So..beware to just cast it aside so nonchalantly?
Interesting...?

@Howitstarts23 This is long, but it’s an interesting subject for me.
So, most people think they have a clear idea of who they are and what their core values are, and think these things are permanent. However, contrary to people’s own views about themselves, many things humans regard as fixed parts of our personality are for most, very susceptible to change under environmental or circumstantial change.

For example a normal boy who is a college football player may, in other circumstances, use his team playing and leadership skills to pull others in intimidation and pack behavior, if he is given free range and power as a leader. We see this during military and fraternity hazing.

During civil conflicts, neighbors may rape and kill each other, once the ethnic or ideological difference has risen to a point where their former neighbor is othered and then dehumanized. People who would not normally hate and kill will do so if they feel threatened or become disgusted by another group, under extreme duress. This happened in Rwanda and Kosovo.

Othering and dehumanizing people a very sure way to bring out the evil part of our ourselves. That is what happened during Abu Ghraib.

At Abu Graib Prison, Iraq, young and inexperienced officers were left in charge of Iraqi POWs. Under the stress of war, and because they were environmentally unstimulated, they made up games during their boredom and confinement. The officers began to use creative ways to punish the people in their charge. The leader, with the support of the pack eventually took the games and creative punishments to the point of degradation, sexual humiliation and torture of the POWs, as evidenced by the pictures.

The prisoners were first seen as enemy combatants, so were othered from the beginning. As the conditions worsened and became less hygienic for the prisoners, they became more “disgusting” in the eyes of the officers, and in turn, this intensified the resentment and hatred felt by the officers. At that point that the officers saw the prisoners as subhuman.

Pack behavior, hierarchy and the bonding of the officers prevented “snitching” or other reporting of the abuse.

In this case, the agents of bullying and evil were previously reported to be kind, loving and of good moral character. They would never had done anything like this at home. Yet, in an Iraqi jail, in war time, they were not in a normal environment and did not behave as their normal selves - the conditions brought about their monsterous sides.
When the abuse was uncovered by a very senior officer and reported to US authorities a case was brought against 9 officers.

The families of these young officers were in absolute shock. Their loving daughter or son left for Iraq as good kids. Even the 9 defendants themselves couldn’t quite comprehend how far they took things and were deeply ashamed or did not recognize themselves looking back during their trials.

This is why we must be alert to the change in the conditions around us and to othering. Humans will always adapt to conditions around them, sometimes those adaptations will be evil.

Here is a list of conditions that I can think of where ordinary human evil can arise. There are probably more:
-Pack/mob behavior
-Being under threat
-Being under consistent abuse
-Extreme and enforced poverty
-Abuse of power in leadership
-The covering up of errors, deviant behavior or loss of control.
-Intentionally and unintentionally bad group dynamics
-Confinement
-Tone and intention during system set up
-Othering and dehumanization
-Group think
-Control of the narrative and abuse of information

I believe that sometimes these conditions converge, making the possibility of evil inevitable or sustained (and I see a great deal of these conditions converging right now).

I realize that not everyone is malleable. Some people have incredible integrity and will resist, but they are the outliers, not the standard.

It’s my view that we must always be alert to our own integrity and notice how we compromise to conditions or are pulled in by others, because that’s where everyday, mundane human evil is brought to the fore.

My mother taught me to understand this, after she had lived through WW2. Many ordinary Germans, French, Italians etc. thought Hitler was good, and right. They helped with the forced removal of Jews. They were not evil before the war, they didn’t hate their Jewish neighbors previously, but nevertheless they joined the push against the Jewish people. They began calling their former friends names. They boycotted their businesses. It started slowly and snowballed. Among the British, Hitler’s ideas were embraced by former colonialists who believed in racial superiority etc. His ideas were embraced by Europe and 8 million people died in the holocaust, 6 million of these people were Jewish. The others were Roma, gays, the disabled, socialists, and dissidents. Anyone who thinks that kind of evil is relative or a concept, or a silly word, can kiss my fat arse.
Un-supernatural , and ordinary human evil is always a possibility under the “right” circumstances. Read Hannah Arendt “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil”
[g.co]

@Livia are you a teacher of the subject?? That was comprehensively insightful-enjoyed reading it !

@Howitstarts23
Hi, thank you! I am a teacher but not on this subject. I like history, politics, philosophy, stuff like that.
What is interesting to me, is how evil begins, and it begins with people really pushing back on realizing it is part of them. Always be vigilant to your environment and how that influences your behavior!

Wow, great stuff. I like the the correlation between lack empathy!

Nope, he is definitely evil and has created an evil administration around him that is literally tearing families apart. What do you call putting children in cages? Sort of bad? Not a good thing? No! It’s pure evil.

That’s a good distinction

That was an interesting experiment, wonder how it would turn out if repeated today

@Howitstarts23 it can’t ever be repeated in the USA, as these days it would fail every criteria for ethical research standards. However you can see the experiment’s result played out daily in schools, prisons, hospitals, mental health facilities old people’s homes etc. I think it is one of the most important pieces of research ever done, and while most people know the general premise, it’s the detail and the speed of the deterioration of moral norms that is most instructive. Everyone should understand that book to avoid unconscious participation in evil activities.

Tell that to the innocent people tortured in Abu Ghraib. Pain inflicted by people for fun or pleasure isn’t relative for the person on the receiving end. Or the children murdered at St. Joseph’s Orphanage by nuns. The Catholic Church is a very good example of structural evil.

That's not evil. That's shitty people doing shitty things.
AND you utilize the catholic church as an example? It's a pedophile ring. Riddled with psychopaths and sociopaths.
And how am I supposed to say anything to dead people?
Move along now. You're far too emotional to have a conversation with about this subject.