The Problem With Normalized Evil Is That It Appears Normal to Normal People.

One of the things that the New York law should do is to cause the Church to seek clarity.

 I used to think that the human conscience, being, as Charles Spurgeon once described it, “the candle of the Lord,” would ultimately lead a person right if they followed it. I no longer believe that.

While it is true that the conscience drives us in the direction of moral rectitude the reality is that it can be co-opted and subverted into endorsing evil when that evil is plausibly presented to it as a positive good, through the means of a narrative in which the actual bad guys are cast in the role of good guys, victims, heroes, and so on, and the good guys or neutral guys are cast in the role of villains, persecutors, devils, etc.

If such a false story is believed by the person, the conscience can really embrace it, even if in reality the narrative is actually a dangerous, even monstrous lie. And then once the person takes the additional step of actually acting on the belief, actually committing the evil they have believed to be a good, it becomes much more difficult for them to entertain evidence that the narrative they have bought into and acted upon was a lie. 

It’s important to understand that the initial violation involved in promoting evil through false narratives of the kind I am describing is the seduction of innocent person into false belief, which if persisted in will leads to complicity in the evil itself when the person either promotes the false story take action on the basis of the false belief and indulges in the evil themselves .

The false narratives of course include a number of embedded excuses as to why the practice of the evil is really justifiable and even good and the narratives achieve their purpose when the actions they promote ultimately become normalized in a society. 

So far we can agree with Peter Berger that “truth” is socially constructed in a sense, but in order to get the full picture we have to understand as well that “socially constructed truth,” in other words things taken for granted to be by a whole society from CEO to cab drivers, can be and have often been utterly false and derive from the process of normalization I have described. 

When we think about evil actions we very often want to attribute them to people who are somehow different than us, people who are inherently prone to doing evil in a way that we ourselves are not prone to it. The problem is that process of normalization of evil by the means of the subversion of individual consciences undergirded by the support of the subverted collective conscience through evil-justifying false narratives makes things more complicated. 

So here’s the punch line: The problem with socially normalized evil is that engaging in it, promoting it, seems normal to otherwise normal people, decent ordinary people who are honest, generous, sincere, nice, fastidious in fulfilling their social and personal responsibilities, even pious. The do evil not because the want to be evil but because they want to be good.