For instance, journalist and blogging great Fred Clark tells a bizarre story about the day his newspaper ran a gruesome article about some local kids who killed a kitten by burning it to death. The bizarre part is all of the messages that poured in from people proudly announcing that they, for one, did not approve of kitten burning. As if that was the minority opinion:

“If you jumped into the comments thread and started reading at any random point in the middle, you’d get the impression that the comments immediately preceding must have offered a vigorous defense of kitten-burning. No such comments offering any such defense existed, and yet reader after reader seemed to be responding to or anticipating this phantom kitten-burning advocacy group.”

It wasn’t enough to know that some disturbed kids tortured kittens; they needed to believe everyone but them were kitten torturers. You can see why; think about how goddamned easy life would be if the only moral hurdle we had to clear was “didn’t burn a kitten today.” That’s why we need to believe in kitten-burning monsters to lower that bar for us. This is why Maury Povich exists — as we previously mentioned, people watch shows like that and Jersey Shore because it gives them a boost in self-importance. You didn’t need a scientist to tell you that; you watched Snooki literally playing a flute with her vagina and realized that compared to her, you’re the goddamned Dalai Lama. “Sure, I’m unemployed and I’m mean to my kids and fewer than 50 percent of my urinations have been into toilets, but you’d never catch me acting like that.”

And that, friends, is why you can tell so much about a society by looking at their monsters. The really popular stories will always feature monsters that are as different from us as possible. Think about Star Wars — what real shithead has ever referred to himself as being on “the dark side”? In Harry Potter and countless fantasy universes, you have wizards working in “black magic” and the “dark arts.” Can you imagine a scientist developing some technology for chemical weapons or invasive advertising openly thinking of what he does as “dark science”? Can you imagine a real world leader naming his headquarters “The Death Star” or “Mount Doom”?

Of course not. But we need to believe that evil people know they’re evil, or else that would open the door to the fact that we might be evil without knowing it. I mean, sure, maybe we’ve bought chocolate that was made using child slaves or driven cars that poisoned the air, but we didn’t do it to be evil — we were simply doing whatever we felt like and ignoring the consequences. Not like Hitler and the bankers who ruined the economy and those people who burned the kittens — they wake up every day intentionally dreaming up new evils to create. It’s not like Hitler actually thought he was saving the world.

So no matter how many times you vote to cut food stamps and then use the money to buy a boat, you could still be way worse. You could, after all, be one of those raping/murdering/lazy/ignorant/greedy/oppressive monsters that you know the world is full of and that only your awesome moral code prevents you from turning into at any moment. And those monsters are out there. They have to be. Because otherwise, we’re the monsters.