Self Deception

Last Sunday evening, my husband and I attended a screening of a live performance of Good, a play about the Holocaust by British playwright, C.P. Taylor. It was both astonishing and disturbing. There were only three actors – David Tennant, who played the protagonist, Professor John Halder, who gradually turns from a liberal minded man in 1933, whose best friend was a Jew, into a high-ranking member of Hitler’s SS. The other two actors were Elliot Levey and Sharon Small, who both played multiple characters, without changing their clothes or leaving the stage. It was a tour de force of brilliant acting, against one, very minimalist set. And, like I said, very disturbing. It demonstrated superbly how the slow drip, drip of evil propaganda can change someone’s opinions, while still enabling them to justify their actions to themselves as “one of the good guys”.

I don't believe in evil as an independent power in the world. No-one is born evil - there is no such thing as original sin. I believe that every human being has the power to choose between good and evil. However, the choices that each person makes will set them on a path towards a life filled with good deeds or evil ones, and the farther one walks along the chosen path, the harder it is to turn aside. As the Native Americans believe, "it depends which wolf you feed." C.P. Taylor’s play was a brilliant and chilling illustration of this in action.

I have to believe that there is a divine spark "that of God" in everyone, but perhaps those people we call evil choose to ignore its promptings. There are many degrees of evil; for example, I do not believe that the majority of German people during Hitler's Reich chose evil consciously, although the dyed in the wool Nazis certainly seem to have done. But the Nazi propaganda machine awakened the latent anti-Semitism in many German hearts, giving them someone to blame for their hard lives, and enabling them to believe its lies, and close their eyes to what was going on.

The Nazis were obsessed by an ideal: the supremacy of the Herrenvolk, the German race, and the elimination of all others. And this ideal led to death and destruction on a large scale. It seems that if we allow ourselves to become obsessed by an ideal, it skews our judgement and corrupts our reason. If we idealise something or somebody, we don't see it / them straight. Examples of this are littered throughout history.

I believe that it is only by the exercise of compassion, by being open to the hearts and minds of others, by recognising that each of us is "unique, precious, a child of God", that the closed mind and consequent intolerance can be avoided. Because the problem has not gone away. Intolerance is alive and well in our society. If we are not careful, we can fall into judgement and “othering”, seeing other people as somehow less than we are ourselves. It can lead to all sorts of -isms: sexism, racism, homophobia.

Why do we do this to ourselves, to each other? We are all human beings, each one unique, each one worthy of love and justice and respect, each one with unique gifts to offer the world. Or that is what I believe...