I remember seeing the Dark Knight, and feeling a little hopeless afterwords. It’s a scary thought to think there are people out there that really have nothing to gain from taking lives and causing chaos. They do it just because they can.

I’m actually taking an Ethics class, and we talked about morals and people’s conscience’s today.

I personally believe when we are babies…we are “untainted” we have that innocents…and wonder about us. No baby comes out evil and vendictive. It’s a learned behavior. So…I do think a persons conscience can be tainted over his/her life time. It’s all based on our morals and what we believe to be right and wrong.

So someone like the joker….who obviously didnt have a good life growing up, could lose that moral compass that tells him “stop! This is wrong.” Or even worse….people like that may truly belive what they are doing is the right thing. The joker constantly said the world needed to learn a lesson…and he was just the guy to give it. It makes me think, what could he have possibly went through to make him so messed up ( if he was real)….or others out there like him.

It’s just a scary thought to think that maybe the world doesnt have one set “moral code.” And if thats true, do we all just fend for ourselves?

Lots of love!

Andrea

Conscience,
I don’t think we ever felt regret, or guilt all those good old days when we picked bananas on trees. It all started with that granny smith apple.
There was a time we were not smart enough to go against our good nature, when we did, we knew the difference, and that is conscience.

That would be a knotty question, I think, about where someone like the Joker comes from. The brilliant stroke that Nolan decided on when writing the screenplay was to not give a back story. The trite sob story of abuse that renders the villain less terrifying is eliminated, evil in its purest form, a force sans explanation much like Anthony Hopkins and Hanibal Lecter almost two decades prior. I actually teach abnormal psychology and I cannot wait to get to antisocial personality disorder and to be able to address what might be wrong with the Joker. He’s a fascinating case for sure.

The more pressing part of the whole film, however, is that it is the most sly exploration of terrorism I have ever seen. You can’t make a profitable film about the current war (Lions for Lambs, Rendition), but you can make a movie that’s, ostensibly, about a man in a bat suit who is going through the same issues and costs of waging a campaign against an enemy who only needs the right timing and some gasoline. It’s terrifying at that level because it shows all of us, so clearly how very hard it is to catch a terrorist and the human cost, while, superficially being a comic book film.

Clever indeed.

Of course, you can always say more with comedy or sci-fi than any other genres because people don’t object to the deeper meanings if they’re laughing (see George Carlin) and they don’t if there are aliens (see Star Trek and its take on racism).

hey allison, i’m so glad u brought up the dark knight. i was going to comment anyway saying that everyone starts with a conscience, but everyone grows up with different upbringing which may cause some to get so lost in the darkness they lose that voice. the conscience is referred to as one’s inner voice. it is all u. the inner voice is in some cases called the gut feeling. but the inner voice is known more in females. if we see a guy in a dark alley that voice may say “i need to get out of here” or if ur on a first date and the guy seems okay, but out of the blue starts talking of certain things that make u stop and ask ur self “did he just say that” ur inner voice may start working by saying “this guy is a bit creepy and stalkish and to end it before it gets scary. ur conscience is the broader more well known term for the word inner voice. i grew up in church so i was told as i also believe God gave us each a conscience like His own, the inner voice that knows more than maybe we want ourselves to realize at that particular moment in our life. as for the dark knight’s joker (i LOVE heath’s portrayal of him) it is the perfect example of a psychopath. being a junior criminal justice student i took a class last year in serial killers and mass murderers and for those of u that have no knowledge of how twisted these psychopaths can be u need to educate urself b/c the scary fact is the world is very dark and many children are growing up in dispickable places and losing a bit of their inner voice to where they very well may end up as one of these psychopaths. a psychopath for those of u that may not be up on the full definition of one is someone that is literally just a shell with a mind bent on destruction of anything or anyone with no remorse, conscience, that what they are doing is wrong. some find it gratifing to cut a human in pieces keeping it to look at or play with in some matter while eating dinner. others may kill randomly just b/c the person looked at them funny and they didn’t like it. these people do exist and they get portrayed on tv making it seem something that came out of hollywood therefore, doesn’t exist in the real world, the reason i like heath’s portrayal of the joker is that he researched psychopaths and the behavior making the joker very much as scary as he was evil. “the magic trick” scene came off comedic, but in the mind of a psychopath he was putting the fear of those that watched and fed on it to give himself that high that exists in his mind that he can do anything he wants and no one can stop him. oh to those who like allison mentioned thinks that the conscience seems like a parental figure telling urself to do the right thing. in a way some would think that, b/c at times when we are not wanting to see the truth in something or someone our inner voice talks to us subconsciencly telling us what’s really going on making us think that it is a voice other than our own when it is our voice. and why it may seem okay for some to do things that our conscience may say don’t is just how we were raised. a child raised in a Christian home with morals may be tempted to be like other kids and smoke or drink even have sex in order to fit in, but their conscience will say u know better, that will only end badly. then there will be kids who were raised out of church whose parents may smoke and drink in front of them even letting them sip from their beer can. as they reach their impressionable years they may drink or smoke without their conscience interupting b/c they were raised around it as a common thing. the way one grows up plays a big part in when and what our inner voice may or may not think we should do. it is one of the powerful things we humans have to keep ourselves out of bad situations. we need to listen to it more than we have been. we have them for a reason, and to disregard it and do the opposite may get us into a situation we may not come out of.

