We Are All Monsters

David Chapman wrote about this, and reading helped me come to terms with my own monstrosity. Perhaps it will help you make peace with yours.

From the essays:

We like to think that “evil” is something that people—and monsters—are, or aren’t. But this is mistaken. Only actions, not persons, can be good or evil.

Most people­—ones we’d want to call “good”—will commit horrific acts when put under sufficient emotional pressure. Do you know about Stanley Milgram’s torture experiment? He showed that two thirds of ordinary Americans would torture other ordinary Americans to death—ones they believed to be entirely innocent. The torture and deaths were faked, but the experimental subjects believed that they had killed another person, simply because Milgram told them they had to. This is horrifying and almost unbelievable; but the experiment has been replicated several times (in other countries too), and appears to be accurate.

I think we each have a moral obligation to ask “would I have been one of the two thirds who chose to kill—or one of the third who refused?” Most people would immediately answer that of course they would have done the right thing—but the experiment shows that most people are wrong. So we need to be much less confident about the answer.

It is easy to act ethically in good conditions. When we feel threatened or confused, humans can become unboundedly destructive.

Pretending this is not true makes the problem worse. It is only when we acknowledge that maybe we would have tortured an innocent person to death, in Milgram’s experiment, that we can start the transformational work to make that less likely.

The most dangerous monsters are those who believe they are moral people. Because they believe monstrosity is alien (somewhere else, those bad people), “moral people” are capable of rationalizing horrifying acts of cruelty, which must be OK because “we are not monsters.”

Monsters who know they are monsters are harder to threaten or confuse. No werewolf would have cooperated with Milgram; they would simply have eaten him.

Go here for the full thing.