October 7th

The victims included babies, mutilated. Young girls, visibly bloodied from rape. More young girls, shot dead in front of their even younger siblings — forced to watch. Pensioners savaged, left lying in pools of each other’s blood. Families burned alive. Grandparents whose own phones were used to record their brutal slayings, with the resulting videos then posted to their Facebook pages for family members to later find. Hundreds of young people executed and raped at a music festival; a hundred villagers butchered in a Kibbutz; Holocaust survivors annihilated. The horrors are unspeakable, but the list goes on, and this is but a tiny, tiny accounting of the atrocities.

I’ve been attempting to understand the motivations of the thousands of people who cheered and celebrated outside the Israeli embassy in London last night, as a ~thousand civilians lay murdered on the other side of the world.

Such an animalistic response from directly impacted individuals can be attributed to anger-induced derangement, resulting in the suspension of empathy and a dehumanization of the victims. For some, last night may have been a shameful one-off moment of madness, but for others it will have represented a rare public chance to express their true, omnipresent genocidal hatred for Jewry, and only last night did they feel emboldened enough to show their true colors. Now they know who one another are, as if they didn’t already and society hadn’t just tolerated their unhinged views, a dangerous situation exists whereby such individuals will now be able to coordinate more easily, legitimize one another’s violent fantasies, and reinforce their compassionless hatred. Terrible as that is, these are not the people I want to consider today. Instead, it is the participation of “intellectual” bystanders who willingly participate in such a mob —many of them young, middle-class activists and left-wing university students —which prevented me from falling asleep last night.

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How evil arises

Every time I have been to the Topographie des Terrors in Berlin I have left shocked. I am reminded of how the Nazis ascended to power, and the kind of popular support they commanded from all sorts of people and unexpected quarters of society. I leave shocked because I am uncertain whether (had I been a citizen of Germany at the time) I would have been able to see what was going on, and have possessed the moral absolutism required to avoid being swept up by the attractive promise of a united people working across all class divides to achieve a shared, common purpose.

Few in the moment ever wonder if maybe they are “the irrational one”, “the gullible one”, or “perhaps enabling pure evil”, because there’s rarely one single big decision that leads people to a terrible dark place… only a slow fading of light as they find themselves further and further from civilization.

Propaganda for even the most obviously evil causes is often overwhelmingly optimistic, promising moral origins, superiority, secret knowledge, and a better future. It appeals to people not who think of themselves as the bad guys, but as enlightened individuals. It plays on legitimate frustrations, and excites people to be a part of a movement for change and betterment that is bigger than just themselves. Extremely few operations of mass evil are in fact self-interested endeavors. Almost all promise something much greater than personal reward.

Almost nobody is inherently or intentionally evil. Instead, their values, beliefs, and good nature are exploited — whether malignly by bad influences — or unwittingly through vicious cycles, undirected but nevertheless present within complex social systems.

But evil does exist, and it is perpetrated by good people all the time. For example, when marching on the streets in a mob of thousands, descending upon the doorstep of people who have just been subjected to terrorism, as part of a crowd that collectively cheers and jeers as a ~thousand civilians lie dead; their murders with axes, hammers, knives, fire, guns, grenades and bare hands streamed proudly for all the world to see. There is no accidentally evading exposure to these horrors. There is no claiming ignorance. One actually has to look away.

On Saturday, Hamas sought a holocaust. For attendees of the London march on Israel’s embassy, there was no recognition of any of this. There was no empathy for the victims or their families who they now marched to shout at and intimidate. But there were plenty of cold rationalizations and claims of “what led us here”. Across the pond, members of dozens of student societies at Harvard declared, “the apartheid regime is the only one to blame”. Not those who actually perpetrated the rape or the kidnapping or the murder of children. They expressed no compassion, and showed no empathy. Not for those victims.

And that is because these protestors subscribe to as an ideology of selective absolutism.

Forms of absolutism

Fascism seeks the emergence of a strong, unified monoculture, subservient to the interests of the state — but accepts suppression of opposition as the cost.

