Fearing the World

I think every villain in popular culture has a view of the world which is, to some extent at least, understandable. This is because they are based on the more negative version of ourselves. It will come as little surprise to regular readers that my choice of villain is the initial version of Ebenezer Scrooge from my favourite book, A Christmas Carol.

Scrooge is told by his fiancée,  when she returns the ring he bought her ‘when we were poor and content to be so’, that ‘you fear the world too much Ebenezer’. When you look into Charles Dickens’ early life of poverty and hardship you realise that he too feared the world. He tried to defend himself by building up as much money as he could from his skill as a writer to avoid the poverty he had experienced as a child.

Scrooge becomes a ruthless businessman in order to do the same. He regards the rest of the world as a threat to his fortune and therefore his security and it’s hard to argue with that. In Christmas Yet to Come he finds himself a pariah fit only to be plundered in death. It was precisely what he feared in life and it showed that in the area he chose to concentrate that his fear of the world comes from a place of reality.

When you look at business and politics these days it’s perhaps even more money grabbing and more full of evil people than it was in Dickens’ time. What Scrooge did to poor people in his small area of London, his successors are doing to the whole world thanks to modern communication. The difference is that none of our current businessmen and politicians started off poor. They don’t fear the world, they see it as there purely to serve them and they see subjugation of everyone else in it as their birthright. Scrooge, by comparison, is actually a pretty decent human being even at the start as the root of his villainy has a real basis in human nature. His successors are not human beings in the sense that they have feelings of love and affection that have been squeezed out of them because they never had them in the first place.

Many of us, like Scrooge, tend to fear the world and, as it turns out, with just as much reason, if not more these days. Yes, Ebenezer definitely had a point!