"Good" People do Terrible Things

"Wherefore let him that thinketh he stands take heed lest he fall." I Corinthians 10:12

People so often ask the wrong questions. When someone asks, “Why do bad things happen to good people?” I want to reply with a different question, “Why do good people do terrible things?”

This past week, I read a great piece by my online friend, Barry Brownstein. (I call him my online friend because I’ve actually never met him in person, but I do consider him a friend.)

In this piece he contrasted the life of George Washington with the life of Rudolf Hoss, the man tasked with carrying out Hitler’s “Final Solution,” and who lived with his family right outside the walls of Auschwitz. He quoted from Hoss’ own memoirs as the man awaited execution for his crimes. I’d highly recommend reading Barry’s piece here:

Are You a Servant of Tyranny or Liberty?

The striking thing about Hoss is that he was a good person. By anyone’s reckoning, he was a good person. He was a kind husband and father. The horrific job he performed caused him significant anguish, if we can take his own words seriously. Barry shared this quote from his memoirs,

Höss often watched Jews being loaded into the gas chambers and recalled how terrified mothers spoke “lovingly” to their children. He recalled, “Once a woman with four children, all holding each other by the hand…stepped very close to me and whispered, pointing to her four children, ‘How can you murder these beautiful, darling children? Don’t you have any heart?’”

Attempting to elicit sympathy for himself, Höss wrote he “had a heart” and explained he “had to appear cold and heartless during these events which tear the heart apart in anyone who had any kind of human feelings. I couldn’t even turn away when deep human emotion rose within me.”

These true stories always strike me with a large dose of terror. A good man, a kind man, a man described as a wonderful person by his own family, a man whose actions inflicted psychological pain on himself—went through with the slaughter of thousands and thousands of innocent men, women and children.

Why? Why do good people do awful, awful things?

How can I be sure I will never end my race, my life’s course, in the same way?

In Hoss’s case, he had the ability to put aside his own feelings and morality and obey orders that came down from the top. Though he admitted that what was being done was horrible, stomach-churning even, he believed it was necessary and had to be done.

People like us, who have never lived under an oppressive totalitarian regime, are often too quick to declare we would never “follow orders” in that way. But history is replete with atrocities carried out by regimes where only perhaps one to two percent of the population actively resisted in any way at all.

Most people will go along with whatever is deemed “necessary.” These people can usually be split into two groups. The first group are true believers. They’ve swallowed all the propaganda, hook, line and sinker, and are therefore the most dangerous. They will turn you in to the authorities and watch you burn without an ounce of remorse or like Hoss, do the necessary thing through tears. The second group just goes along out of fear. They know what’s happening is wrong, but they don’t want to lose everything, so they stay quiet and keep out of the way.

Before reading Barry’s piece I had been working my way through a Russian TV series called “The Red Queen,” very loosely based upon the life of Regina Zbarskaya, one of Russia’s first supermodels who rose to international prominence even before the communist regime fell. It was, not surprisingly, a depressing tale. The final sequence centers on Regina putting on her full face of cat walk makeup, donning a beautiful antique wedding dress given to her by a friend she’d abandoned, and sitting down at the dinner table to a plate covered in pills

What was so unique about this show was that it centered around the fashion industry and supermodels in Moscow—living in the lap of luxury compared to the rest of the country. Moscow was the showroom for how communism “worked.” Living conditions were pleasant, better food, better jobs, even little luxuries. After all, all the top party officials lived there, and they couldn’t be asked to live like the peasants starving and groveling in other areas of communist Russia. And yet…even there, the pervasive stench of communism permeated everything. Everyone watching everyone. The true believers carrying out the will of the party without a single doubt in their heads. The KGB catching citizens in minor infractions, threatening them with years of prison unless they turned informant for them, forcing them to come up with compromising information on colleagues and family members so they could then blackmail them into giving reports on their friends and colleagues and on and on and on. Suicide was the often unhappy end of these informants.

In communist Russia, no significant resistance ever arose that I’m aware of. Communism fell as a result of its own top-heavy, bloated incompetence and from outside pressure. Most people went along with the agenda for the two reasons I mentioned above…and were eventually punished anyway somehow. The rest went to prison or Siberia. Are we to conclude that the Russian people as a whole are peculiarly evil compared to the rest of the world? Of course not. Most of them were ordinary, fairly good people. The Red Queen portrayed that, as well. Even the tedious, communist, “true believer” characters had their moments of good will and fairness.

