How You Make Good People Do Bad Things

With that title in mind, I will start off with Herzog’s mention of Kant’s philosophy. According to Kant, there are certain things we experience that overwhelm us with both fear and beauty. To me, one of those is the concept of humanity. Humans are beautiful creatures who contain so much good in their hearts. They are even willing to extend a helping hand to those whom need it, but at the same time, humanity is also scary. Those same people dedicated to helping us (e.g., soldiers) are the same people capable of absolute horror (e.g., torture). How do you even begin to comprehend how they are able to stomach such acts?

This is where Herzog’s matter of ecstatic truth comes into play. In order to understand why good people do bad things, we must take a step back, outside of ourselves and our bubble, and look at the truth that experience brings us. You can automatically deem the person evil, but you are not looking at the whole experience. For example, I will look to the soldiers in Abu Ghraib. They knew the acts they committed were terrible, but they still committed them without raising objections. To them, those acts were merely an order. Now, while we cannot put ourselves in that situation, we can look to our professors for a similar experience. The professor I teach with once told the class that he says outrageous things to see what students would do. Instead of questioning him and wondering why he says such things, they write it down as logical points in their notes. If your professor is lecturing you, and you know what they said is false, how likely are you to correct them? Sure, a few would, but the overwhelming majority would not say a thing. They would be too afraid to question authority. This same logic applies to the soldiers in Abu Ghraib and other horrible places: They are merely given orders in their mind. By using this example of professors and lectures, we are able to experience ecstatic truth to understand the sublime truth about humanity.

It is easy to argue bad people do bad things because that is logical. You expect terrorist groups to kill innocent children. You expect serial killers to keep playing games. Yet, it is scary and hard for us to understand that most horrendous crimes are committed by good people. Another easy thing to point out that parallels the mystery of humanity is the Stanford Prison Experiments (for those interested, the story is here).

Ordinary men adapted harmful roles as prison guards when given the authority to do so. They were only told to “be the guard.” They did not question the fact that they were harming innocent people. To them, the prisoners deserved to be there; therefore, they deserved the isolation and punishment they received. They did not question it, because much like the Hard Body competitors and their illusions of Kmart, that became their reality. They normalized the crimes they committed. Similarly, the Nazis from Germany also fit in this category. It is easy to say that all Nazis were bad people (and they are), but we cannot ignore the fact that they had everyday lives like us. They played games with their families, had dinner parties, watched films, and even educated themselves. The scary, sublime truth is that ordinary people like you and I are capable of horrendous things we cannot even comprehend. Humanity is infinite, beautiful, and absolutely terrifying. There is a fine line between good and evil, but what is stopping someone from crossing it?

Maybe I am taking a pessimistic view on things, but the concept of humanity and evil is so easily danced around. We want to assume the neighbor we love so dearly is not capable of horrible things, but let’s be real, we ALL are. All it seems to take is an order and suddenly a new world is shoved in front of you until you experience another ecstatic truth and wake up (e.g., like Abu Ghraib soldiers hearing what they did on television). Maybe someone else can put a little bit more of a positive spin on things?