The enemy within

They asked the dark knight what was his worst enemy. There have been said several stories about the vicious villains that he had faced over the years. Bandits, gangsters, murderers and all kinds of notorious criminals. But there was one kind of criminal that he was particularly inept handling, the joker. Why? Because the rest of the outlaws shared something in common: they had an excuse to justify their actions, one maybe better than the other. In their eyes what only matters is revenge, avarice, wrath or any other of the deadly sins. Thus their moves, their whole plans were highly predictable, they were slaves of their own emotions.With the joker though, things were a little different. He had no plan, no feelings, no rational, always one step ahead of our not so noble hero.

After an instance of silence the dark knight replied, “My most ferocious foe is insanity”. And it is true, he loathed the absence of rationality . A savage none the less explicable misdeed could certainly be tackled after the right strategy was deployed. What is the strategy however against chaos, against lack of reason? Well, that’s how you earn your badges and of course your scars. “I was once my friends a person with a distinct set of rules and values and I abided by them. I was too stiff and I broke in a thousand pieces” he said absorbed in his thoughts. The joker has deeply challenged the principles of the dark night. He made him choose one life between his two closest ones, he made him surrender his true identity, he made him use unnecessary violence, he made him relinquish the people who lawfully supported him, he made him just like his image a self-destructing, senseless machine.

The crowd was squirming in discomfort. This wasn’t what it anticipated to hear. Perhaps, it now understood that the title dark knight was indeed a legitimate euphemism. “What happened then, how did you win?” an ardent voice questioned. “I can’t claim I have won completely yet”, he replied and the group surrounding him acted even more confounded, “This is an ever lasting battle, where equilibrium is hard, almost impossible to achieve. My moment of clarity came when I realized… I was the joker“.

Α.Δ.