Violence and the Old Popular Imagination: A Carnival of Devils

One winter evening, I was watching footage of a carnival procession in Swabia, southern Germany. It seemed so primeval, and I have always tried to understand this strange world of medieval Europe, where my people wandered from country to country over the centuries. The parade was not cheerful; instead, the streets were filled with costumed people wearing carved wooden masks of devils, ghosts, skeletal faces, and grotesque creatures with horns and distorted expressions; this terrified me. The costumes were elaborate and traditional, and it seemed to me that they were passed down through centuries in towns that take these rituals seriously. As they moved through the streets, they rang bells and shouted in the region’s folklore. These rituals seemed to confront fear and drive it away. The demons took human form so that the community could symbolically master them.

But that is not what I was feeling. History also reminds us how tragically such symbolic worlds can slide into something darker. In parts of medieval and early modern Europe, the language of demons and devils was sometimes turned against living communities. Jews and other marginalized groups were at times portrayed in sermons, pamphlets, and imagery as embodiments of evil—figures onto whom societies projected their deepest anxieties and fears. The effort to banish darkness could become an effort to banish a human “other.” Knowing this history, it is difficult for me to watch these rituals. In my culture, the echoes of those horrors still echo. The devils in the parade may be fun theater today, but they carry the shadow of a past in which imagined demons were projected onto real people.

A similar paradox appears in the memory of another culture entirely. In the film Seven Years in Tibet, which deeply impacted my life and philosophy, a scene shows masked figures appearing during a ritual intended to drive away disruptive forces and strangers. The imagery is exaggerated and frightening—figures embodying demons, chaos, and the threatening outsider. For the character played by Brad Pitt, the moment creates an unexpected sense of kinship between his culture and the Dalai Lama’s. The ritual logic feels familiar to him: communities dramatizing outside forces they rightly fear to expel them symbolically. Such rituals occur during Tibetan festivals, such as Losar, where masked dancers represent chaotic or malevolent spirits that must be driven away to restore a moral order of decency and safety to the world.

What makes the ritual moment of demons interesting is whether these moments exhibit a pattern of behavior in the real world. Tibetan society has been shaped by a compassion-centered ethic associated with the Dalai Lama, Tenzin Gyatso, and the broader traditions of Tibetan Buddhism.

Tibetan Buddhist culture, at least as interpreted by the 14th Dalai Lama, places great emphasis on compassion toward all living beings. Yet even within a culture that elevates the love of all life and compassion as core virtues, the ritual imagination about demons still manifests frightening caricatures of evil and disorder.

A ritual manifestation of demons does speak to how societies confront fear by exaggerating it symbolically. This ritual embodiment of terror, however, carries a danger. The danger arises when the boundary between symbolic demons and real human outsiders blurs. A ritual meant to contain fear can remain harmless folklore—or, under certain conditions, it can shape how a community imagines those who stand beyond its circle. It certainly has not in the Tibetan case, and I will never forget my 1996 panel encounter with the Dalai Lama.

Ritually, he is considered the embodiment of the Bodhisattva of Compassion, and he has really spent a lifetime trying to be a leader who does just that for his people and for the world. Perhaps not in Tibet, but sometimes rituals slip away from us and our best intentions. Returning to the procession in Swabia, Germany, I wonder whether rehearsing demons manifesting themselves can harm the human mind.

Perhaps there is another way for our cultures. Instead of expelling what we fear, maybe repeated symbolic encounters train our imaginations to incorporate demonic images into our self-image. Are there times that we become what we rehearse? I am not saying this was true in this case, but this is what I was thinking.

It occurred to me because, like many people of my generation, I grew up with a deep attachment to Hollywood “action” films; it was a very important and loving bond between my father and me, for example. Hollywood itself, especially in its creative communities, has often been associated with progressive cultural impulses—support for civil rights, early advocacy of racial inclusion, and a broad cosmopolitan ethos. Yet the industry that helped normalize those values also produced a steady escalation of cinematic violence, which I watched with increasing discomfort since childhood. Over the decades, the spectacle of destruction became more graphic, more technologically realistic, and often more central to the narrative itself.

​I began to wonder about the long-term cultural effects of that escalation. If societies repeatedly immerse themselves in images of revenge, domination, and spectacular brutality—even when those images are fictional—what does that do to the imagination of a culture? Does it release aggression? Or does it gradually train the mind to inhabit a world where violence becomes familiar, even expected? The reflections that follow grew out of that question that came to me in the middle of one night.

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Violence in Reality and in Imagination

The cultural environment of contemporary society—films, streaming media, the “news,” real and fake, digital entertainment, and viral imagery—is increasingly saturated with graphic portrayals of cruelty, despite the decline of domestic violence. The gap between lived reality and symbolic rehearsal raises a troubling possibility: even as societies grow more capable of restraining violence in daily life, they may be practicing it more intensely in imagination. The appetite for violent imagery has intensified, and the most extreme expressions seem to become more brutal and compelling every decade. Even when statistics suggest society-wide improvement in less violence, the imagination can feel saturated with the essential cruelty of society and humanity.

