Are you evil?

Popular media profits from the notion that evil stems from the Other: the Monster, the Psychopath, the Immigrant.

It’s a convenient lie, one that helps us avoid facing the rather uncomfortable reality.

I’ve been lucky enough to travel to lots of places, working with interesting people – sometimes in companies that you might consider to be evil. But, oddly, I have only ever come across good people – people who are trying to do the right thing. In the words of Ernst Becker ‘everyone is the hero in their own story.’

So where does evil come from?

In July 1961 Stanley Milgram began one of the most controversial experiments in the history of psychological research. Post war there was much speculation on the evils of Nazism, and whether it stemmed from some fundamental flaw in the German character.

But Milgram found you could take anyone – your average American – and, under the influence of an authority figure, bring them to the point where they would follow orders to execute another human being. All in the space of a couple of hours. You and I, it turns out, are all capable of unspeakable evil.

People didn’t like that idea. They preferred the good guy/bad guy narrative that Hollywood feeds us.

But the truth is that evil is not the product of evil people, it is the product of good people doing as they are told. It is the result of organisations, and obedience, and bureaucracy. More often than not evil is done simply by people following the rules, rather than their hearts. It is not even that the rules are evil - quite often their original intent was benign.

So the answer to the rhetorical question ‘are you evil?’ is ‘Of course not. You are a good person. Just like everyone else.’

But being a good person is not enough to stop us doing evil things; sometimes the right thing to do is not to do as we are told.