People want to believe they are on a mission from God, or that they are fighting for some more secular good (animals, fetuses, women’s rights), and you can’t have much of a mission without good allies and a good enemy.
If God is all good and all powerful, either he allows evil to flourish (which means he is not all good), or else he struggles against evil (which means he is not all powerful).
A three-thousand-year-old question had been given a complete and compelling psychological explanation the previous year by Roy Baumeister, one of today’s most creative social psychologists. In “Evil: Inside Human Cruelty and Agression”.
The myth of pure evil is the ultimate self-serving bias.
When someone’s high esteem is unrealistic or narcissistic, it is easily threatened by reality. In reaction to those threats, people often lash out violently. Baumeister questions the usefulness of programs that try raise children’s self-esteem directly instead of by teaching them skills they can be proud of. Such direct enhancement can potentially foster unstable narcissism.
To really get a mass atrocity going you need idealism – the belief that your violence is a means to a moral end. The major atrocities of the 20th century were carried out largely either by men who thought they were creating a utopia or else by men who believed they were defending their homeland or tribe from attack. Idealism easily becomes dangerous because it brings with it, almost inevitably, the belief that the ends justify the means. If you are fighting for good or for God, what matters is the outcome, not the path.
The world we live in is not really one made of rocks, trees, and physical objects; it is a world of insults, opportunities, status symbols, betrayals, saints, and sinners.
All this moralism, righteousness, and hypocrisy. It’s beyond silly – it is tragic, for it suggests that human beings will never achieve a state of lasting peace and harmony.
So what can you do about it?
The first step is to see it as a game and stop taking it so seriously.
Write down your thoughts, learn to recognize the distortions in your thoughts, and then think of a more appropriate thought.
You will see the fault in yourself only if you set out on a deliberate and effortful quest to look for it. Try this now: Think of a recent interpersonal conflict with someone you care about and then find one way in which your behavior was not exemplary.
Finding fault with yourself is also the key to overcoming the hypocrisy and judgmentalism that damages so many valuable relationships.
