Rationales for Evil Behavior

In the move The Godfather (Parts One and Two), both Vito Corleone and his son Michael explicitly and repeatedly laid out the rationale for their criminal behavior: anything goes, as long as it is for the sake of their family. And yet, despite this, they only succeeded in destroying their family! In Cuba, the rationale for the Communist revolution there has always been to protect their people from economic exploitation from capitalists. And yet, until just recently, Cubans were prohibited by law from even buying and selling simple appliances!

In most instances of people openly doing bad things to others, the perpetrators rationalize their actions by either portraying themselves as victims (entitled to redress) or protectors of some other supposedly victimized party. Look at the actions of Al-Qaeda under Bin-Laden over the past few years as they “protect” Muslims from Western nations and culture. And who have been their chief victims? Muslims!

Speaking of current events, our current President has kept our country mired in a prohibitively expensive conflict in Iraq for the past five years, with no end in sight. Done ostensibly to protect us within the context of the “War on Terror”, the Iraq War, besides causing more than 4000 American deaths and many more injuries, has caused our government to borrow money at interest from other nations (some who do not have our interests in their hearts) to fund itself and the war. And it distracted us from going after the root cause of 9/11: Al-Qaeda under Bin-Laden. Was President Bush evil when he launched the war in 2003? No, but his overeagerness for the war back then, along with his stubborn refusal to ever admit to a mistake, has put us in this sorry state of affairs today.

In the previous examples (fictional or real), those responsible for rationalizing their aggressive behavior toward others had a great deal of support by many at the beginning. But over time, people gradually came to see each of them for what they were: cynical exploiters who cared little, if at all, for those on whose behalf they were pretending to act. As a matter of fact, in each of these examples, the “leaders” without exception regarded themselves as being in a socially-superior class, far above those whom they purported to serve.