Evil In Shakespeare's Macbeth

The age old question of how evil manifests itself in today’s society is still widely unanswered, and is still debated in many social and biological sciences. In modern times we seem to see evil a lot more, the news is filled with tragedies. We often view the source of evil as a murderer, con artist, or someone who commits fraud. However, what if there was evil inside of all of us? The evaluation of ourselves in terms of evilness starts with psychological experiments that test the theory that, when put into an authoritarian position, a normal person could grow to be evil. However, could this really be true if there wasn’t already capacity for evil in such a normal person? Macbeth is an example of our exposure to this concept and the Stanford
A notable one is the famous Shakespearean character Macbeth from the play Macbeth. Macbeth is notoriously known for his rampant murders during the course of the play in order to rise to power. During the beginning of the book, Macbeth is introduced as the hero that killed the two-faced Thane of Cawdor, an act that deemed him the new thane when the battle ended. “Lady Macbeth uses her superior willpower to overrule his "moderately good" nature and coaxes him into murdering Duncan.” (Shanley). His introduction is inherently mixed, good and evil; Meaning, while his murder of the former thane is overall good for the kingdom, the traitor is ended and killed, the murder itself is considered a sin, even if it is justified. Macbeth has never been portrayed as completely good or completely evil and eventually, his evil overtakes him and he reaches a point of no return, "[Macbeth] I am in blood Stepped in so far that should I wade no more. Returning were as tedious as go o'er." (III,IV,168-170). He begins with that seed of evil and lets it grow and develop until he gets what he wants, and he continues that until he is eventually stopped by Macduff. This shows that Macbeth fits the description of having a small portion of evil within us but depending on the situation, whether someone lets that evil develop into an unstoppable force. While Macbeth lets it overtake his personality and
This experiment took place at Yale university and was headed by psychologist Stanley Milgram. The experiment was created to evaluate obedience with the Nazi officers in World War II but can also be used in the context of the presence of evil. The procedure is incredibly detailed and yielded many trials, “In his experiments, Milgram told participants that a man was being trained to learn word pairs in a neighbouring room. The participants had to press a button to deliver an electric shock of escalating strength to the learner when he made an error; when they did so, they heard his cries of pain. In reality, the learner was an actor, and no shock was ever delivered. Milgram's aim was to see how far people would go when they were ordered to step up the voltage. Routinely, an alarming two-thirds of participants continued to step up shocks, even after the learner was apparently rendered unconscious.” (Abbott). This demonstrates the idea that many people do have the ability to murder, especially when paired with the results of the experiment. Almost all of the participants continued on to the level where the person in the next room would be ‘screaming in pain’ louder and louder, it seems unthinkable to the public but this experiment shows that everyone is capable of this kind of cruelty. The small seed of evil is released when encouraged by an outside force, slightly encouraged that