Something may indeed be getting better, but something else may be getting worse at the same time—not necessarily in the streets, but in the symbolic world we inhabit. If cultures repeatedly stage scenes of humiliation, revenge, and destruction, the imagination itself may be devolving based on what it rehearses.

Declining Violence, Persistent Anxiety

Criminologists have tried to explain declining violence in terms of improved policing, demographic shifts, declining alcohol abuse, and the long-term effects of social norms that increasingly stigmatize violence. In these respects, modern societies appear to be becoming less tolerant of brutality in everyday life. Yet we have all seemed to become more aware and more exposed to shocking forms of violence—organized sexual abuse of minors, serial predation, mass shootings, and technologically amplified cruelty—that seem to appear with a particular intensity that captures public imagination. Even if such events are statistically rare, their scale and emotional impact create the sense that something darker is also unfolding beneath the surface.

Homicide Trends

The moral tragedy of homicide has declined in many parts of the world over the past several decades, not just in the United States. The United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC), in its Global Study on Homicide 2023, documented major decreases in homicide rates across many countries. Societies restrain everyday violence through legal innovations, improvements in social norms, and the view of violence as a disease and a matter of public health. But at the same time, the stories, images, and rituals of violent reenactment remain a problem, a goad to perpetuating violence. From medieval plays to modern cinema, we may still face a persistent fascination with violence and evil that keeps manifesting itself.

The Explosion of Online Sexual Aggression

Another development related to violence challenges the evidence for declining violence. Reports of online child sexual exploitation expanded dramatically in recent years. The U.S. National Center for Missing and Exploited Children (NCMEC), which operates the CyberTipline used by technology platforms and the public to report suspected abuse material, has documented enormous growth in the number of reports submitted annually.

Part of this increase reflects real expansion in the online circulation of exploitative material. but it is also true that more platforms now participate in reporting systems, and detection technologies have improved. The result is a statistical explosion in reporting that signals the extent of the problem while also complicating interpretation.

Technological Magnification of Cruelty

Child protection organizations report that AI-generated sexual abuse imagery has increased. The technology enables an increase in volume and sheer realism of abusive content, even when the number of direct perpetrators may not be increasing.

It is hard to escape the impression that sadism makes the picture more complex. Contemporary psychology recognizes what researchers sometimes call “everyday” or subclinical sadism—a personality tendency associated with deriving pleasure from cruelty, humiliation, or domination. Studies have linked this trait to antisocial behavior and certain forms of online harassment.

Yet the scientific literature also emphasizes the limits of what can currently be known about its prevalence. Many studies rely on convenience samples or self-reported measures, which make it difficult to determine how widespread such tendencies are in the general population. As a result, reliable long-term trend lines for sadism do not yet exist.

For this reason, the honest answer to the question “Has sadism increased statistically?” is that no clear statistical evidence currently demonstrates such an increase.

Cruelty in a Networked World

What can be observed with greater confidence is a transformation in how cruelty operates socially. Certain forms of harmful behavior have become more visible, more scalable, more networked, and in some cases more extreme. Digital environments allow abusive communities to find one another, coordinate activities, and distribute material globally in ways that were previously impossible.

Understanding this transformation requires attention not only to individuals but also to systems. The pool of people predisposed to cruelty may be relatively stable over time—although this cannot be proven. What has changed dramatically is the environment in which such individuals can interact. Even if many baseline forms of violence decline, the symbolic manifestations surrounding cruelty can become more graphic, and communities then emerge who normalize extreme behavior.

How Societies Process Violence: The Cathartic Tradition

Why do people act out violence through parades and theater and now online addictions to horrific films of sadism and brutality? For much of the twentieth century, many European intellectual traditions—especially those shaped by psychoanalysis—leaned toward the cathartic explanation. Following a lineage that stretches back to Aristotle’s theory of tragedy, psychoanalytic thinkers often assumed that symbolic encounters with aggression could relieve internal pressures.

If we give vent to violent impulses symbolically and acknowledge and dramatize them in art or ritual, they might be discharged rather than acted out in reality. The stage, the novel, or later the cinema could function as a psychological safety valve.

Ritualized Encounters with Fear

This idea of catharsis through art has resonated across many cultural practices over the centuries. Carnival traditions featuring demonic masks, frightening costumes, or grotesque reversals of social order were interpreted as ritualized, successful confrontations with and victories over the chaos of wars and plagues. By embodying the frightening figure for a limited time, communities symbolically mastered it. The monster became part of the social script rather than an uncontrolled threat. These are the cultural/psychological ancestors of modern cinema.