Hi Allison

The conscience is the little voice that say:
Will you live with the consequences of your action?
I heard the voice when I deliberately do an action which is in disagreement with my values.
Each person have different values.
What kind of values has the Jocker?

Bye
Claude

Allie…that sure is a mind-bender. If I were that teacher, I’d do the same thing and give up the child per month. But I wonder how I would hold up. I think having to constantly make that decision would really mess with my head, and I wonder what kind of person I’d end up becoming.

Seriously, did I just ramble on then or what? What I really meant to say was “DARK KNIGHT RAWKS!!!!!!”

Hi everyone,

I read all your posts and while I agree with some I also disagree with others. I think we may be missing the point on some topics. Firstly I think we should all realise that comic heroes and villans are extremes of human nature. While I’m not saying those characters don’t exist in society they just might not be a typical Joker, Bane, Venom or Carnage incarnation. I also think that the conscience we are talking about is actually a moral compass.

For me the Joker has a conscience and he needs that to find out how to attack the vunerable points of his victims. It’s his moral compass that’s off as he actually commits these acts of aggression.

Lets be honest with ourselves we all want to do bad things to people who hurt us or someone/something close to us. We use our conscience to find out how we can hurt them back. But we use our moral compass to either to point us in the right way or to go down a dark road which we might no come back from. For Nikk, it was the choice between the girl or the gang. Two paths were available and Nikk used the moral compass to choose (in my eyes) the right one.

Of course this leads on to what Aqgalaxy said…”Did you know in Italy, ask people, elder people, about Mussolini, you want to know what they’ll tell you? “He brought the golden age to Italy, it was proud to be Italian in those years” People LOVED Mussolini.”

During WWII the Axis powers had control over the people and used propaganda to make them believe they were doing the right thing. It was the people at the top (Hitler or Mussolini) whose moral compass was off and wanted to go to war. Think back to the Dark Knight… The Joker’s compass is off, so he gets a message of propaganda through the media to the people of Gotham, “Kill they guy who knows Batman’s identity or he will start blowing up hospitals.” People think about all the death hospitals being blown up will cause, and so they choose to riot and attempt to kill the guy who knows who Batman is. (of course at the same time that guy’s compass is off as well since he was trying to blackmail Bruce Wayne to keep him quiet.)

I think what I’m trying to say is that our conscience explains the good and the bad to us and we have to decide if were strong enough to live with whatever path we choose. Like the cartoon with the angel on one side and the devil on the other (and yes they have that in family guy too, but they don’t have quite the expected result) we need a voice to tell us the paths available. However more importantly we need a compass to guide us on the road to who we will become or how we will be remembered.

Isn’t it weird how we can argue with our conscience even though it’s supposed to be a part of ourselves? When you’re a child, it’s like you and your conscience are of one mind, united. But the first time you realize that not only does everyone else have the option to disobey the rules, but that *you* do as well – I think a split develops. Suddenly you have this freedom to go against your conscience, and it becomes this separate, alien, *threatening* thing. And the more you learn about the world and your options in it – who you can become, and who you don’t have to – sometimes you start to resent it.

