“When Good People Do Bad Things”

I have almost forty years of law enforcement and security experience and it still amazes me, “When Good People Do Bad Things”!

People, who appear normal and lead seemingly good lives, do bad things and sometimes commit unthinkable crimes. The Amish school shooting and the torture at the Abu Ghraib prison are prime examples.  The hazing and beating of fraternity and sorority pledges on college campuses by so called educated people are another.

There is a long history of state-sponsored systemic evil, like Nazi Germany and the genocide in Rwanda, where normally good peoples’ sense of right and go completely out the window!

I think of the phrase the “Banality of Evil “coined by Hannah Arendt and incorporated in the title of her 1963 work Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. It describes the thesis that the great evils in history generally, and the Holocaust in particular, were not executed by fanatics or sociopaths but rather by ordinary people who accepted the premises of their state and therefore participated with the view that their actions were normal.

Think about it the next time you are watching the evening news and a reporter interviews the next door neighbor of a person who has just killed their entire family and the neighbor says, “He was such a good church going man who loved his family”.

That’s my rant for the day; feel free to blog-it-out!