The Shift Toward Repetition and Neural Conditioning

In recent decades, several strands of psychology and neuroscience have moved in directions that call the concept of catharsis into question, with implications for the psychotherapeutic healing of individuals. There is a struggle here between the virtue of processing and therapy and working out things from the past versus the danger that focusing on the past and talking things through again and again can also lead to confirming neural pathways of trauma and negativity. Significant theories increasingly emphasize the power of repetition in shaping our emotional habits and cognitive neural pathways, for better and for worse. Too much repeating of things can lead to confirming and hardening trauma. Repetition is determinative, not always cathartic; it creates or hardens something into reality rather than neutralizing it. This makes catharsis quite problematic, in that what you think you are working through and neutralizing may be something you are baking into your identity. Neural plasticity research also suggests that the brain becomes what it repeatedly practices. Patterns of thought and attention reinforce themselves through continual activation. I am calling for a sober look at Aristotle’s brilliant analysis of theater and art as catharsis, and wondering whether, especially with so much money to be made from constantly retraumatizing people with terrifying art, we should take a fresh look at how best to serve our cultures and civilizations. Do we really want to invest billions and billions of dollars in ‘entertainment’ that may, in fact, be making us sick?

The Moral Consequences of Rehearsing Trauma

What happens when individuals or communities repeatedly rehearse the experience of fear, humiliation, revenge, or violent imagery? Do the negative neural circuits associated with those experiences become easier to activate? Perhaps symbolic exposure to aggression steadily reshapes the imagination, making certain forms of cruelty feel less shocking.

Earlier Aristotelian and psychoanalytic frameworks tended to emphasize the positive effects of releasing suppressed drives. But newer cognitive and neuroscientific models emphasize that habit formation, attentional patterns, and emotional training are the only cure for negative rumination and obsessive negative thoughts.

In simplified terms, the question changes from “What do we need to discharge?” to “What do we repeatedly practice becoming?” Over the last half-century, various films have intensified violent imagery. Technical changes let audiences witness ever more detailed portrayals of suffering, and market competition has driven producers to escalate violence. But the complex truth is that some studies find links between exposure to violent imagery and increased aggression, while others find only modest effects.

Modern societies may have become more successful at regulating ordinary aggression while at the same time providing platforms where extreme behaviors become more visible, or more psychologically amplified. The cultural negative effects may lie in the availability of this sickness at the press of a button, rather than its preponderance.

A New Danger of Abuse Manifested at the Hands of Some Billionaires.

There is another way we humans manifest who we become: through our economic icons. We tend to worship billionaires, as if they were modern gods whom nature has favored. If you are a billionaire, abuse of others seems to escape accountability, as if billionaires are too big to fail or commit crimes. Vast financial resources create insulated environments—private islands, hidden networks, exclusive social circles, and layers of legal protection—within which behavior that would normally be illegal and reprehensible becomes easier to conceal or sustain. In such settings, the rehearsal of domination and sadistic fantasy can take on a particularly disturbing form, especially when it targets the most vulnerable, including women and children.

The astonishing facts emerging about Jeffrey Epstein’s global network demonstrate that vast wealth and influence can combine to mass-produce exploitation despite the formal protections of modern law. This is a dangerous trend of above-the-law abuse, and it must be aggressively changed if the global community is to be safe. The ethical challenge is not only how societies reduce violence statistically, but helping them to possess the institutional courage to confront cruelty when it hides behind privilege, prestige, and immense wealth.

The Central Question

The basic ethical question facing our future is this: What kinds of symbolic worlds should societies cultivate? Do cultural narratives in film and the arts train citizens to focus on humiliation, revenge, compassion, self-regulation, or positive imagination? Here is the lesson I am seeing from cognitive psychology and neuroscience regarding how humans manifest reality: human beings tend to become what they repeatedly imagine and practice. If this is true, then the moral ecology of a culture—the stories it tells, the images it rehearses, and the emotions it repeatedly evokes—matters profoundly.

Compassionate Reasoning and the Imagination

Both the theory and practice of Compassionate Reasoning propose that moral judgment is a disciplined process of calculating consequences.

It also involves weighing the effects of actions on human life, imagining better possible outcomes for all, and establishing universally applicable moral principles. The bigger challenge is to develop a public capacity for compassionate moral reasoning—a form of civic literacy that evaluates the symbolic worlds we repeatedly invent to strengthen compassion, restraint, and responsibility that make peaceful societies possible. Compassionate Reasoning asks: What kind of human character does a narrative rehearse? What vision of justice does it cultivate? Does it enlarge the imagination toward care and coexistence for more people, or does it normalize humiliation and domination? Such questions do not necessarily suppress freedom. It is not a matter of suppressing freedom of expression. But moral reflection needs to return to the public conversation about what is healthy or unhealthy. It did not violate freedom of speech to begin a cultural conversation 40 years ago about smoking and cancer, and neither should a public conversation nor rehearsed online humiliation or sadism. A culture capable of having such discussions becomes capable of choosing what it practices becoming.

The practice of Compassionate Reasoning counterbalances the rehearsal of media violence with suggestions for rehearsing compassion, foresight, and positive imagination. This can be developed through education, storytelling, and civic dialogue that highlight examples of courageous restraint, reconciliation, and creative conflict resolution.

