Between bleakness and grace: What it means to be human
In one of the most iconic scenes in the 2008 movie "The Dark Knight," the Joker eloquently expresses his belief in the darker duality of human nature: "Their morals, their code, it’s a bad joke. Dropped at the first sign of trouble. They’re only as good as the world allows them to be. I’ll show you. When the chips are down, these civilized people, they’ll eat each other." Seen in this context, Christopher Nolan’s observation in a 2005 interview with Box Office Mojo that he does not think solely in terms of ‘darkness and light’ but also in terms of ‘bleakness and richness’ is relevant.
Throughout the thematic architecture of The Dark Knight Trilogy and his latest, "The Odyssey," Nolan, concerned with the impulses and paradoxes of human nature, depicts the world as it is, in its unvarnished glory and strange majesty: grim, complex, but never beyond redemption. What Nolan gives us is a complex tapestry of human action: we find traces of richness with even the darkest figures, while shades of bleakness inevitably intrude upon the most virtuous characters. In the end, Nolan does see the world for all its darkness and brokenness, but with enduring strains of worth and unyielding hope — and this authenticity is exactly the reason why people are still inspired by the messages conveyed in his movies.
While Nolan offers a compelling portrayal of moral fragility and ambiguity, can human nature truly be reduced to these contradictions, or does its very complexity point to something more nuanced and multifaceted?
Jordan Peterson takes Nolan’s complex vision of the world a step further, contending that human societies are structured hierarchically around competence and status, illustrating his point through the example of lobsters: “The dominance hierarchy of human beings and lobsters is remarkably similar. Like lobsters, human beings engage in fierce territorial struggles for survival and social status, and the winners are those who are the most intelligent, powerful, healthy, and fortunate.”
Across Peterson’s work, there is a recurring and sobering truth to which he consistently returns: life entails suffering. More than simply acknowledging this suffering, Peterson urges his audience to confront it by accepting responsibility and cultivating what he calls “integrated aggression,” leading him to make striking claims, such as the assertion that “there is almost no difference between the capacity to cause chaos and destruction and being a strong, good person.”
Yet Peterson’s response to nihilistic despair — a Nietzschean social Darwinist vision of a world in which individuals must struggle against one another — has little room for compassion, rest and love.
Meanwhile, in his essay “This Is Water,” David Foster Wallace sheds light on the often overlooked truths of living a compassionate life. He draws attention to the fact that our default mode of being is shaped by an unconscious assumption that we are at the center of the world, and that our immediate needs, desires and feelings should determine what matters. For Wallace, being “well-adjusted” does not simply mean adapting successfully to this way of seeing the world; rather, it involves the difficult work of consciously altering our default settings — the deeply ingrained tendency to be, in his words, “literally and deeply self-centered,” and to see and interpret everything through the lens of the self. In this sense, true freedom requires the cultivation of attention, awareness, discipline and effort: the capacity to genuinely care about other people and to repeatedly make room for their needs, even at the cost of our own, through the “myriad petty little unsexy ways” that constitute everyday life.
Perhaps the complexity of human nature lies less in the tension between "bleakness and richness" than in the grace we respond to it with compassion, responsibility and love.
Chang Se-myeong (semyeongchangx7@korea.ac.kr) is a student at Korea University Graduate School of International Studies, majoring in International Peace and Security.