Human history is marked by a relentless struggle for survival, often marred by violence and suffering. Caused, on the one hand, by the harsh reality of life. Cold and heat, food and water scarcity, predators, infections, and black plague among other hazards have been keeping humanity on its toes. It is not self-evident that humanity even got a chance to arrive at today. On the other hand, men and women were a danger for themselves. They stole, hurt, murdered, raged wars, and tortured. Men and women brought the horrors of the Holocaust, Gulags, China’s Great Leap Forward, Rwanda’s genocide of the Tutsis into reality, and it is not clear that they were commanded by any external force. The evil that animated Man throughout the 20th century came from his heart: how else could these shameful events otherwise have taken place?
Surely, the want to “belong”, as Hannah Arendt has it in her book the banality of evil, has been playing its role in convincing Man to torture and massively kill as well. Thus, Eichmann, to be recognized and accepted, became an extraordinarily organized and zealous administrator… of a concentration camp. This can be and has been applied in countless cases. This suggests that the potential for cruelty lies dormant within us all, waiting to be awakened.
Fear, power, and hierarchical structures are often cited as the driving forces behind the atrocities of the 20th century, and this argument holds considerable merit. What can one individual student possibly do against the whole nazi state? Or against the Stasi? Or against the Khmer Rouge? If you resist, your life and the one of your close friends may end very quickly, though after great sufferings. So, you have every reason not to revolt. Soldiers in Auschwitz must murder and torture because their sergeant ordered them to. If he did not comply, he might have been executed. The sergeant too had to follow orders “from above”, or else… Under such conditions, one might argue that evil was forced upon the soldiers. That it did not originate from them. This might be the best argument for evil being forced down upon Man.
However, monsters like Mengele in Auschwitz and Ishii Shiro at Unit 731 indeed walked the earth and actively engaged in cruelty. They were physicians, neither soldiers forced to serve in Auschwitz nor from the Gestapo. They were under less outside and hierarchical pressure than soldiers, but conducted nameless experiments such as boiling prisoners alive, hanging prisoners upside down to see how long it would take for them to choke to death, and sawing off a prisoner’s hands and switching them so that the left hand was reattached to the right arm. Just for the fun of it. One might respond that, in order to cope with the horrors they inflicted, the doctors and workers developed a dehumanizing and scientific reductionism mechanism. In fact, the semantic used at Unit 731 resembles the language of the Hutus during the Rwanda genocide in 1994. While the former laughed at “how many logs they downed in one day”, meaning people, often Chinese. The latter were encouraged by the radio to “cut down the tall trees”, meaning the Tutsis. Even though this idea can be applied in many cases, there is another theory, maybe more compelling, but simultaneously infinitely more terrifying: Mengele and Shiro, the Hutu population, the Ottoman Empire (against the Armenians), Nazis, and Communists among others tortured and murdered precisely because their victims were human. “The more a torturer humanizes their victims, the more pleasure they would feel: when kicking a rock, thinking about the rock’s pain brings no pleasure”.
Evil resides in all of us. Man and woman alike. There is no escape from it.
In the Bible, Adam and Eve became conscious of their own nakedness (and vulnerability) after eating the forbidden fruit. They also understood their own finitude, that they could be hurt and how they could be hurt. Ashamed and anxious, they hid and sewed fig leaves together and made coverings for themselves. However, through this new knowledge, they correspondingly knew that others could be hurt and how. Because it drew them out of their childlike state, the fruit was the seed of evil, but also of good. A killer whale playing with its halfdead seal does not understand it is causing harm and pain. Among other reasons, it is because the killer whale is not conscious of its own finitude. A Gestapo member torturing Jean Moulin knew perfectly well what he was doing. And this is what makes it so terrifying. By contrast, a doctor, in order to heal, needs to know what hurts. This is what makes it so beautiful.
Few have entered the darkness of nazi concentration camps or gulags and survived it. Among them great writers such as Alexandr Solzhenitsyn and Primo Levi or celebrated politicians such as Simone Veil. Others such as Mahatma Ghandi, Martin Luther King, or Nelson Mandela have lived through another kind of Hell: oppression, racism, and colonialism. These great men and women have witnessed first hand the horrors Man is capable of. They have watched their friends and family get killed, jailed , tortured for arbitrary and wrong reasons. They recognized the evil inhabiting Man, but most importantly their own proclivity to evil.
They saw the roots of human soul reach down to Hell. And it looks as if it is precisely because of this that they seem to be able to reach the divine. One through writings, the other through politics. All through peacefull means, trying to make the world a better place because they know what another possible option might look like. Besides, since they know how to hurt most, they also know most how to do good. Doing good presupposes to understand what harms. However, understanding the evil side of human nature, without giving in to it, is heroic. Often roots get burned as they approach Hell. But if, for some reason, they survive, the foundations become unshakeable and the tree may grow to Heaven. This is why the sublime is so rare.