I have spent many years of my practice bearing witness to extraordinary stories from people on every continent who are compassionate and visionary, despite all the violence that has surrounded their lives. These Individuals and communities refused revenge in moments of tragedy, transformed cycles of hatred into unexpected cooperation, and helped total strangers, even those who wished them harm.

When these stories are told with emotional power and cultural visibility, they compete with the ugly stories that often dominate entertainment markets. I have seen this reconciliation work in many cultures across the globe as they recover from mass violence.

The repeated stories of extraordinary individuals and friends across enemy divides help to reorganize the human mind in a certain way. Compassionate Reasoning seeks to redirect the imagination toward forms of heroism rooted in compassion and life-nurturing qualities. Such role models are not less dramatic than the warrior or the avenger. Good writers and talented writers throughout history have created wonderful literature and art; they embody a different understanding of strength.

We can make great books and movies from the lives of such people, and with a little effort, the news itself can become wonderful. There are new news feeds, such as Fix the News, which, page after page, create an inspiring read that leaves one with a sense of optimism that is not false, not naïve, but grounded in facts. Elevating these narratives in film, literature, education, and digital media helps societies gradually cultivate a symbolic environment in which compassion and courage are rehearsed as vividly as violence once was.

Do cultures become what they repeatedly imagine? I am not sure, but to build the future educationally and culturally, we should seriously experiment with how we shape ourselves. When compassion, fairness, and foresight are imagined fictionally and then become habits of thought, they begin to change how people respond to one another and how societies confront their problems.

Compassionate Reasoning offers a way to develop these habits. It does not deny the persistence of violence or cruelty, but asks whether we can educate the imagination toward different possibilities.

Reducing violence is essential, but so is teaching people, from childhood through old age, to imagine human relationships differently. Self-control, compassion, moral debate, and thoughtful planning must become ordinary habits rather than exceptional achievements. Over generations, what a culture teaches people to imagine may profoundly influence what kind of civilization they create.

Part I has argued that humanity’s evolution depends in part on our capacity to imagine the future. We must learn to envision a better world before we can build one, and develop common moral aspirations before we can act together. But imagination alone is not enough. Hope must be joined to careful reasoning, compassion to moral judgment, and aspirations for a better future to an understanding of truth, power, conscience, conflict, and the institutions that govern our lives.

Selected ANNOTATED References

Violence Trends and Crime Data

Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature: Why Violence Has Declined. New York: Viking, 2011.

A landmark synthesis arguing that violence has declined over long historical periods due to the development of institutions, norms, and cultural shifts.

United Nations Office on Drugs and Crime (UNODC). Global Study on Homicide 2023. Vienna: United Nations, 2023.

Comprehensive global analysis of homicide trends, widely cited for evidence of long-term declines in lethal violence in many regions.

World Health Organization. World Report on Violence and Health. Geneva: WHO, 2002.

A foundational public-health framework for understanding violence, emphasizing structural, social, and cultural determinants.

Research on Viewing Violence on Social Media

Krahé, Barbara et al. “Desensitization to Media Violence: Links With Habitual Media Violence Exposure, Aggressive Cognitions, and Aggressive Behavior.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology (2011).

A widely cited experimental study demonstrated that repeated exposure to violent media can produce emotional desensitization, increasing tolerance for violence and making aggressive thoughts more cognitively accessible.

Mrug, Sylvie et al. “Emotional Desensitization to Violence Contributes to Adolescents’ Violent Behavior.” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology (2016).

Longitudinal research shows that repeated exposure to violence can reduce emotional responsiveness and compassion, which may contribute to later aggressive behavior.

Huesmann, L. Rowell. “The Impact of Electronic Media Violence: Scientific Theory and Research.” Journal of Adolescent Health (2007).

A major synthesis of research concludes that media violence is one contributing risk factor among many influencing aggression and violent behavior.

Stockdale, Laura A., et al. “Media Violence Exposure and Neural Responses to Emotional Faces.” Social Cognitive and Affective Neuroscience (2015).

Neuroscience research suggests that exposure to violent media may alter emotional processing and reduce sensitivity to others’ suffering.

De Choudhury, Munmun, Andrés Monroy-Hernández and Gloria Mark. “Narco Emotions: Affect and Desensitization in Social Media During the Mexican Drug War.” (2015).

A computational social science study showing that prolonged exposure to violence on social media correlated with declining expressions of fear or distress, suggesting possible collective desensitization.

Olteanu, Alexandra et al. “The Effect of Extremist Violence on Hateful Speech Online.” (2018).

Large-scale analysis demonstrating that violent events often trigger increases in online hate speech and calls for violence, illustrating how digital ecosystems can amplify aggressive discourse.

Sadism and the Psychology of Cruelty

Buckels, Erin E., Paul D. Trapnell, and Delroy L. Paulhus. “Everyday Sadism.” Psychological Science 24, no. 11 (2013): 2201–2209.

Seminal research introduced the concept of everyday or subclinical sadism as a measurable personality trait.

Paulhus, Delroy L., and Kevin M. Williams. “The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.” Journal of Research in Personality 36 (2002): 556–563.

