Following Frodo

Downey begins his book with a verse from Jeremiah 17, "the heart is deceitful above all things, and desperately wicked".  He believes that all people either truly long to be good or at least wish that they wanted to be good.  Our biggest problem in getting there is our inability to not only recognize but also admit to our own wickedness.

Downey then makes the argument that humans get entangled into three desires: the desire to posses, the desire to be seen, and the desire to be unseen.  His clearest example is a ring that can make one invisible if it is put on, referenced by both Plato in the Republic and Tolkien in The Lord of the Rings trilogy.

Downey challenges the reader to look beyond what one hopes he would do with this sort of power, and instead define what he would truly do if this ring were in his grasp at this moment.  Personally, I was unable to avoid the truth that at the very least I would use the ring to steal something that I wanted but could not afford.  Who knows where it would go from there; I chose not to think about it further.

We are all afraid of what we are capable of.  Are all of us truly murderers, thieves, and adulterers deep down inside?  What would it take to bring these monsters out of subconscious and into reality?

"Why invisibility?" is Downey's next question.  What is it about being invisible that would free us enough to chase what we truly desire?  A step even further back would be, who told us that what we desire is bad, forcing us to hide it?  Here, Downey's theory of the three human desires comes in.

We define "good" as that which we desire.  Therefore, if we attain what we desire, we will have what is good.  But what if what we want is considered evil?  Well, what is evil?

Downey, in my opinion, makes a very good distinction here between "evil" and "bad".  We do not fear bad things.  Bad is a descriptive word we give to something like a pungent smell or something that disgusts us.  Bad is never tempting; in fact, Downey goes so far as to say that bad things actually only ever encourage us to do good because we have no desire to associate ourselves with bad things.  Evil on the other hand, is the temptation that leads us away from the good, and it is often very appealing because it comes from the very core of our true corporeal desires.  The only reason that we do not act upon these desires is fear, fear of being seen by others.

Our desire to posses does not end with the tangible.  It persists into the desire to be seen.  A desire for a good reputation and a pleasing image that we believe we have defined and desperately want others to believe in.  This can only be accomplished in tandem with the desire to be unseen when it comes to the darker labyrinths that make up who we truly are and what we truly want.

So, what does the ring give to us?  The power to be seen and unseen on our own terms.  We can satisfy both needs that people would approve of, as well as the ones they would shun.

Downey wants the reader to understand that the only way we can be good, or at least the shadow of it, is to understand how evil we are in our true selves.  What I am hoping he will answer in my further reading is, if we are truly innately immoral, why or how would any of us ever have the desire to be good?  And is our definition of good based simply in the cultures and religions we have grown up in, or is there also a part of us that inherently knows what is good as well?