While Rorshach's activities should not be emulated, his core value, the rejection of apathy in the face of suffering and predadation, is certainly something that everyone should take to heart.
And his methods, they're just a guilty pleasure. In the comic book world where we know he isn't executing jaywalkers, it's allright.
But that's not Rorschach's core value. Rorschach isn't a guy who believes in rejecting apathy in the face of suffering and predation -- we see him engage in apathy in the face of suffering and predation all the time. Rorschach's central value was expressed at the end of "The Abyss Gazes Also:"
Rorschach said:
Looked at sky through smoke heavy with human fat and God was not there. The cold, suffocating dark goes on forever, and we are alone.
Live our lives, lacking anything better to do. Devise reason later.
Born from oblivion; bear children, Hell-bound as ourselves. Go into oblivion.
There is nothing else.
Existence is random. Has no pattern save what we imagine after staring at it for too long. No meaning save what we choose to impose.
This rudderless world is not shaped by vague metaphysical forces. It is not God who kills the children. Not fate that butchers them or destiny that feeds them to the dogs.
It's us. Only us.
There's a thing line between Nihilism and Existentialism. Both begin from the fundamental premise that the world lacks any inherent meaning -- that there is no God or higher authority, and that any meaning we find in life is actually the product of human imagination. For an Existentialist, this is an
affirmation: We are free. "Man is his freedom," an Existentialist believes, and the ability to imbue the world with your own meaning is a good thing.
For a Nihilist, though, the fact that we have to imbue the world with our own meaning just means that that meaning is a lie that we're telling ourselves. The Nihilist interprets the idea of a world without inherent meaning in a negative light -- if we have to impose meaning upon the world, then that makes our imposition a false one, an act of desperation to make ourselves feel better, not an act of hope. There is no real point to imbuing our lives with our own meaning, because there is no real point to anything. All is vanity to the Nihilist.
That's Rorschach. He's not an Existentialist, he's a Nihilist. In examining Rorschach's psychology, the audience should be left with the same feeling that the Psychologist in the graphic novel is when he stares at a Rorschach test:
I sat on the bed. I looked at the Rorschach blot. I tried to pretend it looked like a spreading tree, shadows pooled beneath it, but it didn't.
It looked more like a dead cat I once found, the fat glistening grubs withering blinding, squirming over each other, frantically tunneling away from the light. But even that is avoiding the real horror.
The horror is this: In the end, it is simply a picture of empty meaningless blackness.
We are alone.
There is nothing else.
From my point of view, Rorschach is a fundamentally disturbed individual whose sick and twisted version of Nihilism has justified his decision to commit some horrible acts of murder and torture against anyone he designates as being undeserving of life and safety. He's not an admirable man at all--he's severely mentally ill. His only real redeeming values, frankly, are the fact that he still acts to protect the psychological innocence of children (stopping calling his landlord a whore after she tells him they don't know) and the fact that he acts to give the general populace the real truth behind the attack on New York. Even though he's a Nihilist, he does believe that others have the right to see the truth, too, and he'll die for that right.
Of course, frankly, it also played into his egotistical Nihilism. He'd been looking for a long time for something to die for, I'd argue.
: I dunno. I like both versions, so it didn't bother me all that much.