Influential work examining antisocial personality traits associated with cruelty and manipulative behavior.

Chester, David S. “The Role of Sadism in Aggressive Behavior.” Current Opinion in Psychology 19 (2018): 86–90.

Review of contemporary research on sadism and its relationship to aggression.

Media Violence, Desensitization, and Imagination

Anderson, Craig A., and Brad J. Bushman. “Effects of Violent Video Games on Aggressive Behavior.” Psychological Science 12 (2001): 353–359.

One of the most widely cited studies suggests links between violent media exposure and aggressive cognition.

Ferguson, Christopher J. “Violent Video Games and Youth Violence.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 10 (2015): 646–666.

A major critique argues that links between media violence and real-world aggression are weaker than often claimed.

Bushman, Brad J., and Craig A. Anderson. “Media Violence and the American Public.” American Psychologist 56 (2001): 477–489.

Overview of research on desensitization and aggression in relation to violent media exposure.

Gerbner, George. Violence in Television Drama: Trends and Symbolic Functions. Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Annenberg School, 1972.

Classic work introducing the idea that media environments cultivate symbolic perceptions of violence.

Ritual, Catharsis, and Symbolic Violence

Aristotle. Poetics.

The classical source for the theory of catharsis through tragic drama.

Girard, René. Violence and the Sacred. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1977.

A major anthropological theory of ritualized violence and the symbolic management of aggression in cultures.

Turner, Victor. The Ritual Process: Structure and Anti-Structure. Chicago: Aldine, 1969.

Influential analysis of ritual symbolism, carnival inversion, and communal confrontation with disorder.

Bakhtin, Mikhail. Rabelais and His World. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1984.

Classic study of carnival culture, grotesque imagery, and symbolic reversals in European traditions.

Douglas, Mary. Purity and Danger: An Analysis of Concepts of Pollution and Taboo. London: Routledge, 1966.

Seminal anthropological work exploring how societies symbolically classify danger, disorder, and moral boundaries.

Cognition, Repetition, and Neural Plasticity

Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. New York: Viking, 2007.

Popular synthesis of research on neuroplasticity and the brain’s capacity to reshape itself through repeated experience.

Hebb, Donald O. The Organization of Behavior. New York: Wiley, 1949.

Foundational work introducing the principle that repeated neural activation strengthens pathways (“cells that fire together wire together”).

Seligman, Martin E. P., et al. Homo Prospectus. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2016.

A major psychological framework emphasizing the central role of future imagination in human cognition and behavior.

I have been studying recent Israeli public opinion surveys, trying to understand how Jewish Israelis have come to regard the Palestinians of Gaza after nearly three years of war. The results are disturbing, especially the apparent indifference to Palestinian suffering. There is something happening in Israeli society that deserves closer attention than the usual political arguments about Netanyahu, Hamas, and the conduct of the war.

A September 2026 survey by the Jewish People Policy Institute found that 72% of Jewish Israelis opposed withdrawing to the Gaza border without retaining an Israeli military security perimeter inside Gaza. Support for occupying the entire Gaza Strip and administering it through the military for several years rose from 27% in September 2025 to 36% a year later. I understand the fear of another October 7. Indeed, 59% of Israelis surveyed in September believed that another attack of that kind could come from Gaza in the coming years. Yet the prospect of years of military government over millions of Palestinians seems increasingly acceptable to a significant part of the Jewish public.

In July 2025, the Israel Democracy Institute reported that 79% of Jewish Israelis were not upset by reports of famine and suffering in Gaza.

And 78% believed that the Israeli military was making substantial efforts to avoid unnecessary suffering.

Perhaps the confidence in the army helps explain the indifference to what Palestinians are experiencing. But how do we account for such widespread unconcern about hunger, the repeated displacement of families, and the destruction of entire neighborhoods? What are people being told, and what are they willing to believe?

The Pew Research Center found something equally disturbing in the spring of 2026. Among Jewish Israelis, 64% thought the United States was providing too much humanitarian aid to Palestinian civilians in Gaza. Among those between 18 and 34, the figure rose to 74%, compared with only 8% of Arab Israelis. I am particularly concerned about these younger Jewish Israelis, who have grown up with recurrent wars, fear of terrorism, and very little experience of ordinary relationships with Palestinians. Their views may have consequences for decades, especially as they become parents and take responsibility for Israeli institutions.

Then there is the possibility of expulsion. A Geocartography survey of 1,005 Jewish Israelis in March 2025, reported in Haaretz, claimed that 82% supported expelling Palestinians from Gaza and 56% supported expelling Palestinian citizens of Israel. It also reported that 47% agreed with a question referring to the biblical destruction of Jericho and the killing of its inhabitants.

Three Israeli political scientists challenged the survey’s methodology, and their criticisms deserve attention. The biblical question particularly concerns me because agreement with a story from the Book of Joshua does not necessarily mean that someone would support killing Palestinian civilians today. There is enough evidence of deeply troubling attitudes without attributing to millions of people an intention to commit mass murder that these surveys cannot establish.

