Last night, my wife and I were talking about our sons’ stages of development. She said that she recalls wishing the baby and toddler stages would last forever. She loved having her boys fall asleep cuddled up against her and being so little that they wore their need for her on their sleeves.
Me? I couldn’t wait until I could throw a ball around with them and they wanted movies with a few more explosions than Care Bears. Yesterday evening, my wife was thinking wistfully about “her” time. I was still on popcorn high from having seen Battleship.
In the dinner table discussion that followed the movie (and yes, we dissected Battleship and The Avengers like the Zapruder film), I realized that where work is concerned, Battleship and The Avengers (and Captain America, Thor, Iron Man I and II, and Green Lantern for that matter) were wrong. Where human experience is concerned, evil is much more powerful than good.
In 2001, Drs. Roy F. Baumeister, Ellen Bratslavsky and Kathleen D. Vohs of Case Western Reserve University, in collaboration with Dr. Catrin Finkenauer of the Free University of Amsterdam published a paper entitled Bad is Stronger than Good in the Review of General Psychology. They write: