How Could They be so Evil (or Thoughtless)?
Often people wonder how (other) people can be so evil, so thoughtless? Don’t they have a conscience, they wonder? As someone who is naturally cynical, I’ve never spent much time on that topic: to me, the answer has been that most people are evil, dumb or both. Of course, in my more rational moments, I know that can’t be it. Certainly not all of it, anyway. Surely there must be some other answer to explain how the scale of atrocities by many (and the do-nothing-against-it response of the rest) could happen during Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia? Steven Pinker’s comments on the need to defend dissenters and whistleblowers seems to explain “collective delusions”, which in turn could be the answer to the evil-on-a-grand-scale question: “You look at them retrospectively and you wonder, 'How could everyone have been so mad?' On top of being evil these ideas seem patently ludicrous. How can you have a collective delusion overtaking an entire society? And it looks like one o...