in trespasses and sins” come to their death through incremental steps rather than by leaps into the abyss.  For me it is more comfortable to think of murders and adulterers as sociopathic fools, raving lunatics who get high on breaking the social contract.  But I’m beginning to wonder how much I may be like such extreme deviants.  I make small selfish decisions; at times I am guilty of little steps towards my own gratification rather than little steps towards compassion and kindness.  And I find myself wondering whether such tiny steps towards self-gratification were the little steps on which a murder’s path of criminality began.

Looking at the Apostle Paul I wonder if he thought the same thing when he claimed that he was the “greatest of all sinners.”  It is important to note that he made that claim in the present tense rather than in the more acceptable past tense (you’ll understand if you are familiar with his background).  What do you think?  Are the little decisions the most critical?  Have the most reviled men and women come to destruction through momentous acts of deviance or was destruction arrived at through small subtle acts of self-gratification?  How different are you and I from people in prison, from great historic criminals?  Are we really the “greatest sinners” of all?