I told you once that I was searching for the nature of evil. I think I’ve come close to defining it: a lack of empathy. It’s the one characteristic that connects all the defendants. A genuine incapacity to feel with their fellow man. Evil, I think, is the absence of empathy.
Captain G.M. Gilbert
The army psychologist assigned to interview the Nazis at the Nuremberg trials.
A list of options has been previously catalogued.
I’ll grant you it’s easier to daydream about violence.
Latvia is very excited about Flow’s success. It’s all over Latvians social media. Even the military official accounts are posting their congratulations.
The yard spray folks come around every spring offering me a deal because they are spraying all my neighbor’s yards. I’m the only yard with lighting bugs in the neighborhood.
A Silent Spring was supposed to be a warning, not a how-to.
I realized part way through the title works on a few levels. It was refreshing to realize this wasn’t remotely following the 3-act narrative structure and I had no idea what was happening next.
Gilbert himself didn’t seem sure he had a complete definition, just a critical piece of it. As a psychologist he would have understood sociopathy well, among other psychological maladies. He seems to be making a distinction here, but that is my reading of him. If he could have provided a diagnosis that underpinned becoming a Nazi it would have been a bombshell, but they all seemed rather normal under a battery of tests. Instead of a specific diagnosis, the Banality of Evil became the commonly cited mechanism behind the Nazi’s abhorrent acts. Weak men following vile leaders.
After thinking about Gilbert’s quote I have come to conclude a lack of empathy is a necessary, if not sufficient condition for evil. There may be more to it, but this piece is already enough to oppose evil, and challenging on its own.