Dark and Light

The Trope that Bad is Ugly May Get People Killed

Human beings have a bias. Good is beautiful. Ugly is bad. This bias doesn’t just play out in our social realms. For example, there are fruits and vegetables that never make it to market because we have an expectations that it must be perfect. An apple that isn’t reasonably round just won’t sell. Consequently, tons of apples will just be tossed to the ground- which is okay, the ground needs it’s share of fruit, too. So do the animals that might eat off the ground. But it could also have been juiced, sliced and put into a pie or a can. Even though we have memes reminding us not to judge books by a cover, we still do.

Only bad witches are ugly is a theme as old as man, made into a solid meme with Wizard of the Oz, and carried forward by Lucas in Star Wars. In the latter, if you choose a life of evil, you will become scarred, deformed, and just rather unpleasant to be around. In real life, you can be both beautiful and evil. Not just beautiful, but captivating, charismatic, charming, pleasant… We may be hard wired to fall for this trap.

How many Disney tropes can you name where the bad is ugly? Heck, we could likely spend years breaking down the story of Beauty and the Beast. Men are bad, therefore ugly? Men are bad in their natural states… Well, any unsocialized human will likely be seen as such. A man who has tamed the beast will be more socially acceptable, he referred to as refined- he may even be in a tux, but his appearance will still be human? To drive the point home, the personification of beast had to be exaggerated. Even in Shakespeare’s Taming of the Shrew, this personification of bad was ugly.

What if the roles were reversed, the Beast was actually civilized and beauty was the one with all the problems? CEOs are sociopaths?

You can find more than one study that a person’s income is corelated to height or beauty. The more attractive your are, the taller you are, the more likely you will be seen favorably and promoted, even while lacking competency compared to your shorter, frumpier, work peers. Successful people like to surround themselves with good looking people, just like a person with wealth likes to surround themselves with evidence of wealth.