My conscience follows me around all day, harrassing me. If I leave the fridge door open too long – it’s breathing down my neck. If I forget to use my turn signal – it’s glaring at me in my rearview mirror. Oh no, we don’t get along. And that’s because I’ve allowed my own fears to fuel my conscience. It feels like my conscience has somehow decided that only *perfection* is *moral*. But that’s not really some separate voice in my head, telling me what’s right – it’s my own fears and insecurites hiding behind a curtain with a loud voice hoping that I’ll listen if they pretend to be something else.

I’ve found that my conscience hardly ever needs to clock-in consciously. When it’s your conscience at work, and not some fear that’s hiding behind a warped moral principle to justify itself, it usually kicks in automatically. When we’re faced with a decision that rouses our conscience, we feel it. A conscience isn’t guilt. It doesn’t work through guilt. A conscience doesn’t just make you feel guilty for doing the “wrong” thing. It tells us what’s *good for us*. A conscience is an instinctual response to a moral dilemma. What a conscience *isn’t* is that voice telling us that we should have picked up a half-gallon of milk on the way home, “you idiot.” That constant tightening in your stomach that won’t let you relax or enjoy the family, friends, and beautuful things around you – that is *not* my conscience. That’s me, trying to guilt myself into change.

I think that most people are good people with healthy consciences. However there are too many (like me) who let our fears masquerade as our conscience and that’s where it all goes wonky. That’s when we begin to ignore our real consciences in favor of the nagging – but *familiar* – sense of everlasting guilt. Whether it’s fear of success, fear of failure, or fear of wildebeasts – the conscience has nothin’ to do with it. It’s got our back when we need it, but the rest is up to us. Jiminy just really needed to get a hobby. He spent waaaay too much time with Pinocchio. The conscience sleeps most of the time, wakes up and roars like a lion or purrs like a kitten according to the situation we’re faced with, and promptly goes back to sleep.

As for The Dark Knight: I still haven’t seen it! ;( But the Joker seems like the type who is so intent on ripping away veils, that he ends up ripping off the wallpaper, tearing down the walls and setting the place on fire looking for something that isn’t even there.

“That’s not cricket” actually refers to any time the English win the Ashes. Cos that just aint right.

Speaking in conscience…
I think this cat doesn’t have any……….

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w0ffwDYo00Q&feature=user

I’m trying to lightin’ up the theme here a little bit.
All this reflections blogs almost made me become a serious person. That was scary…

A new song from Carrie Underwood seems to talk about what can happen when you turn a deaf ear to the cricket. It goes something like “It went from “Hi Cutie, where are you from” to “Oh Lord, what have I done!” “

Gnome, so that’s why I had a blackeye when I woke up this morning!

Verry funny

And thats why I couldn’t watch Dark Knight yet …..

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=s13dLaTIHSg&feature=user

I think people who have pyschiatric problems don’t know the difference between their own thoughts and their concious

I would love to be able to use that excuse, but unfortunately, my local cinema have become all to wise to the temperament of my feline companion.

They don’t allow me to take him in there anymore!

Friday

aww my conscience just kicked in for some reason….
I really haven’t spent any time with my little brother today…
and he asked me to go to the beach with him today…
and i cant
because I have to work on the school paper…
and i felt horrible
because hes so understanding despite my lack of spending time with him…
:-/
im a bad big sister

As far as the Joker…..I always say there is no good and bad…no right and wrong…. no evil and righteous….there is only a difference in opinion…..your good may not be someone elses good.

I find myself writing this for no apparent reason. Which, in the grand scheme of things, I’ve learned means that I’m actually writing it to gain more insight through writing.

My conscience is inside me. It’s at the deepest layers of my heart and soul, which is why to cut out my conscience is to cut out my heart. Most cases, I literally cannot lie. If I lie, which I CAN do on occasion, I hate myself for it, without fail, every time. I don’t know why, but my heart pains me every time I do, and my heart is a part of who I am, my soul.

