I was talking with a friend last night and somehow the conversation veered towards trying to understand why people, often in large numbers, do bad things. The conversation began with the topic of cyclists. As you may well know, many of the best cyclists in the world have admitted or been implicated in a huge doping scandal. I'm now pretty convinced (sadly) that almost all of the top stage race cyclists (e.g. Tour de France) cheat, including our cancer-surviving hero Lance Armstrong (mostly because everyone who could even kind of keep up with him cheated).
But why do so many people cheat? Maybe it's just a few sour apples? Well, then I started thinking about the whole Nazi mess from WWII. Thousands of people were involved in the detaining and ultimate murder of millions of Jews. Many tried to use the now famous "Nuremberg defense" that they were only following orders. (In cycling, a similar argument might be, "everyone else is doing it, so I'm not really cheating, I'm just staying competitive" - and they have a point).
One year at college we had a speaker who came to talk about genocide. He was a christian, and one of his premises was that we are all fallen sinners. He didn't make this point especially clear, but it permeates everything he was saying. Some people are comforted by the "Nuremberg defense" because then you don't have to believe so many people did horrible evil. Instead, you can simply believe it was a few, horribly twisted people at the top of the chain of command. This speaker countered this argument with another example - Rwanda. Now you have hundreds of thousands of people involved in chopping people to death with machetes and such. Now you can't make the argument that it was just a few people up top and the rest weren't aware of the impact of their actions. It doesn't get much more in your face than hacking someone to death. Go watch "Hotel Rwanda" sometime - the whole thing was so twisted it makes you just want to curl up in a ball and denounce the human race.
So how do we deal with the fact that so many people are willing, in fact have committed, such heinous crimes? I read an article this morning in Newsweek that tied it all together really well. It's all about self-image. The article states: "People resort to denial when recognizing that the truth would destroy something they hold dear....'The more important the aspect of your self-image that's challenged by the truth, the more likely you are to go into denial'". I would surmise that most people have a very strong self-image of being a "good" person. Good people don't do bad things, especially horrible things. But maybe we aren't all as good as we think. Is there something demonstrably different about Germans, or Rwandans? Sure, culture and history play a role, but I think to be honest, we have to admit that they are just as human as we are.
If we asked most people if they are capable of participating in genocide, they would emphatically say no. But if they are no different from Rwandans, that can't really be the case, right? I'll give a less terrifying example. When surveys have asked people if they think they are smarter or better looking than the average person, some ridiculously large percentage of people say they think they are above average. But, for those of us who understand the concept of "average", that's not possible (unless there are some absolutely heinously ugly people dragging down the average - I don't buy it). Half of us are less beautiful and less intelligent than the other half. And I think many, most, maybe all of us are capable of horrible things. I think if we revisit our past, there are things we have done that hurt other people. Sometimes it was intentional, and sometimes we just didn't care. I know I have done bad things in the past.
I'm not proposing that we all think the worst of ourselves. I think this would be counter-productive and wouldn't be a true self-image either. But maybe we aren't as good as we think either. Maybe a realistic self-image would include a belief that we really are fallen sinners. And maybe owning up to this, in conjunction with some self-reflection, will actually make us "better" people in the sense that by becoming more aware, we will be less likely to do things that hurt other people because we realize we, I, can do evil, and thus I must be on the lookout. Otherwise, our self-image of being a good person will lead us into denial. Something along the lines of, "I am good, so I can't do something bad. Therefore, what I am doing isn't bad." Now that's frightening.