Other findings, however, cannot be dismissed so readily. In June 2026, the Institute for National Security Studies found that 25% of all Israelis, including 31% of Jewish Israelis, favored annexing Palestinian territory without granting Palestinians civil rights. I wonder how respondents understand the future of people living under such an arrangement. Would they remain permanently subject to a government in which they had no political voice? How would such a system affect Jewish Israelis themselves over another generation?

Israeli society is certainly not united around these views. The same June survey found that 25% supported a two-state solution and 27% favored separation from the Palestinians. Forty-five percent considered nationalist violence by Jews to be terrorism that must be stopped. In September, 75% supported an independent state commission of inquiry into the war and its failures. There are many Israelis who have opposed the war, defended Palestinian rights, and continued to work with Palestinian partners despite the enormous difficulties. I have known Israelis engaged in such work for decades, including people whose lives have been devoted to reconciliation. Their efforts should never disappear from our understanding of Israeli society.

Still, I keep returning to that figure of 79% expressing little or no concern about Palestinian suffering. Some respondents may simply disbelieve the reports. Others may regard civilian suffering as an unavoidable consequence of the war against Hamas. The surveys do not tell us enough about the reasons. But the result is difficult to contemplate, particularly for someone whose understanding of Jewish history has been shaped by the experiences of persecution, expulsion, and the indifference of surrounding societies.

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I have spent much of my life studying how communities become enemies and how they sometimes recover their capacity to recognize one another’s humanity. Fear can become deeply embedded in a society, particularly after a catastrophe such as October 7. Israelis have endured terrible losses, and the possibility of further attacks remains painfully real to them. I do not question their right to protection. I am concerned about what happens when the suffering of another people ceases to disturb us, especially when our own government and military have so much power over their lives.

The polling cannot establish how many Jewish Israelis would actually support forced expulsion or mass killing, and I think it would be irresponsible to pretend otherwise. But enough of these findings come from established research institutions that we should be asking what has happened to the moral education of Israeli society, to its religious leadership, and to its capacity to imagine a future in which Palestinian lives are as worthy of protection as Jewish lives.

I wonder what it will take to change these attitudes, and whether the Jewish traditions that have sustained our people through centuries of suffering can still become a source of moral resistance to the suffering now being inflicted on others.

Given these attitudes, I find it increasingly difficult to imagine how serious coalition building can succeed in Israel. Even if the Zionist parties were willing to form a governing coalition with Arab parties, how could they sustain it in a society where relations between Jews and Palestinians are so close to violence, where violence is already a daily reality for so many, and where such extreme attitudes have become widespread? Parliamentary agreements may be possible, and I certainly hope they will be attempted, but the mutual trust required to govern together is another matter entirely.

For nearly forty years, I have been arguing for much deeper processes of healing and mutual understanding, both between Jews and Palestinians and among Jews themselves. I, along with an entire cadre of religious and secular change makers and conflict healing experts, have developed approaches to conflict healing that involve understanding the fears, historical wounds, moral convictions, and personal experiences that have brought communities to such profound hostility. Thousands of Israelis themselves have pioneered excellent work of healing themselves but all of it has gone completely underfunded and actually suppressed.

This work must include religious representatives, settlers, religious fundamentalists, educators, political figures to pioneer work for the millions of people involved here who have rarely had the opportunity to encounter one another outside the circumstances of conflict. It requires sustained relationships and a willingness to examine one’s own responsibility for the suffering of others.

I have also argued for many years that the divisions among Jews themselves require serious attention. Israeli society contains profoundly different understandings of Judaism, democracy, nationalism, and the future of the state. Religious and secular Jews, settlers and their opponents, and communities with very different historical experiences have become increasingly estranged from one another. The bitter conflicts over the judiciary, military service, and the conduct of the war have exposed divisions that cannot be resolved simply through elections or agreements among party leaders. Jews need opportunities to understand and heal their relationships with fellow Jews, including those whose political and religious convictions they find deeply threatening.

This work is now critical. We cannot expect coalition negotiations alone to overcome decades of fear and the increasing acceptance of Palestinian suffering, nor a compassionate approach to healing and moving beyond Jewish suffering and victimization at the hands of the rest of humanity over the centuries. Even a successful change of government may leave deeper problems untouched, with the same hostility waiting to erupt in the next crisis.

Political cooperation can help create conditions for healing, but it cannot replace the years of work needed to change how communities understand one another.

Israel is approaching a stark choice concerning the future of Jewish democracy. Continued domination of millions of Palestinians without equal political rights, recurring warfare, and the growing hostility among Jewish communities themselves threaten the possibility of a peaceful democratic future.

I worry increasingly about the danger of mass civil violence, even civil war, within Israeli society. The massive rise of a Palestinian Israeli middle class is no protection against this. On the contrary, this is precisely when majorities can backlash into their most primitive frames, as we have seen in the United States. These dangers are not inevitable, however, but I see little reason to assume that they will disappear through ordinary political competition.

