One Good Man — Part Three: How Evil Works

Perhaps one of the most important things I have learned from my experiences with the Jersey justice system is that evil does not necessarily look like evil.

That may sound like an obvious statement.

But it is not.

We tend to imagine evil as something obvious. We imagine somebody who knows that what they are doing is wrong and does it anyway.

We imagine cruelty.

We imagine hatred.

We imagine somebody deliberately setting out to cause harm.

But I have come to believe that some of the most dangerous forms of evil arise when people genuinely believe that what they are doing is good.

The Good Person

Most people do not wake up in the morning and decide that they are going to do something evil.

They wake up believing that they are good people.

They go to work.

They do their jobs.

They follow the procedures.

They answer their emails.

They attend their meetings.

They make decisions.

And they go home believing that they have done what was expected of them.

They may even believe that they have helped people.

That is precisely what makes institutional wrongdoing so difficult to recognise.

The person doing the thing does not necessarily perceive himself as doing something wrong.

He perceives himself as doing his job.

And if somebody comes along and tells him that what he has done is wrong, he does not necessarily hear:

"You made a mistake."

He may hear:

"You are a bad person."

And those are very different things.

The Rules

Bureaucracy makes this problem particularly acute.

People are trained to follow rules.

They are given procedures.

They are given forms.

They are given targets.

They are given deadlines.

They are told what they are expected to achieve.

And eventually the instruction becomes very simple:

Follow the rules.

Don't worry too much about whether the rules themselves produce justice.

That is somebody else's responsibility.

If there is a legal problem, somebody else will deal with it.

If there is a policy problem, somebody else will review it.

If there is a complaint, somebody else will investigate it.

If there is a mistake, somebody else will correct it.

And so the individual can carry on doing exactly what he has been told to do.

There is enormous psychological comfort in that.

Because if I am merely following the procedure, then I do not have to take complete responsibility for the consequences.

I can say:

"That is the policy."

"That is the procedure."

"That is what I was instructed to do."

"That is how we have always done it."

And the uncomfortable question disappears:

Was it actually right?

When Doing Becomes the Problem

There is another problem.

Modern institutions tend to value action.

People are expected to produce results.

Targets have to be met.

Statistics have to be produced.

Cases have to be processed.

Files have to be closed.

Decisions have to be made.

Managers want evidence that their departments are doing something.

And so people do things.

Sometimes they do things because something genuinely needs to be done.

Sometimes they do things because doing nothing would make them look as though they were not doing their jobs.

And sometimes the action itself creates the problem.

There are circumstances in which the most responsible thing a person can do is stop.

Wait.

Investigate.

Think.

Admit that the evidence is insufficient.

Admit that the consequences are uncertain.

Admit that perhaps nobody knows what should happen next.

But there is very little institutional glory in doing nothing.

There are no impressive statistics for the cases you wisely refused to rush.

There is no performance bonus for the decision you did not make because you recognised that you did not have enough information.

There is no convenient management report saying:

"Today we prevented three unnecessary interventions by exercising restraint."

Instead, the institution rewards activity.

And activity can become more important than wisdom.

The Shortcut

Then come the shortcuts.

A deadline is approaching.

A manager wants the matter finished.

There are too many files.

There is not enough time.

There is pressure from above.

So somebody takes a shortcut.

Perhaps they do not read everything.

Perhaps they make an assumption.

Perhaps they rely upon somebody else's summary rather than examining the evidence themselves.

Perhaps they accept what has previously been decided rather than asking whether the previous decision was correct.

Perhaps they simply do what will make the statistics look good.

And the shortcut becomes normal.

Then somebody else relies upon that shortcut.

Then another person relies upon the second person's work.

And eventually the original mistake becomes part of the institutional reality.

Nobody remembers where it began.

Everybody simply knows that this is how things are done.

The Unintended Evil

This is how I have come to understand one of the most frightening aspects of institutional evil.

It does not necessarily require evil people.

It can arise from ordinary people doing ordinary things for apparently reasonable reasons.

A person wants to do a good job.

A manager wants the department to perform well.

A politician wants to demonstrate progress.

A lawyer wants to keep costs under control.

A civil servant wants to meet a deadline.

A prison officer wants to maintain order.

A court wants to bring a case to an end.

Every individual action can have an explanation.

Every person can have a reason.

And yet the combined result can be terrible.

That is the great danger.

Evil can emerge from the interaction of people who individually believe that they are doing good things.

It can emerge when nobody stops to consider the whole picture.

It can emerge when everybody is responsible for their little part but nobody accepts responsibility for the consequences of the whole.

The Person Who Says No

That is why somebody has to be willing to interrupt the process.

Somebody has to be willing to say:

Stop.

Not:

"What does the procedure say?"

But:

"What is actually happening here?"

Not:

"Have we completed the process?"

But:

"Have we done the right thing?"

Not:

"Will this make the statistics look better?"

But:

"What will this actually do to the person affected by it?"

That person may be unpopular.

He may be inconvenient.

He may slow everything down.

He may ask questions that nobody wants to answer.

He may force people to reconsider decisions that they have already made.

And eventually people may begin to resent him.

But somebody has to do it.

Good Intentions Are Not Enough

I do not believe that good intentions are sufficient to make an action good.

Intentions matter.

But consequences matter too.

If I genuinely believe that I am helping somebody but what I actually do causes them serious harm, my good intention does not magically undo the harm.

I still have a responsibility to examine what happened.

I still have a responsibility to learn.

And if I discover that I was wrong, I have a responsibility to admit it.

That is where humility becomes essential.

The truly good person is not the person who believes that everything he does must therefore be good.

The truly good person is capable of asking:

"What if I am wrong?"

That question is extraordinarily powerful.

It is also extraordinarily difficult.

Because once we have convinced ourselves that we are good people, admitting that we have done something bad becomes psychologically painful.

And that is where the next problem begins.

We defend ourselves.

We defend our colleagues.

We defend our institution.

We defend the decision.

We defend the procedure.

And eventually we may defend the indefensible simply because admitting that we were wrong has become too uncomfortable.

Why One Person Matters

This is why I keep coming back to the idea of the one good man.

One person who is willing to look at what everyone else accepts and ask whether it is actually right.

One person who is willing to interrupt the process.

One person who is willing to accept the possibility that the institution has made a mistake.

One person who is willing to say:

This is not right.

That person does not necessarily save the world.

He may not even persuade the people immediately around him.

But he introduces something into the system that was missing before.

He introduces doubt.

He introduces scrutiny.

He introduces the possibility that the accepted answer is not the correct answer.

And sometimes that is enough to begin a change.

Perhaps that is what a good man really is.

Not somebody who never makes a mistake.

Not somebody who believes himself to be morally superior.

But somebody who is willing to look honestly at what he has done, what others have done, and what the consequences have been.

Somebody who is prepared to say:

I might be wrong.

And, when the evidence demands it:

I was wrong.

Because if we are unwilling to say those words, then our belief that we are good people may become one of the greatest obstacles to actually becoming good people.

And perhaps that is how evil really works.

Not always through people who want to do evil.

But through people who are so certain that they are doing good that they no longer think to ask whether they are.