by Allister John Marran
Imagine an individual who truly believes that someone's intelligence or worth is based solely on how closely their skin colour and values reflect their own.
Imagine a soul who continually needs to devalue others' religion or creed or culture in order to validate their own self worth and superiority.
Imagine a person who gets triggered by LGBTQ rights when it literally doesn't affect them in any way.Imagine someone who champions the cause of the safe and wealthy few by painting them as the real victims of every woe in the world.
Imagine an activist who spends an inordinate amount of their free time searching for and sharing fake news so that they no longer feel alone in their crazy conspiracy theories, putting others at risk.
Imagine a citizen so out of touch that they brazenly suggest that healthcare and education are the sole domain of those who can afford it, and those born poorer should die or be denied it.
Imagine a character who espouses the values of a divine deity who was sinless and blameless, and then chose the most sinful, terrible mortal to platform, revere and lead them to their promised land.
Imagine a being whose core motivation is hatred and fear.
You do not need to imagine any of these people. You just need to scroll through a select few of my Facebook friends' posts to see how ill-informed, un-enlightened, angry and crazy some have become.
You do not need someone born evil for evil to live. You just need to find someone with a tiny bit of insecurity, introduce a few smatterings of fear into their already anxious minds, and let social media algorithms do the rest.
They can go from calm and friendly Betty or Bob to raving lunatic conspiracy-toting-White-power-saluting-angry-uncle in a matter of weeks.
I am shocked by what I read on social media, quite frankly by people who should know better. Some are highly educated, influential people who have become trapped down the rabbit hole with no way out, and their insane posts and shares are equal parts disturbing and sad, from the mind of someone who has completely lost control, and all sense of logic and rationality.
'We live under continual threat of two equally fearful, but seemingly opposed, destinies:' wrote Hanna Arendt, reporting for The New Yorker on the war crimes trial of Adolph Eichmann, 'unremitting banality and inconceivable terror.' She followed up with a shocking thesis: evil is banal.
Banal? It cannot be, wrote psychologists S. Alexander Haslam and Stephen D. Reicher, in The Psychologist. Such crimes cannot be committed by ordinary people.
Yet this is the dynamic. Great evil is not born of grand designs. It is born of fiddling philosophical missteps.
I always wondered why the average German did not say no to Nazism, why the KKK took root so easily in the South, why South African Whites tolerated a deeply unpopular National Party government, or how the Taliban drums up such widespread support on the ground.
Who supports such extremist organisations? Who spreads their crazy rhetoric? Who?
It could be you.
