Human Good and Evil

That heading sounds extremely presumptuous, I know. Not I nor anyone will have the last word on that subject. Greater minds than mine have tried.

The previous post talked about mankind or humanity collectively. One more thought on that: When individuals constitute a mob, the collective intelligence can go totally wild and berserk. That's implicit in the idea of a mob. The mob tramples, the mob lynches. Even in demonstrations, when a political position has to be reduced to a few words to make a slogan chanted or put on a banner or a placard, it is worse than oversimplified: it's an idea reduced almost to meaninglessness, all the thought and rationality taken out of it. Maybe that's a main reason I don't participate in demonstrations.

But now I want to talk about individuals. There are good people and bad people. I didn't used to believe that there was such a thing as evil or evil people. However, when we have people who lie, rob, cheat; when we have dictators and mass murderers who arrest and "disappear" and torture and murder sometimes tens and hundreds of thousands of people—Hitler, Pol Pot in Cambodia, Gen. Pinochet in Chile, with a little thought the sad list can become far too long—we might have to wonder whether there are evil people or if evil in the abstract exists.

Certainly it looks as though some people have no conscience. I think that criminologists call these people amoral or sociopaths or criminally insane. Others, such as the "financiers," for example, who manage to cheat others out of millions of dollars, maybe their greed gets the best of them, consumes them, lets them subordinate their conscience or rationalize their actions.

It's not clear to me that religion effectively restrains people from committing evil. Big mafiosi would go to church on Sundays and go on having people killed the other six days of the week. Not to mention that religion has often induced people to do harm, but that would be going off on another, very large topic.

I tend to think that good and bad—angel and devil, if you want to use the terms, but I'd only use them metaphorically—both exist within each of us. That is, I think even the best of us can behave horribly and certainly be unkind, even horribly cruel, to others.

In between the whole of the human species and individuals there are groups. Within any group (of a certain size) you've got the whole range of humanity, from good to bad. I have often written critically about the police, but I'm sure that, within any large enough group of police, you would find the whole range, from good to bad—with probably a majority in the middle who are neither outstandingly good nor definitely bad, either. So maybe there are lots of individuals in that great middle who now and then, when there are little incidents of bending the rules, will close their eyes or turn a deaf ear. But maybe the big stinkers started out that way.

Copyright © 2010 by Richard Stein