The Nation-State of Collective Evil, When Normalcy Becomes Atrocity

“The sad truth is that most evil is done by people who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” - Hannah Arendt

“The line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?” - Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn

It is ingrained in us to look for a face to evil. A warlord covered in blood, a tyrant, a dishonest politician. We find it satisfying to think that the epidemic of cruelty will cease if such men are eliminated. T his is illusion. No single heart holds the most relentless types of evil. They are ingrained in the institutions, empires, and nations' machinery.

This is evident from history. Rome enslaved entire nations while providing its citizens with bread and entertainment. Murder was mechanized by the Third Reich with administrative accuracy. The United States exports wars, coups, and economic dominance under the guise of democracy, hiding its violence behind the rhetoric of democratic freedom. Armed and protected by American might, Israel has waged a relentless occupation of ethnic cleansing and murder against an indigenous Palestinian people refusing any independence including a sovereign nation, justifying its atrocities as self-defence. These aren't anomalies. They are the natural results of structures that incentivize exploitation, conquest, and destruction.

This is how systemic evil operates. No one person bears the entire burden of accountability. They only obeyed orders, soldiers tell themselves. Politicians say their actions were in the "national interest." The temptations of consumption, political demographic distance, and the comforts of wealth are used by citizens as excuses. However, the machine as a whole commits atrocities that no single antagonist could. This is how collective evil seduces people by disguising itself as normalcy. It assigns each participant a tiny, seemingly minor piece of responsibility. However, when combined, those pieces create cruel nations. The system we cannot readily see and our own complicity within it pose a greater threat than we can realize.