In order not to be disappointed with people — and with anything people-related — I need to get something straight with myself first.

Are people generally evil?

Does that evilness fail to shrink with education, leaving only a rare few who are truly good-intentioned? This is, I realize, an old argument dressed in new clothes — Hobbes’s man as wolf to man, against Rousseau’s man born innocent and corrupted only by society. I am not sure yet which side I actually stand on; perhaps the honest answer is that I stand closer to Hobbes than I would like to admit.

And if that’s so, how can people be evil? I cannot fully empathise with it. Surely they must be something like me — wanting a good life for themselves, for the people they love, and for other living beings too. So what changes, from someone like me to someone else, that makes them less tolerant, more ruthless, less objective?

What surprises me most is this: the people who look diplomatic, neutral, unmoved by rumor — they often turn out to be the least objective of all. Which makes me wonder whether neutrality is ever what it claims to be, or whether it is itself a way of taking a side — the safest one, the one that costs nothing. Nietzsche said every philosophy is a confession; maybe every claim to impartiality is one too, quietly confessing a position its owner would rather not name.

Life keeps surprising me this way. I used to think it was simply a lack of education that made people biased, sided, ambivalent. But the more time I spend around academia, the less hope I have for that theory. Education does not solve people’s affective ambivalence. It only sharpens factual wisdom — it does not remove maliciousness, which, as I sadly hypothesized above, seems to be innate.

Or is it innate at all? Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil says something almost opposite to my own instinct — that evil is rarely a deep, deliberate essence, but the ordinary residue of not thinking, not questioning, following along. So which is it: is malice a substance some people are simply born with more of, or is it a failure of attention that any of us could fall into, given the right amount of not looking too closely?

Most people, it seems, carry some of this in them, and only a few are born good — though even calling it “born” may already be the wrong frame. Aristotle would say virtue is not a seed but a habit, something built through repeated action rather than granted at birth. If that’s true, then goodness isn’t a rare gift some people happened to receive — it’s a rare set of choices, made again and again, that most people simply never had reason or support to keep making. I still don’t know what makes the good, good. Is it the way they were raised — a good mother, a good perspective? Is it being shielded from the evil of the world? Or simply being unusually sensitive?

I want to discover what makes goodness what it is, and why it’s so rare. But maybe the question I should sit with first is a less comfortable one: am I actually as objective as I believe myself to be while asking all this — or does it simply suit me to see myself that way?

Until then — stick with me.

π