It is a question as old as time, as old as Genesis with Eve, the serpent and the apple. For millennials our answer to that question was pretty simplistic; people do bad things because they are evil. That was never an answer for me, especially when I learned that someone that I had put on a pretty unrealistic pedestal ended up being a pedophile. Hence, my interest in social psychology which studies how people behave in groups and also explains a whole lot about human assholery.

The 20th century gave social psychologists plenty to study; bolsheviks brought down the tsar to install Lenin, Stalin and a communist utopia without jails…just to be thrown in the gulag by Stalin. Mao pulled a similar fast one in China with his Cultural Revolution. Nazis famously sent millions to extermination camps to pass their post WW1 rage, surviving jews went on to Palestine and commited genocide against the people who lived there. Great ideal like democracy and liberty themselves were used by the americans to invade Iraq and Afghanistan. (It started twenty years ago and we just stopped kidding ourselves about it last august!) and here, children were abused In a word, psychologists and philosophers like Stanley Milgram, Hannah Arendt and Philip Zimbardo got plenty to work with.

My two cents on this? In order to do great evil, people must first believe in great good, an ideal: nation, God, liberty, democracy, civilization itself. There’s nothing wrong about having an ideal, we need that for motivation!
…but goddamit, sometimes we need to ask ourselves “am I the villain here?”