Free will rears it's ugly head
“We stand upon the brink of a precipice. We peer into the abyss- we grow sick and dizzy. Our first impulse is to shrink from danger. Unaccountably we remain.” When one thinks of perversity we are prone to think of things like pornography, or some sort of sexual deviancy. We think of sociopaths, or the criminally insane but certainly never ourselves. Perversity is defined a s the willful determination not to do what is expected or desired. In “The Imp of The Perverse”, Edgar Allen Poe takes this definition one step further and suggests that all humanity suffers from perversion, in that we never do what is in our best interest. But what force is it that brings us to the edge in the first place? Reason lets us understand that jumping into an abyss would bring about certain death. We know that it is the absolute wrong thing to do and it is this precise knowledge that makes us want to do it.