You Have a Greater Capacity for Evil

You have a much larger capacity for evil than you realize or understand. Most of us absolutely do not believe we are capable of doing the things we hear in the news, read in history books, or see in Hollywood productions. The reality however, is most of us are capable of the exact things we know are terrible and evil. You need to understand your own capacity for evil before your morals are questioned or you are likely to fail the test.

When we read history or see terrible things happen on television or in movies, we tend to sympathize with the victims of wrongdoings. We are particularly susceptible if we have a history of being a victim at some point in our lives. We feel sorry for the victims and we romanticize our ability and desire to help those in need. The very notion of helping a victim however, isn’t something you are actually likely to do. You are more likely to walk away or, worse, record it with your cell phone. This propensity to ignore evil is the reason we tell our daughters to cry out “fire” rather than “rape.” We are more likely to help when there is no victim, when there is no evil being done. When we know evil is being done, we walk by and pretend we didn’t hear or see anything at all, if we even walk away. You should be trying to understand the perpetrator. You should realize you are more likely to be that person.

Our world is filled with Social Media posts created by people, just like you, who would rather record someone in great distress than help the victim. You have watched people get shot or stabbed, people get physically assaulted, property get destroyed. You’ve seen people drive recklessly and perform completely antisocial acts, detrimental to and in direct violation of social norms. You’ve watched, commented, and shared the atrocities. You’ve likely even thought to yourself, “one day I’m going to be the person that records something like this so I can get famous.”

Throughout history, we have done terrible things to each other. We all think of the atrocities conducted by the Nazis in the 1940s and recognize those actions as completely evil. We can’t understand how humans could perform such terrible acts on other people. Yet, as much as we were shocked by the notion of concentration camps in Nazi Germany, we were putting Japanese Americans in internment camps at the same time. It wasn’t until 20 years after the end of WWII we started talking about the fact we were segregating Americans based on the color of their skin. We didn’t worry about burning women “witches” at the stake. We still judge and even perpetrate people with opposing political views.

You may think concentration camps and segregation are two separate things, but really, they are one and the same in several ways. Both we and the Nazis divided people based on difference. Rather than including, we denied those different from us were as human as we are. Both were directly shaped by societal norms. Both events led good people to do terrible things. Both were conducted by the majority of the populace. Some numbers suggest 99% of Germans, fully knowing the atrocities were terrible, participated and agreed, publicly, to some degree. It was better to agree with grotesque hatred, mutilation, murder, and genocide than to risk our own state in the world. History tells us things would be no different today. History tells us, you and I would probably do the exact same. We would gladly watch people get brutally killed in a colosseum, burned at a stake, defamed on social media, or gassed, in-mass, in a gas chamber before we would actually stand up and risk joining the victims.

Even though we want to be strong enough to not be shaped by society, we often rationalize our actions based on events surrounding us. If everyone else is doing it, yes, you are going to do it. You are going to do it because it is easy, socially acceptable, and you believe your comfort is more important than that of others. People have been known to rape their own kin just to be part of a gang. Chances are, you and I would do the exact same. Even though you are reading this thinking, “no, I would NEVER do ANY of those things,” the statistics are undeniable.

I won’t argue that people are inherently evil. I’m not saying you are only pretending to be good. I think you are just as susceptible however, as 99% of humans are,  to rationalize evil as acceptable and participate in the conduct of terrible things. I think you won’t even hesitate and may not even realize the thing you are doing is evil. You may not understand the depth of your evil until years later. That’s the saddest part of all of it. We get so wrapped up in the justification and rationalization of our actions, we never take the time to understand our actions. We don’t look to learn for the things that motivated us to do evil. We don’t look for ways to make ourselves better. We don’t create the cognitive dissonance within ourselves necessary to grow.

Yes, you are very capable of absolute evil.