It’s just that “good people” do evil things all the time. Their good human traits like kindness and compassion don’t protect them from it…if they can be convinced that the evil thing is heartbreaking, but necessary.

During the Covid insanity, I saw this play out again in the US. The good people put on their masks. Even though they didn’t do a hills beans worth of good. All the studies prior to March 2020 showed this quite clearly. They obeyed orders and stayed home. When the hospitals made their loved ones die alone in terror, they didn’t storm the hospitals. They didn’t so much as protest. What did all the good people do? Another writer, Josh Slocum, put it so eloquently in his piece, Banishing Death Broke Our Minds,

I am not, obviously, the first person to notice this. Much has been written for more than 100 years about the modern terror of death and its consequences on our psyches and on how we live. But I tell you this: without this modern terror, the government’s oppressive reaction to the alleged pandemic could never have happened. It is our childish, desperately immature terror of death that softened us up to have our constitutional rights taken away, to have our businesses closed, to be forced to take dangerous injections, and to un-person our own families by re-making them as Vectors of Death and Doom.

We are not a sane people.

(The emphasis above is my own.)

“Good” people dehumanized their own flesh and blood. “Good” people didn’t let grandparents see brand new grandchildren for years after they were born. “Good” people shut their Covid-positive children in bedrooms, quickly passing food through the door like prison guards feeding inmates. “Good” people called the police on families playing at the park. “Good” people apprehended a person paddle boarding…all alone….in the ocean. “Good” people put school children in masks for a year or more, to keep the adults from getting sick. “Good” people made struggling employees choose between their livelihood and taking a vaccine without clear and accurate safety data.

“Good” people chased my mother around in a health food store because she wasn’t wearing a mask and made her leave. “Good” people made it hospital policy that only two people could visit a patient all day and couldn’t stay the night. When my dad struggled to recover from open heart surgery, eventually succumbing to complications, he was so lonely. The nights were long and frightening because none of us were allowed to stay with him through the night and hold his hand. When it was time for him to go to a rehab facility, we found that “good” people had put another policy in place. He had to be vaccinated for Covid or quarantine for two weeks after arriving. He needed that physical therapy badly, but he did not want the vaccine and we knew he would decline drastically in two weeks of isolation. So, we brought him home. Instead of improving, he died. Not of Covid or even with Covid. He never got Covid.

Good people. Good, compassionate, responsible people. Because it was necessary. It was going to keep everyone safe.

You are not immune from doing evil things just because you are thoughtful and considerate and loving.

I am not immune from doing evil things just because I’m thoughtful and considerate and loving.

I have spent years of my life pondering how I can be sure I don’t commit or cooperate with or even seethe angrily but remain silent at atrocities. I think I have a few solid ideas.

Never trust your own goodness, because it isn’t good enough. All the goodness in the world will not help you if you can’t see reality clearly. And there’s always someone out there with some great propaganda to help distort reality for you. At this very moment, a portion of the right wing is being re-propagandized by the same anti-semitic talking points the Nazis used. Almost word for word. At this very moment, a portion of the left wing is being re-propagandized by Marxist/Maoist/gnostic concepts that handed Eastern Block countries, North Korea, China and other countries over to totalitarian communist regimes and into starvation, grinding poverty, and killing fields.

Beg God to open your eyes so that you can see what is real and true. Satan is the great deceiver, the ultimate propagandist. He loves to bring shame to God’s name on earth by getting Christians on rabbit trails, stupid ideas, and doing evil things in the name of Christ.

Don’t be so sure. There are only a few things I’m truly sure of: Death, taxes, sin, the love of God, the virgin birth, the deity of Christ, Christ’s death, resurrection and second coming. This is not an exhaustive list, of course, but you get the picture. The rest are up for grabs. I could very well be wrong on an awful lot. Being too sure of ourselves leads to arrogance and pride. And pride leads to every other kind of evil.

So…

Never assume you wouldn’t do the worst thing you can think about given the right circumstances.

And then…

Trust God to deliver you from evil.

Because it is much better for evil to happen to you, than to be the person responsible for the evil.

That’s all for now. Until next time, folks…

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