I have witnessed people in societies devastated by violence develop extraordinary relationships with former enemies. Some had lost children and other family members, and nevertheless found the moral strength to work toward reconciliation. Such experiences have convinced me that changes of heart are possible even after terrible suffering. But they do not occur simply because political leaders sign agreements. They require sustained work among people, communities, and institutions, and a willingness to confront beliefs that have become deeply rooted over generations.

Israel needs an effort of this kind on a scale that has never been attempted. It must include Jewish-Palestinian healing, serious encounters among Jews themselves, and changes in education and religious leadership that can reach people who would never voluntarily participate in conventional peace initiatives. I have spent much of my professional life developing approaches to precisely these problems, and I believe there are practical ways to begin. What is missing is recognition, among enough influential people, that this work is essential to Israel’s future. Without it, we may continue changing governments while leaving the conditions for endless war largely intact.

Israeli Jewish Society Polls on Gaza, Palestinian Suffering, and Expulsion Make a Democratic Coalition Impossible Without a Change of Heart

• Recent polls reveal extraordinary levels of Jewish Israeli acceptance of prolonged military occupation, Palestinian suffering, and restrictions on Palestinian rights.

• In July 2025, 79% of Jewish Israelis reported little or no concern about famine and suffering in Gaza, despite the Jewish people’s own long history of persecution.

• In spring 2026, 64% of Jewish Israelis believed the United States was providing too much humanitarian aid to Gaza, rising to 74% among those ages 18–34.

• A controversial 2025 survey reported overwhelming support for Palestinian expulsion, although serious methodological objections make its most extreme findings unreliable.

• Israeli society remains divided, with significant numbers of Jewish and Arab Israelis opposing extremist violence and supporting alternatives to permanent occupation.

• Fear following October 7 helps explain some Israeli attitudes, but the growing acceptance of Palestinian suffering raises troubling questions about Jewish moral education and religious leadership.

• A governing coalition between Zionist and Arab parties cannot establish lasting democratic cooperation without deeper changes in the relationships between their communities.

• For nearly forty years, many Israeli and Palestinian colleagues have developed approaches to conflict healing that remain desperately underfunded despite the extraordinary work already accomplished.

• Healing must reach Jews and Palestinians as well as deeply divided Jewish communities, including settlers, religious fundamentalists, secular Israelis, and political opponents.

• Israel faces the danger of endless war and even civil conflict unless political change is accompanied by sustained efforts at reconciliation, mutual understanding, and a genuine change of heart.

• Decades of work in societies devastated by mass violence have shown that even during war and in its aftermath, sustained conflict healing can transform relationships between former enemies, overcome generations of hatred, and make reconciliation possible where it once seemed unimaginable.

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References

1. Hermann, Tamar, et al. “Israeli Voice Index: July 2025.” Israel Democracy Institute, August 5, 2025.

2. Smerkovich, Maria, Kirsten Lesage, and Julia Armeli. “Views of U.S. Military Assistance to Israel and Humanitarian Aid to Gaza.” Pew Research Center, September 15, 2026.

3. Hazkani, Shay, and Tamir Sorek. “Yes to Transfer: 82% of Jewish Israelis Back Expelling Gazans.” Haaretz, May 28, 2025.

4. Sheffer, Lior, Alon Yakter, and Yael Shomer. “That Alarming Poll Showing 82% of Israelis Back Gazans’ Expulsion? It’s Wrong.” Haaretz, June 4, 2025.

I have become interested, for those of you who are regular readers, in mental maps, in imagined spaces, and in how those mental maps affect our preparedness for change, for moral responsibility, and for our ability to cope.

I want to explore one complicated and changing mental map. Imagine the arc of your life. Imagine your parent, 20 or 30 years older than you, holding your hand and walking you across the street, and you can see in your memory your hand held high because the one holding your hand is so much taller than you.

Now jump forward 20 years, and you are helping your father walk with a walker, trying to get over a slight dip in the sidewalk, trying not to stumble, stopping every 3 feet from exhaustion and breathlessness, needing encouragement, needing help seeing all the hazards. Some of our relations are not horizontal or vertical, but diagonal. Our mental map is dynamic, or it needs to be if we are to cope. This is the dynamic nature of diagonality.

Diagonality is the seesaw of our lives over great lengths of time. Diagonality is how dependence and independence change over time, mostly with intimate family relations, but sometimes teachers, sometimes friends, neighbors, and sometimes even a doctor who once tended you when you were so young, sick, and helpless. And now you visit him with his permanently infirm condition. The map of the relationship and the dependencies has permanently shifted, no matter what you do, because time is unforgivably linear. This is diagonality.

​Diagonal Relations: The Seesaw of Time

A certain kind of seesaw geometry of care moves through time. When we are young, our hands reach toward parents and caregivers. They hold us, feed us, and teach us. As children, we needed that hand up so very much.

Time passes, and the angle of that outstretched hand changes dramatically. The elder becomes tired, and the child becomes an adult. Eventually, the person who received the hand has to extend it. An adult child becomes a caregiver and sometimes a decision-maker for the elder or parent. The parent once helped the child stand, and now the child helps the parent stand, or sit up, remain safe, and still connected to life, clinging to life.

