Tom Rachman is a contributing columnist for The Globe and Mail.
A policeman stopped a 60-year-old outside a private health clinic this week in Palermo, asking his name. Oddly, the man replied truthfully: “I am Matteo Messina Denaro.” The most-wanted Mafia boss in Italy, a fugitive for decades, was shackled at last. Instantly, cop cars converged, sirens wailing, police motorcycles growling.
In the background, there was a fainter sound too: clapping. Locals approached the armed officers, taking their hands: Grazie.
Two decades earlier, back when The Sopranos still had seasons to go, I visited Sicily to report on anti-Mafia initiatives there, venturing into the notorious mobster town of Corleone. Throughout that trip, I was struck by how most Italians viewed mobsters: not as wise guys in stylish duds, but as parasites.
Why, I wondered then and now, do we in safer societies retain such an attraction to the villain?
I ask not as a moral scold; I myself am entranced by tales of crooks. But lately, I wonder if our one-sided romance with violent men is becoming a problem, with the creeping normalization in politics and culture of an ethos of brute thuggery. It’s not far from what the great anti-Mafia prosecutor Giovanni Falcone called “la mentalita mafiosa”: a cynicism that plagued Sicily, that you look out for your own, while society is there merely to drain. (Mr. Falcone was murdered in 1992; Mr. Messina Denaro was convicted of the crime.)
“For a long time, the Mafia and the mafioso mentality got conflated, the Mafia as an illegal organization and the mafia as a simple way of being,” Mr. Falcone once wrote. “What a mistake! One may very well have a mafioso mentality without being a criminal.”
But this shameless mindset isn’t only reserved for Sicilian mobsters. You see it in the extortionist behaviour of Donald Trump, or among sociopathic influencers such as Andrew Tate, an ex-kickboxer who brags of fast cars, easy money and brazen misogyny.
Who could admire such a villain? Millions and millions of people, I regret.
Rather than feel aghast and bewildered, we need to consider why people – us included – find thugs so intriguing, even appealing.
In some cases, our attraction to bad guys is out of empathy, a conviction that even the awful possess virtue. This can be naive, but it can be noble too: A humane justice system depends on a certain faith in the inherent good of evil-doers.
We also respect the aggressive and the risk-takers because they’re useful sometimes, their bravura and courage safeguarding the flock. Indeed, the promise of every strongman is to protect. Our blunder is to mistake their self-interest for group interest.
When it comes to sympathy for devils, though, one motive is strongest: escapist envy. Imagine that you needn’t wait in queues, and that strangers treat you with respect. You say what you like, act as you like, barge through your enemies – and you can sleep late. Imagine!
Villains embody a fantasy of quitting social restrictions that – worthy though you may consider them – are vexing and stifling. So why do few of us actually become villains? Well, we’re too wise to the consequences: prison, violent retaliation, shame.
But that last guardrail – shame – keeps getting eroded lately, bashed and bumped from all sides. Social media, it turns out, is both our leading source of shame, and our leading source of shamelessness.
Online, you’re reminded of how others are happier, their lives more exotic, successful, joyous. However, the humiliated also find comfort online, discovering others who embolden them, who insist that they’re not such losers. Sometimes, that is kindness. Sometimes, it’s a licence to degenerate.
Members of such communities validate each other’s worst impulses, denouncing elites who are supposedly excluding and exploiting them. What matters most to them is power: dominate, or die alone.
Online, the humiliated find comfort in a screw-the-world cynicism not far from la mentalita mafiosa. The system is rotten, so why not hollow it further? It’s our side against the rest. Cruelty is hilarious! Manipulation? Everyone’s doing it. Narcissism? Well, aren’t we the best?
Villains have long exploited the humiliated this way, whether it’s in big-city slums or in Sicilian poverty. Now, the internet adds a global setting both for further humiliation, and for those who want to escape it by embracing the worst of humanity.
Those Sicilians applauding the arresting officers – they know exactly where this deranged mentality leads. That charming mobster arrested in Palermo, the one nicknamed “Diabolik”? Among the crimes for which he has been convicted is the killing of a 12-year-old boy, the son of a witness. On Mr. Messina Denaro’s orders, the child was kidnapped, held for two years – then strangled, his body dissolved in acid, to hurt his family even further.
Yes, these are the good fellas.
The only way to respect villains, I suspect, is to never meet one.