Another problem with seeing enemies as innately evil is that it lets us off the hook as to our own capacity for evil (so elegantly demonstrated by the Milgram experiments, although I hope I would do better).
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that Hitler or Stalin or whoever was “just evil,” or that the holocaust was the result of some essentially German negative personality trait, or that child abusers of various kinds are “just monsters.”
To the extent that these statements mean only “Boo Stalin!” or “Boo paedophiles!” I guess they’re not so bad, but I think people actually believe them as propositions to some extent. Certainly, if movies are any guide, the bad guys are usually pure evil—for no readily apparent reason, they just love pain and want to blow up the world.
Which is a big problem, because it leads you to be naive about your own propensity. An acquaintance of mine knew a rapist, through work. This rapist was not a slavering beast, he was an ordinary guy (maybe with some nasty explicit or implicit beliefs about women) until he got drunk and raped somebody. I really don’t want to say “it could have been me,” and I honestly don’t think it could have. But I doubt he thought, say a year before, that it could have been him.
More likely is that your inaccurate map of the territory of his mind was sufficiently wrong that it fell under the “normal person” category. As someone who has fantasies about that sort of thing (but would hopefully never actually do it), let me tell you that this isn’t the sort of thing that comes out of nowhere. Odds are, he knew where his proclivities lay, and simply decided not to actualise his fantasies until alcohol reduced his inhibitions sufficiently that he decided to go through with them.
Another problem with seeing enemies as innately evil is that it lets us off the hook as to our own capacity for evil (so elegantly demonstrated by the Milgram experiments, although I hope I would do better).
I’ve lost count of how many times I’ve heard that Hitler or Stalin or whoever was “just evil,” or that the holocaust was the result of some essentially German negative personality trait, or that child abusers of various kinds are “just monsters.”
To the extent that these statements mean only “Boo Stalin!” or “Boo paedophiles!” I guess they’re not so bad, but I think people actually believe them as propositions to some extent. Certainly, if movies are any guide, the bad guys are usually pure evil—for no readily apparent reason, they just love pain and want to blow up the world.
Which is a big problem, because it leads you to be naive about your own propensity. An acquaintance of mine knew a rapist, through work. This rapist was not a slavering beast, he was an ordinary guy (maybe with some nasty explicit or implicit beliefs about women) until he got drunk and raped somebody. I really don’t want to say “it could have been me,” and I honestly don’t think it could have. But I doubt he thought, say a year before, that it could have been him.
More likely is that your inaccurate map of the territory of his mind was sufficiently wrong that it fell under the “normal person” category. As someone who has fantasies about that sort of thing (but would hopefully never actually do it), let me tell you that this isn’t the sort of thing that comes out of nowhere. Odds are, he knew where his proclivities lay, and simply decided not to actualise his fantasies until alcohol reduced his inhibitions sufficiently that he decided to go through with them.