Since the beginning of humankind, evil has always been abhorred. All cultures and societies identify what they view as good and what they consider evil. The notion of right and wrong is relative according to different groups of people. Nonetheless, some actions and behaviors are universally evil according to all communities. Such actions are the likes of stealing or killing. When evil gets committed by individuals or groups of people, communities and clans usually give punishments whose severity depends on the seriousness of the act. The role of discipline is and has always been aimed at deterring the offender from repeating the act and to serve as a warning to others.
However, despite its apprehension, evil still reverberates all over time starting from the pre-historic, to recorded history, all the way to the present moment. In time immemorial, religion had the primary role of upholding the law and teaching morality. But humans proved to be too evil, that religious belief alone could not control them. This was when the state had to step in. Kingdoms and empires established codes of law and introduced forms of punishments such as incarceration and some types of execution. The book "Unmasking administrative evil" discusses the different kinds of corruption in organizations and government. It also shows how people get unknowingly conditioned to conform to malevolence.
The first chapter mainly discusses the dynamics of evil in administrations. It explains that over the course of the twentieth century, humankind has developed a greater capacity for evil. In fact this century has seen more bloodshed than any other time in recorded history. The First World War saw the killing of millions of people. In the second war, more than double the number got killed. The most notable event that led to the culmination of the war was the dropping of the two nuclear bombs at Hiroshima and Nagasaki. The two bombs decimated those cities entirely wiping out nearly the entire populations.
After the World War II, there has been no other major war. However, we as humanity adopted a rather disturbing ideology. We have the tendency to believe that civilization is development. In our view, when we have safe houses, high incomes, good roads, hospitals and schools then we are more civilized. Society places a high value on physical development rather than moral and ethical development. For us to be truly enlightened, we need not only the physical infrastructural development, but also the right morals and behaviors. Without this, we would be no different that our historical predecessors.
Evil in society wears many masks. In the modern age, the scientific and analytic mindset makes it easy to carry out evil without intent. When invited to evil, we no longer need to accept an overt invitation to commit it. Calls to evil acts come to us in the form of expert roles, or they get packaged as worthy products. In, this case, we as a society have created a moral inversion. We have made evil look good or "cool", and the right things, we make them look evil.
The most common masks of evil are our failure to see administrative evil, or hide it when it occurs. Another mask is through the use of language and dehumanization. Furthermore, social construction also plays a role in hiding evil. We fail to see administrative evil when we separate our generation from blame resulting from significant human atrocities. We relate them to historical events within a particular culture at a different time.
A good example is the Holocaust when Hitler, massacred millions of Jews among other war crimes. In other cases, history attempts to hide atrocities. For instance, when the U.S imported Germans and Nazis, some of who participated in heinous crimes against humanity. This incident got downplayed by the government. The United States massacred dozens of Vietnamese during the cold war. Furthermore, they applied a scorched earth policy through the use of highly toxic Agent Orange. Effects of this chemical still affect locals up to today due to the genetic mutations it caused. However, the American government justified the war as a means of curbing the growth of communism.
We also tend to use distance and perception to define the extent of evil. The Hutu and Tutsi conflict that led to a genocide killing over 800,000 people were a bloody war. However, most of the western world never took it that seriously. After all, it occurred in Africa. The Bosnian war, however, got deemed as more bloody because it happened in Europe.
The use of language plays a prominent role in masking administrative evil. Euphemism provides emotional distance from a particular vice. It gets rid of the guilt associated with an act. One common use of this language is evident in the case where America conducts major bombings in the Middle-East. They commonly use the term “collateral damage” to refer to the killing of innocent non-combatant civilians. When the forceful transfer of populations occurs, the government that perpetrates it referred to the process as “evacuation or resettlement. In this case, the perpetrator not only makes it look less evil, but socially appropriate and even necessary.
In dehumanization, administrators find ways of demonizing individuals or particular groups so as to justify heinous acts against them. Sometimes evil gets isolated to individual acts rather than trying to understand how social conditions influence the actions. Institutions also tend to program the masses to comply with certain standards set by those in authority.
References
Adams, G., & Balfour, D. (2014). Unmasking administrative evil. Routledge.
