Understanding Society
Why Do Good People Turn Bad?
EDITORIAL INTRODUCTION
George Orwell’s ‘Looking Back on the Spanish War’ records the instant a half-dressed enemy became a fellow human: ‘A man who is holding up his trousers isn’t a Fascist.’ Drawing on Rutger Bregman’s Humankind: A Hopeful History, Doug connects that hesitation to military historian John Keegan’s account of Waterloo and the Somme, where fewer than one percent of recorded injuries were caused by bayonets.
A Note on the Original Text
Doug’s writings are presented as originally written. Spelling, punctuation, and grammatical irregularities have been retained to preserve his words and the integrity of the original record.
ORIGINAL WRITING
The content in this post is based on the book Humankind: A Hopeful History by Rutger Bregman.
So, why do good people turn bad?
I think we can now start to frame an answer. In the Second World War, the soldiers of the Wehrmacht fought first and foremost for each other. Most were motivated not by sadism or a thirst for blood, but by comradeship.
Once in combat, we’ve found that soldiers still find it hard to kill. In the Pacific, Colonel Marshall realized that the majority of soldiers never fired their guns. During the Spanish Civil War George Orwell noticed the same thing, when one day he found himself overpowered by empathy:
At this moment a man jumped out of a trench and ran along the top of the parapet in full view. He was half-dressed and was holding up his trousers with both hands as he ran. I refrained from shooting at him. I did not shoot partly because of that detail about the trousers. I had come here to shoot at ‘Fascists’; but a man holding up his trousers isn’t a ‘Fascist’, he is visibly a fellow creature, similar to yourself, and you don’t feel like shooting at him.
There’s even one thing even harder to do than shoot, military historians have discovered: stabbing a human being. Less than one% of injuries during the battles at Waterloo (1815) and the Somme (1916), for instance were caused by soldiers wielding bayonets. So all those thousands of bayonets displayed in hundreds of museums? Most were never used. As one historian notes ‘one side or the other usually recalls an appointment elsewhere before bayonets cross.