Marxism is motivated by a strong desire for perfect equality, but eliminates individual liberties in attempt of that impossibility.

Absolutism, meanwhile, at least of a moral nature, proposes that an objective morality exists which underpins all humanity. Absolutists believe that this morality is global, unconditioned, and never changes (although our collective understanding of it may evolve over time).

Armed with this belief, absolutists exist in two forms.

First, the universal absolutists: individuals with a standard of morality they apply everywhere, consistently. Universal absolutism prevents tragedies. It grants the ability to “step back”, and judge matters from a consistent vantage point, providing unimpeachable moral clarity. It is also what motivated so many German resistors to Nazi rule, enabling them to see and requiring them to resist the atrocities required to fulfill Nazi promises of an ultimately more harmonious society. Not all absolutism is bad.

Second, the selective absolutists, who believe that only those in positions of power can be judged against a moral code. Selective absolutists are not moral or cultural relativists, nor must they be confused with them. They do not believe in multiple ‘legitimate’ moralities, all as equal and valid as one another (based on culture, history, and path dependency). But to claim one does, and to assert others do, is much easier than admitting selective application of one’s own moral code. For whatever kind of morality you subscribe to, it is hard to imagine how the rape and murder of children are either defensible or dismissible under any circumstances. Not all absolutism is good.

Understanding selective absolutism

Selective absolutism parallels Marxism: those without power are the oppressed, and insurrection by the oppressed is both inevitable and justified. Of course, neither are necessarily true, but this morality-bypass cheat code enables selective absolutists to “fill in the gap” of the political horseshoe, and justify extremes of any nature. There is no contradiction between supporting unquestionably fascist Putin in Ukraine on Thursday, the Chinese Communist Party in Xinjiang on Friday, and Hamas in Israel on Saturday. To a selective absolutist, any action is justifiable, if it takes place within a “system of power” in which the oppressor can cast itself as the oppressed.

In the same way anti-competition lawyers argue over the boundaries of where to draw “markets” for the purposes of identifying “monopolies”, absolutists differ in how they define systems of power, and where they draw the lines.

But when considering where ‘power’ lies, and who might be ‘oppressed’, most people seem to consider the ultimate battlefield to be the whole-world stage, with the West as (an at least historical) hegemon. To a selectivist, this means absolutist standards must apply to the West, while others’ actions can be disregarded (or justified by their perceived relative lack of ‘power’). Selective absolutists are able to ignore China’s internal oppression of Uyghurs, because they believe supporting China’s challenge to Western hegemony is even more important.

Selective absolutists unwittingly bridge both ends of the political spectrum, welding fascist intolerance for dissent with the Marxist obsession of power, disregarding feeling for human life in the process. Until now this absolutism that bridges the extremes, and its adherents, have escaped serious criticism for their moral and intellectual inconsistency.

Nobody, after all, is explicitly preaching a testament of selective absolutism. But it is clear that plenty of educated young people, at top universities around the world, tolerate and contribute to behaviors only typically found at the bottom of the political horseshoe: forming mobs, intimidating opponents, silencing free speech, and tending towards or justifying terror. Laying blame with murdered civilians, arguing “it’s their fault”, and claiming “there are no innocents” is the result.

Challenging selective absolutism

Public shaming elicits defensiveness and can harden resolve, but private shame inflicted by trusted peers — whether friends or family — cannot be avoided in the same way.

To ordinarily proud parents: take your children aside, and talk to them. Encourage them to apply their beliefs consistently. Show them the gruesome videos they may have avoided watching, and force them to confront their decision to march on the very people targeted in those attacks in the mere hours that followed. Ask them to empathize.

To trusted peers, siblings, and classmates: encourage your friends to be universal, not selective, in their absolutism. Recognize their strong sense of morality, but regret that it is inconsistently applied. Remind them, indirectly, that good people commit evil when they compromise the universality of their beliefs. They can either oppose genocide, universally, or join those throngs shouting “gas the Jews” as those they wish dead mourn their already slain families and friends. Ask them who is evil.

Never again.