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Evil is older than empires.

Roughly since the dawn of humanity, we’ve been carrying out horrific injustices. Slavery has been nearly universal throughout history. Conquering other nations, slaughtering their men, and raping their women was seen as not merely acceptable but noble and praiseworthy. The Romans left infants to freeze to die of exposure. In Rwanda, babies were hacked to death with machetes; genocidal ethnic slaughter continues around the world to this very day.

This is one of the more disturbing facts about human history. Evil actions are not limited to evil people. Acts that you’d expect only a sociopath to perform have been widely accepted. The people who cooperated with the Nazis were ordinary. So were the Rwandans who hacked innocent people to death with machetes. There is almost no limit to the evil that ordinary people will perform in the right settings. Most people are willing to torture an innocent person because someone in a white lab coat tells them to. https://benthams.substack.com/p/the-darkness-within?utm_source=publication-search

Very likely our society is carrying out horrific injustices too. It would be a suspicious pattern if this ubiquitous cross-cultural trend of omnipresent evil suddenly stopped 40 years ago. If every society in history, until our own a few decades ago, has carried out evils on the level of slavery, then you should suspect ours continues to carry out evils on the level of slavery to this very day. You should think this even if no specific grave evils come to mind. Past societies didn’t think they were evil either.

So if you don’t want to go along with atrocities, being an ordinary person, even a nice one, isn’t enough. The most putrid moral abominations ever carried out were facilitated by nice, ordinary people. Raise the people of today in Nazi Germany, and many would have been Nazis.

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