Sauron and Saruman – the Tragedy of Good Intentions

Unlike Morgoth and his existential nihilism, Sauron and Saruman are both a case study of how good intentions lead to evil.

Both Sauron and Saruman are the Maiar of Aule. This may in fact be the root origin of their mistake: the tendency to look at the world, society and even individuals as nothing but machinery that operates according to strict and easily understandable laws. By this logic, anything that causes disruption or chaos, anything unpredictable at all, is by its very nature a mistake. Because chaos causes harm, pain, and even destruction. It can lead to creation of many things, but also to their destruction; it can lead to progress, but also to regression. In order to remove the pain, inefficiencies and “mistakes”, to create safe and productive life, chaos must be replaced by order.

Natural conclusion of this logic is that the free will itself is a mistake. Free will creates chaos, inefficiencies and mistakes, because people are not the same. Thus, in order to create this perfectly functioning machine, free will itself has to be removed and subdued – and this is what both Sauron and then Saruman set out to do.

The ultimate failure in their belief is that, despite their good intentions, Sauron and Saruman had both rejected God. They rejected the role God had envisioned for them, and much like Nietzsche, concluded that “God is dead”. Instead of having to comply with the role God intended for them – that of caretakers and guides – they could instead enforce their own will on the world, control people like puppets in order to create a perfect utopia.

But even for an atheist, this should still hold an abject lesson: good intentions alone are not enough. It is not enough to be good and to want good: that can still, all too easily, lead to evil. Belief in utopia is dangerous: this world is by its nature imperfect, and therefore creating a perfect society, a utopia, heaven on Earth, is a fool’s errand. More than just being foolish, it is dangerous as well: belief in perfection always breeds extremism, because what isn’t allowed in pursuit of a perfect world? Wouldn’t all of Sauron’s evil be justified if only he could solve all the world’s problems? Sauron and Saruman certainly believed so. For them, the ends always justified the means, the utopia always justified whatever was done along the way. And if free will got in the way of the paradise, then the free will had to go.

Yet refutation of free will is in and by itself evil. And evil can never bring about good. No matter how good intentions and the goal may be, the path that we walk to that goal still matters. Stable house cannot be built on quicksand, nor can good world be built upon evil works. Therefore, denying the free will in order to achieve a perfect world or some sort of utopia can never manage to do so, because evil cannot bring about good.

Power is not the path to happiness, nor is the ultimate power something able to solve the world’s problems. Tolkien’s ideal king has little responsibility or impact on the lives of his subjects. He is a caretaker, not a manager, much less a dictator. Freedom, not power, is what should be strived for – but responsible freedom, one in accordance with human role in God’s design, rather than the destructive freedom of the Hippie crowd. Humans are fallible, and there are no heroes who will rise up to solve the world’s problems. Aragorn becomes a king of Gondor, but all he can do to win the war is offer himself and his men up as a bait in a Hail Mary move to draw Sauron’s attention away from the real threat. Frodo may be the protagonist of the Lord of the Rings, but he ultimately fails in his quest to destroy the One Ring – fails at the very end. It is only through divine providence that the quest succeeds. The One Ring, as a representation of sin, is so powerful that no creature can overcome it. Only one who is resistant to Ring’s call is Tom Bombadil – an impersonation of nature itself. Yet neither Sauron nor Saruman understood this, and attempted to work alone and against God’s design. No matter how good their intent may have been in the beginning, their pride ultimately doomed them to fall.

Tolkien’s heroes are people who act out of love and duty and place themselves in service of things greater than themselves. Aragorn and Faramir both do what they can to protect Gondor. Denethor too starts out as a hero – but his pride and belief in his own power ultimately dooms him, as he fails to realize that he cannot fix everything, or even just defeat Sauron, on his own. Yet Denethor can never be called a villain, for even those prideful actions were ultimately taken from love for his family and his people. Sauron and Saruman by contrast have no such love. For them, country is merely a system of domination, and their people are merely slaves, extensions of their own will. They became so convinced of their own goodness and calling to order the things the way they believe they should be, that both have forgotten the importance of very things they were claiming to be trying to perfect.

In this, both Sauron and Saruman are representatives of modernism, where man is the measure of all things. Both of them abandoned wisdom of the past in pursuit of the ideal future. They – and this is especially obvious with Saruman – abandoned tradition in favor of modernism, abandoned what has worked for centuries in favor of new solutions that promised ideal future. Saruman at first wanted to help the people, but in studying the One Ring he began to desire it. Even if Ring itself had not been evil, desiring Ring to reshape the Middle Earth represented hubris of wanting to be like God, or even, be the God. They may have started with good intentions, but humans are imperfect beings, and imperfect beings can never create perfection. If one attempts to create in anyway, the outcome will be far worse than if no attempt had been made at all. Both Sauron and Saruman, embodying Nietzche’s modernist philosophy, decided to try and achieve perfection (that is, Godhood) on their own. But in trying to become gods, they created Hell on earth. And this result was unavoidable – perfection after all is the domain of the divine, and can never be achieved in the physical reality of Middle Earth. Attempting to recreate Eden will always result in Hel.