I recently watched Iron Man 3 for the second time. In case you haven't seen it, it doesn't spoil anything to know that the central message of the movie is that we create our own demons. This is stated explicitly at the very beginning, I think in the opening line. Simply put, if you hurt someone they may wish to hurt you back. I'm bringing up the point not because it's from a movie I like, but because I think it's fundamentally true: Whether on a personal or societal level, we create our own demons.

Life is made up of all kinds of little competitions. We compete against each other constantly for jobs, money, sex, love, approval, attention, and relationships. In any competition there are winners and losers, and this much is fine. Competition is healthy and productive when the winners are gracious and the losers are good sports. The problem is that we live in what has increasingly become a bragging culture: We celebrate not only winners but show-offs. A lot of the time it seems like winning is desired only as a means to the end of bragging, of showing off, of proudly presenting oneself to the world as better-than.

In a lot of life's competitions, I am decidedly one of the losers. I say this not with emotion but as a dispassionate statement of fact. I happen to suffer from a variety of physical, medical, and psychological conditions that make it difficult and often impossible for me to compete with others either personally or professionally. The specifics of my situation are beside the point; what matters is that I know how it feels to be one of life's losers. And as such I have a lot of experience with the world of difference between when a good winner behaves graciously toward me and when a bad winner creates in me a demon.

The other day I caught part of a story on the news about a married couple who had been randomly murdered, allegedly by another couple who wanted to know how it felt to murder someone. To my surprise, I found myself immediately identifying not with the victims but with the alleged murderers. Over the past few years I've repeatedly failed to achieve a variety of social and professional goals I'd set for myself, not because I've fallen short of any objective standard but rather because other people have been deemed better than me for no particular discernible reason. This has left me feeling frustrated, helpless, and confused to say the least. But alas, this much is life. However, several of the "winners" in this case have exhibited show-offish, elitist, self-promoting attitudes around both myself and others. Consequently, for the first time in my life, I've entertained fantasies about the potential satisfaction and dignity I could gain by murdering a fellow human being. Other people from the same winning group have by contrast been friendly, good-natured, supportive, and kind. For them I have wished and continue to wish only the best.

There are a few key differences, I think, between myself and most actual murderers. For starters, I'm able to clearly separate fantasy from reality. No matter how badly I feel like I want to kill or even seriously hurt someone, I'm not going to act on that impulse. This is mostly because of my values but also because I wouldn't want to potentially make my situation even worse by getting caught. Another difference is that I'm usually able to articulate my emotions, attribute them to a cause, and mentally separate the people who have hurt me from the ones who haven't. In my less emotionally articulate states, I know what it's like to momentarily lump all people into the crudely arranged categories of "self," "loved ones," or "other." In this foggy mindset I've fantasized about the feeling of power and control that would come from murdering even a stranger. The satisfaction here would derive not from taking specific revenge on an individual but from taking general revenge on society as a whole. I'm under the impression that this might be the mindset of a lot of murderers who prey upon victims they don't personally know.

So, if I had been raised with different values, if I didn't care or simply didn't have the foresight to think about getting caught, and if I lacked the mental and emotional capacity to differentiate between people who have hurt me and everyone else, it seems likely that I could not only be a murderer but an indiscriminate murderer of strangers as in the news story I saw. And although the individual is ultimately responsible for his own actions, the action in this case would stem not from myself alone but also from those around me who had shown off, ignored me, and treated me badly. If the winners behaved graciously, the loser would wish them the best.

It's when winners rub their success in losers' faces that the losers want to push back in whatever way they can. And I'm not talking about naturally sore losers. I'm talking about good losers like myself who would be happy for the winners' success if only the winners would behave graciously or with a certain level of modesty. These are the people who flaunt their wealth and wonder why they get robbed; the ones who flaunt their bodies and wonder why they get raped; the ones who flaunt their power and wonder why they get overthrown, murdered, terrorized, and destroyed.

Granted, most victims don't deserve what they get. But most criminals don't deserve what they've gotten. Like the rest of us, they've drawn general conclusions about the world based on the relatively few examples of it to which they've been directly exposed. Like anyone, they take that experience and do with it whatever they feel they rightfully or reasonably can. It comforts us to think that evil comes from some noticeably dark and far away place, but a lot of the time it comes from and is amplified by everyday acts of showiness, taunting, elitism, and pride. I'm not saying everyone is equally to blame, but a bragging culture of winners will inevitably produce a spiteful counterculture of losers. Whether on a personal or societal level, we create our own demons.