Once in a dream I was presented with a terrible choice. Neither option was good. Both were harmful to the world. The first choice was to become a thug, a quasi-alcoholic, an abusive husband, father, and employer, an embezzler who made others go down for his crimes and got away scot-free (yet with a lingering canker of guilt ulcerating his gut)—in short a rancid stew of a person, the kind that keeps society and life grunting along on its present low, starved level.

The second was to become a corrupter of people's souls.

The second was much worse than the first in its effect on the world. Bad as being scum of that order would be if I selected the first option, the second choice would be at least a hundred times more harmful.

Instead of mutilating a few people and spreading a certain amount of poison to several more (and providing the contagion of a bad example), I would by the second choice make carnage out of hundreds of beings. Worse than carnage—I would, almost certainly in most cases, annihilate them.

I was in a bind. In my dream what was left of my withering moral sensibility cried out that I must make the first choice, the less hurtful one, and simply become a toxic schmuck.

However, in my dream I recoiled from the bleak grey world I would inhabit for many decades if I chose the first path.

You see, being a poisonous smear was boring. The second option was, well—interesting.