They don't hate the Godfather. They love it.

Recently I watched a bunch of short documentaries about the making of trilogy and was surprised to learn how limited the views of its participants were. You could expect that Robert Evans, head of Paramount, would see it as little more than a cash cow, but I was surprised that even Francis Ford Coppola could say only that it was a "metaphor for capitalism."

A few of those interviewed noticed that it transcended traditional crime flicks in being less about violence and more about family loyalties. So far so good.

But my view is that, like all great art, The Godfather shows us the inescapably tragic nature of human existence. It tries to answer the question, "Why do good people do bad things?"

There is no such thing as "evil" roaming the world. Evil is not a thing. It's an epithet, a name we call events we don't understand. But it's important to try to understand how these events happen, at least in principle. In the case of The Godfather, the story is simple:

1. Italian peasants were preyed upon mercilessly by criminals like . A few isolated heroes like Vito Coreleone rose up to strike back in the only way they could, with retaliatory violence. Soon their friends and neighbors asked for protection and they willingly agreed because they were soldiers now, soldiers in a good cause.
2. But a man has to make a living. So at first they asked for favors in return and then, later, for money.
3. Each leader slowly grew their own private police force, called "families", to compensate for the failures of the official police.
4. As these families grew they attracted adherents not so nobly inspired, and what started as a heroic cause slowly sank into the quicksand of crimilality.

All of us, including the other mammals, were little creatures once. Creatures who relied on the kindness of their parents, and who tried to be good in return. Yet "evil" things happen, in every time and in every place. Our myths, especially as Joseph Campbell tried to understand them, remind us of how tragically commonplace this is.

Plato was right. Poets have no idea of what their jingles mean to other people. But every once in awhile one of their creations strikes a chord in the hearts of their listeners and becomes an iconic symbol of something we need to care about — especially in a pre-scientific era or a era where science has a lot of catching up to do. I don't believe Coppola set out the make a profound movie. The Godfather's prominent place in human consciousness is just another success story in the world of what Murray Gell-Mann calls . So how does great art rise to greatness?

I don't believe in a Freudian "unconscious consciousness" or a Jungian "race memory", but I believe that — in a way similar to the of dolphins, sharks and icthyosaurs — the stories we tell are often deeper than we realize. The best metric for this is popularity. We love art that tells them who they are at the deepest level of comprehension we are capable of. The ensemble of stories we tell are just another example of a complex adaptive system, in this case a system of things that evolve simply because they are useful to us. We are surrounded by many cultural artifacts, from our great myths to toothepaste, that evolve not for their fitness to survive, but for their fitness to serve us. To them we are God.

And God is not our father, evolution is.