https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=5y3d2VZWohk
I was trying to understand why people did terrible things. And I was really concentrating on the terrible, terrible things that people do. And I was interested in Auschwitz, for example. And not as a political phenomenon, but as a psychological phenomenon. I was curious about how you could be an Auschwitz guard. And I wasn’t really curious about how you could be one, because, well, you could be one, of course. I was more curious about how I could be one, being such a good person, as I thought I was. But I also knew that people, many people, did many terrible things during the 20th century. And the idea that I was somehow better than them, or that I should assume a priori that I was better than them, and that I wouldn’t have made the same choices, or worse, had I been in the same situation, was a very, very, very dangerous supposition. And in fact, a sufficiently dangerous supposition to bring about the very danger that I assumed was worth avoiding. I had this idea that what had happened, especially in Nazi Germany, but also in the Soviet Union, shouldn’t happen again. That what we needed to do, because of what happened in the 20th century, especially because we also managed to create hydrogen bombs, and that we had become so technologically powerful that there wasn’t time for that anymore, that time for that was over, and that we really needed to understand why it happened, and that perhaps we could go deep enough in that understanding, which is, I think, what happens when you go deep into understanding, so that you could stop it. Because if you understand a problem, maybe you can solve it. And at least in part, I came to believe that the problem was, as Solzhenitsyn said, that the problem is that the line between good and evil runs down every human heart. And I was reading Jung at the same time, and he believed that the human soul was a tree whose roots grew all the way to hell, and believed also that in the full investigation of the shadow, which was the dark side of the human psyche, was that it was bottomless, essentially, that it was like an experience of hell, and that also struck me as true, and that the way to stop those sorts of things from happening was to stop yourself from being the sort of person who would do it, who would even start to do it. Because the other thing you learn when you learn about atrocities of that sort, you could read Ordinary Men, by the way, which is an unbelievably great study of exactly this sort of phenomenon. It’s on my book list on my website. It’s about a group of German policemen who were turned into brutal murderers over a period of months when they went behind, when they went into Poland after the Germans had marched through, and they were just ordinary middle-class men. And they weren’t forced into this by their leadership, by the way, either, which is one of the things that makes the book so interesting. So for me, it was a matter of understanding that if we want this sort of thing to not happen anymore, then we have to start to become the sort of people who wouldn’t do it, which seems rather self-evident, all things considered, unless you believe that we’re the pawns of social forces, for example, like the Marxists do. And I don’t believe that, because we’re also the creator of social forces. We were also capable of standing up to social forces, because I would say the individual is more powerful than the social force, all things considered, interestingly enough. That the way to stop such things from happening, the way to remember properly, is to understand that you could do it. That you could do those terrible things, because the people who did them were like you. And that the way out of that is to stop being like that. And the way you stop being like that is, well, at least in part, by stop, by ceasing to tell yourself lies that you don’t believe in, and that you know you shouldn’t act out.