THE PSHYLOGY OF EVIL: SITUATED CHARACTER TRANSFORMATIONS

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1. We attempt to search for an idea that will separate good people from bad people, to essentialize evil pointing bad tyrants in our era. We are talking about the contradiction between the church and the state, talking about ideologies which stand in both sides of evil and good.
   1. The bad apple: is it the apple that is rotten, is it the barrel, or is it the barrel maker. It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable.
   2. It is when power is wedded to chronic fear that it becomes formidable. — Eric Hoffer, The Passionate State of Mind The Power to Create "The Enemy"
2. We live in the "mass murder century." More than 50 million people have been systematically murdered by government decrees, enacted by soldiers and civilian forces willing to carry out the kill orders.
   1. A report by the United Nations estimates that be- tween 800,000 and a million Rwandans were murdered in about three months' time, making the massacre the most ferocious in recorded history.
   2. Japanese soldiers butchered between 260,000 and 350,000 Chinese civil ians in just a few bloody months of 1937. Those figures represent more deaths than the total annihilation caused by the atomic bombing of Japan and all the civilian deaths in most European countries during all of World War 2.
   3. Soviet Red Army soldiers raped an estimated 100,000 Berlin women toward the end of Word War II and between 1945 and 1948. In addition to the rapes and murders of more than 500 civilians at the My Lai massacre in 1968, recently released secret Pentagon evidence de- scribes 320 incidents of American atrocities against Vietnamese and Cambodian civilians.
3. "Men are not prisoners of fate, but only prisoners of their own minds," said President Franklin Roosevelt. Prisons are metaphors for constraints on freedom, both literal and symbolic.
   1. The Stanford Prison Experiment went from initially being a symbolic prison to becoming an all-too-real one in the minds of its prisoners and guards. What are other self-imposed prisons that limit our basic freedoms? Neurotic disorders, low self-esteem, shyness, prejudice, shame, and excessive fear of terrorism are just some of the chimeras that limit our potentiality for freedom and happiness, blinding our full appreciation of the world around us.
   2. Power said to the world, "You are mine." The world kept it prisoner on her throne. Love said to the world, "I am thine." The world gave it the freedom of her house. — Rabindranath Tagore, Stray Birds"