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What Creatures Like Trump And Jones Show Us About Human Nature
We like to pretend that certain individuals are atypical, but millions of ordinary people empower them to do great evil
In the Disneyesque simplifications taught in most history books and endlessly reinforced by mindless entertainments, evil appears in the form of some Machiavellian character who — miraculously — inflicts great horrors on millions of innocent people. Hitler is the go-to exemplar of this phenomenon, but more educated people also cite Trotsky, Stalin, Mao, and PolPot. In this comforting view, evil is perpetrated by atypical monsters while the rest of us remain nice decent ordinary people somehow caught up in their terrible schemes.
This view is of course absolute nonsense. Without millions of ordinary people eager to follow them and slavishly do their bidding, none of the aforementioned would have had any ability to inflict harm on anyone outside their immediate circle of acquaintances. And it’s no good pretending that representative democracy prevents such creatures rising to power: Hitler was, after all, elected in a thoroughly democratic manner. Also elected democratically in more recent times: Putin, Erdogan, Modi, Bolsonaro, Duterte, and of course the perpetually whining imbecile Trump.
