The Fragility of Morality

The society, we live in, is obsessed with labeling things either black or white. It plays the moral police for each of its individuals. Since our childhood we are made to see things as either good or bad. There isn't much scope for grey. Grey, which is in fact the reality but we live in pseudo realities which are much more comfortable to accept. The moral uneasiness which comes with accepting the evil in you, is hard to accept.

Probably the most difficult thing to accept, morally, would be that the murderers, the rapists, the goons; are just the humans that we are. Their morals and ideologies are similar to ours. When the (fake) wall of morality that we build between THEM and US falls, our moralistic self will get a shattering. We are so comfortable feeling and believing moralistic that we fail to see the evil in us. The evil is always in others while we have achieved moralistic zenith.

Gitta Sereny, a journalist known for her unflinching studies of Nazis and child criminals, has produced a work on similar lines called "Into the Darkness". What is so terrifying about his work is that she makes evil look ordinary and everyday. He resisted the easy characterisation of evil as something done by people with horns and funny accents: that is, done by people not like you and me. What's so terrifying about this work is that it shows how close we are to it.

He explains this through the life of Mass murderer Franz Stangl, a one-time commendant of the Treblinka death camp. Stangl was so obsessed with taking orders and getting things done, as part of his job that he had no sense of the morality of the act. Like many of us stuck in this rat race, he was fallowing orders. He was so determined to be at the assiduous best that he had no perception of the bigger picture.

One of the most morally devastating experiences one can have is to catch one's own reflection in the face of a mass murderer. For this can prompt a sort of spiritual crisis in a person and thus act to warn us not to be so trusting of our own virtue. Evil is not done by "other" people. It is done by people like us. The virtue and the vice reside in us.

Thus one of the most important ways to avoid evil – or whatever one wants to call it – is by having the self-critical vigilance that such a journey can scare you into developing.

An excerpt  from the book:

"'My conscience is clear about what I did myself,' he(Franz Stangl) said, in the same stiffly spoken words he has used countless times at his trial, and in the past weeks, when we had always come back to this subject, over and over again. But this time I said nothing. He paused and waited, but the room remained silent. 'I have never intentionally hurt anyone, myself,' he said, with a different, less incisive emphasis, and waited again – for a long time. For the first time, in all these many days, I had given him no help. There was no more time. He gripped the table with both hands as if he were holding on to it. 'But I was there,' he said then, in a curiously dry and tired tone of resignation. These few sentences has taken almost half an hour to produce. 'So yes,' he said finally, very quietly, 'in reality I share the guilt … Because my guilt … my guilt … only now in these talks … now that I have talked about it all for the first time …' He stopped. He had pronounced the words 'my guilt': but more than the words, the finality of it was the sagging of his body, and on his face."
(Gitta Sereny, Into That Darkness)

He died of heart failure 19 hours after he spoke these words.