The line dividing good and evil runs not between groups of people but through every human heart.
Solzhenitsyn wrote it in The Gulag Archipelago (1973), reflecting that if evil people were somewhere apart, it would be enough to separate them and destroy them, but the line cuts through everyone. He drew it from his own experience as a Soviet officer and then as a prisoner.
In practice
- A truth commission finds that many of those who informed on their neighbours were ordinary people under pressure.
- A manager who despises office bullies finds, under deadline, that she has become one.
- Possible explanations
- One explanation is situational: circumstances shape behaviour more than character does. Another is moral: the capacity for both good and evil is universal.
- In its favour
- Consistent with research on situational pressure, such as the Milgram obedience studies, and cited across the political spectrum as a warning against dividing the world into good and evil camps.
- Against it
- Critics argue it can blur real moral differences between perpetrators and victims, and some of the situational research it is paired with, such as the Stanford prison experiment, has not held up.
- Standing
- Compare the Milgram obedience studies.
- Subject
- Psychology & Behavior
- Essay
- Moralists, aphorists and the self-help tradition