I am, however, concerned that my heart is fine with some of my writing that I feel is out of the bounds of societal norms. I also feel strange about my priorities. I’ll get worked up when a character I like gets mutilated (e.g. the way Jill Valentine is treated by Anderson in Resident Evil: Apocalypse compared to what she’s REALLY like in the games, and Anderson’s reasons for mistreating the character), but then people start debating hot-button issues like abortion or assisted death and I roll my eyes every time. The hot-button issues are distractions to me, but for some reason characterization is a big deal to me.

Okay, now to The Joker, because that’s all I have to say right now about my conscience. The Dark Knight film version of The Joker is extremely tame. His darkest moment in animation, he tortured one version of Robin until Robin mentally cracked and got warped into a sort of mini-Joker; it’s one of the creepiest and most heart-wrenching events in animation. In comics, his darkest moment that I know of was shooting, raping and taking pictures of Barbara Gordon, then abducting Commissioner Gordon and trying to push him to insanity. I’ll avoid saying every bit of it here for decency of the blog because I know you can find it if you want to see how dark it gets, but one element was showing Gordon those pictures.

You don’t get much about what made The Joker in animation or film, aside from the first film’s approach… which is close. In the comics, Alan Moore’s version, The Joker was a struggling stand-up comic with a pregnant wife trying to make ends meet, and tragedy after tragedy befell him. He never got anywhere with his art, his wife and unborn child died in a household accident, and while helping two criminals break into a plant where he used to work (he was doing to support his wife and child, and was forced to go along when he wanted to back out), he fell into a vat of acid that mutilated his physical figure to what we know as The Joker.

Ultimately, his conscience was rubbed raw by misfortune and the cruelty of society until he decided to wash his hands of it. After all, what’s the point of following a corrupt system where a good person gets beaten and battered for trying to follow his or her heart? It’s almost laughable, how pointless it is to struggle in a world that will knock you down repeatedly unless you turn the tables and try to drag it down instead.

That’s a lot of his motivation, I think. He used to care, he used to clock the nine to five and be an upstanding citizen and struggle to make ends meet. But, he’s been pushed so far that now, as the film version of Alfred puts it, he just wants to see the world burn.

Denebola:
“So don’t take a guilt trip”

hes so sweet… he doesn’t even bother to give me any guilt…
hes really understanding
haha guilt :-/
i always give myself guilt when it comes to my little brother.
I’ve decided to take him laser tagging tomorrow
sooo ya know

I just wanted to say ‘cheers’ to everyone who had the fortitute to read my post.

That is all.

Allison is Love.

Carry on.

“# Denebola Says:
August 29th, 2008 at 3:58 am

Isn’t it weird how we can argue with our conscience even though it’s supposed to be a part of ourselves?”

Uhh… I never argue with mine?

At least if I understand the way you mean it right. My conscience is me. If I go against it, I do so with a heavy heart.

Scott:
That’s good! I’m not saying everybody has that opposing voice in their head, but a lot of people do, and I’m one of them. What I was talking about is that voice that guilt-trips me over inconsequential things, not my actual, inherent conscience. Your conscience IS you. But sometimes if we let it, we warp it into some twisted thing by throwing in other motivations that end up obscuring what our instinctual sense of right and wrong tells us to do. I guess a simpler term for it would be an “overdeveloped” conscience. The kind that nags for no reason, and we end up rejecting because we’ve packed so many “shoulds” into it. My own perfectionism has bled into my conscience and now we’re at odds. I second guess it a lot. I’m sorry if that came out more confusing than it should have. Maybe it’s just me.

I thought the definition of a psychopath was someone without conscience, someone with complete disassociation with his fellow humans, unable to empathize, so then didn’t worry or feel guilty when causing harm to them.

The mind is a complicated thing. We can manipulate it by using alcohol..drugs.. or even something simple like smelling a candle. We can take pain killers to dull our senses to something that hurts. We can drink alcohol to make ourselves relax and in some cases do very stupid things that under normal circumstances we would not do.

Sometimes all it takes to make us self destruct is something simple like an F on a report card or a rejection from someone you thought you liked or losing your job.

Sometimes when you teardown the very fabric of someone’s existence they can become somewhat of a timebomb.. someone that doesn’t care about what they do and if it will affect other people.

In the Joker’s case. Lived for destruction no matter what the cost for other people.

If you want to really start thinking about things see the matrix trilogy. What is we all woke up and what we did was just a dream. Something to think about.