Are some people just bad people?
My default answer is no, partly out of my general aversion to binary thinking (we’re complicated, which means there are no good people either). This view is also in alignment with my spiritual values, aspirational though they may be. I want to embody love. I want to assume there is good in everyone, that we are all flawed but trying our best.
But then sometimes people make it so hard for me to think this way.
Take the recent story about how Tesla systematically ghosted customers seeking service for problems related to range and battery life. The backstory is that Tesla probably overstated the range of their cars in order to boost sales. That in itself is not surprising, but the lie was not limited to marketing hype. Tesla also apparently rigged the on-board vehicle software to exaggerate the range estimates drivers actually see. Then when customers began to notice discrepancies, Tesla organized a “diversion team” for the express purpose of cancelling owners’ service appointments.
A detail from the story that stood out for me was how at one location, Tesla employees would strike a xylophone to celebrate each cancellation. At another location, employees reportedly danced on their desks each time they dodged a customer. Without these kinds of details, it’s easy to keep saying Tesla did this or Tesla did that. That’s the common frame for this sort of thing. But “Tesla” didn’t do any of it. Tesla didn’t lie in their marketing or rig the vehicle software. Tesla didn’t create a diversion team or strike a xylophone or dance on desks. People did all of those things.
I tell this story about Tesla though it is hardly notable, since nobody died (the Tesla autopilot scandal is a different story) nor suffered devastating financial losses. Nonetheless it’s a story of people behaving badly, where we can judge their acts unequivocally, and nothing at all excuses the behavior.
Another reason it’s hardly notable is that there is a corporate or institutional scandal every other day. I’m talking about injustices we don’t hear about much because they are just routine, like how cops all around the country overwhelmingly target brown and black people with ticky-tack traffic stops to boost their own performance numbers or fill city coffers (we hear only about the incidents that escalate into violence or death). Or consider all the people working in health insurance or for-profit healthcare who are involved in rejecting claims without even reviewing them or literally dumping patients out in the streets.
Bigger scandals make the news, like how predatory lenders played a big part in triggering the 2008 financial crisis. Or much more recently, how scores of people from the powerful Sackler family all the way down to small town doctors have helped fuel the opioid epidemic. And then I still feel sick with anger and sadness when I think about the family separations at the U.S.-Mexico border that were carried out under the Trump administration, an unthinkably cruel policy that continues to impact families.
As an aside, I understand it might feel like a stretch to include run-of-the-mill corporate cheating in the same short list of examples as the opioid epidemic and family separations. To be clear, I don’t equate these things, nor would I argue that a slippery slope links them. They are vastly different in degree, but I think they are the same in kind in the sense that they happen through inexcusable actions of individual people. In the discourse around these things, people point to systemic failures or systemic corruption or bad incentive structures. I always picture the human beings up and down the chain who make decisions and act. The impact of systemic problems doesn’t absolve them.
But is it evil? Yes, in a way. I posit that a lot of it is precisely the sort of banality of evil / Eichmann in Jerusalem / just following orders stuff that Hannah Arendt wrote about. That at least explains how bureaucrats and software developers and middle managers hurt other people who barely exist for them, who exist only as nameless, faceless abstractions. That feels like a subversion of nature, the absence of the capacity to imagine other people as people. It’s depressing because it is so ordinary.
And then there is another kind of evil that sometimes surfaces through these same pathways, a kind I can’t fathom as easily.
Some years ago in Berlin, I visited the holocaust memorial and museum. Part of one gallery was devoted to what’s known as the holocaust by bullets. I remember one photo that showed a German soldier aiming his rifle down into a wide trench, ready to kill a whole group of mostly women and children. Here was a bureaucracy devoted to genocide, but here was also one man pointing his rifle at cowering women and children, with the choice and the power to end their lives, or not, without any personal connection or animosity towards them at all. Imagine the sights and the sounds and the smells of that moment. What went through his mind as he stood there?
There are many holocaust stories about horrific individual acts. A German officer offhandedly murders a little girl who makes too much of a fuss while being separated from her mother at a train station. A regular family man joins a mob and throws stones at his neighbors. Etc etc.
There are similarly horrific stories from every genocide and from the era of African slavery of course. Very recent stories from the U.S.-Mexico border feel of a kind as well. Each family separation for example involved not only distant bureaucrats who drafted policy but also the agents on the ground who physically pulled wailing children away from mothers. Imagine doing that.
We sometimes explain these kinds of acts as failures to see the humanity of other people. We have a word for it: dehumanize. This makes sense up to a certain level of sadistic cruelty, and then maybe it does not, as Paul Bloom observed in a book review some years back, using some incidents from the holocaust to illustrate the point:
The Jews who were forced to scrub the streets—not to mention those subjected to far worse degradations—were not thought of as lacking human emotions. Indeed, if the Jews had been thought to be indifferent to their treatment, there would have been nothing to watch here; the crowd had gathered because it wanted to see them suffer. The logic of such brutality is the logic of metaphor: to assert a likeness between two different things holds power only in the light of that difference. The sadism of treating human beings like vermin lies precisely in the recognition that they are not.
The common thread that ties all of this together is the irrational, unmotivated nature of the bad behavior and evil acts. The perpetrators are in most cases ordinary, recognizably normal, frighteningly relatable sometimes. They aren’t damaged, toxic, acting out. And they have no particular grievance, no personal animosity towards their victims.
There’s no story we can formulate where any of it makes sense. There’s no way to explain it to ourselves in human terms. And because there’s no narrative frame for the evil act, it feels there’s no available redemption story either. Ultimately I don’t know how to answer the question of whether some people are just bad people, because these kinds of acts feel so inexplicable. I’m unsettled by anything I can’t even begin to explain to myself.