The point is that we are never permanently above or below most other people. We are born dependent, grow into strength, become responsible for others, and will eventually return to dependence. A human being moves through positions that are more diagonal than strictly horizontal or vertical, especially for the deepest relationships of moral care.

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Life-course theory provides a scholarly foundation for this idea. Parent-child relationships change with marriage, childbirth, work, illness, disability, migration, and aging. Support flows both ways over many years. Parents will provide housing, childcare, guidance, or financial help. Later, adult children provide transportation, companionship, medical coordination, and end-of-life care. These brief sentences hardly do justice to the massive amount of our lives dedicated to shifting dependency over years and decades.

The increase in our lifespans has made this even more obvious. Many adults care for children and aging parents at the same time. The term “sandwich generation” describes people caught in the middle, reaching toward two generations while trying to stay upright themselves. Research documents the exhaustion, work disruption, health burdens, and financial strain that follow. Caregivers sustain a structure society depends on, but they receive inadequate support, especially in radically libertarian and unequal societies such as the United States in the 21st century.

The diagonal mental map also affects learning and wisdom. Elders have wisdom to offer younger generations, but they must know when to yield responsibility. Younger people need to develop into leaders without treating everything inherited from the past as useless. A society can injure its future by neglecting the wisdom of the past or by failing to respect youth and their great potential.

Music, Memory, and the Diagonal of Grief

Finally, music is another underappreciated way to manifest the world we are in and shift it. I think of my mental map of the past in musical terms, with a keen sense of the diagonal shifts in my life. The voices on the radio I remember from childhood—the Righteous Brothers, the Walker Brothers, Lord Huron, and Roy Orbison—merge into a captivating moment of imagination. Their deep voices, orchestration, and special kinds of reverberation place the singers in something like a temple or an enormous empty room. Phil Spector’s “Wall of Sound,” Roy Orbison’s loneliness, and Scott Walker’s baritone belong to this emotional universe.

The cavernous quality of this genre of music was intentional. In the 1950s and 1960s, producers used echo chambers, heavy reverberation, layered instrumentation, doubled voices, strings, percussion, and unusually dense arrangements to make a three-minute pop song sound as if it occupied a space far larger than the recording studio itself. Phil Spector’s famous “Wall of Sound” pushed this technique especially far: instruments were layered upon instruments and then blended with echo until the individual sources became less important than the enormous acoustic atmosphere they created. Gold Star Studios, where much of Spector’s work was made, even had specially constructed echo chambers that helped produce that expansive sound. The Walker Brothers drew strongly from that same emotional and sonic vocabulary—the booming orchestration, deep male voices, and reverberation that make “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore” seem to arrive from some vast, half-empty interior space. Critics have explicitly connected their brooding ballads to Spector and the Righteous Brothers.

What fascinates me is that the effect did not disappear with that era. Lord Huron deliberately works in a related acoustic world, using pronounced reverb, distant voices, layered instruments, and echoes to create the sensation that a song is taking place somewhere immense and slightly unreachable; Ben Schneider has even recalled insisting to sound engineers, “I want more reverb.” The technology is different, but the psychological effect is similar: the singer does not seem to be standing a few feet from us. The voice comes across distance. It inhabits memory, loneliness, landscape, and time. That appealed to me deeply as a child, and it does so to this day.

Especially “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore,” recorded by the Walker Brothers, carries me to a haunted, lost past. When I hear it, I recover something of my position as a child: small, receptive, and looking upward toward adults who held reality together for me. That is when these songs made the deepest impression on me.

They merge with my diagonal moment of dependence on my parents. For key adults in my life, such as my mother and her mother, that time was infused with a deep depression over grievous losses that they had suffered decades before. To me, these songs somehow captured or symbolized those old wounds that I felt as if they were my own. In some ways, my mental map of the past is incomplete without this music.

Memories of grief and loss are such a central part of life that we need to confront them when trying to manifest a different, better world. The person who was held as a baby and then as a child, always secure in being loved, eventually finds a diagonal shift toward needing to care for an aging, declining world of people who were the caretakers; adults becoming the children. I witnessed dementia and grief combined when growing up, and now I do the elder care, trying as much as we can to move away from grief and toward joy, appreciation, and gratitude. So does the rest of the family.

Now the adult child is the one doing the holding, and there is loss in that, loss of a safe world of childhood. The child is now doing the holding, holding those who themselves mourned a child who died in 1934, a child I was named after. Now the child who once reached toward a parent is caring for the parent trapped in a depleted body. The parent is a vanishing protector, still mourning her little brother from 1934, whose death changed her family forever. This is just one example of diagonal relationships, diagonal grief, in just one arc of life. The world we look at every day is filled with millions of arcs of life at least as laden and complex as mine.

For me, grief and nostalgia wrap into one when I hear and remember the old music. Early music sometimes fills in as memory for what existed before I had language for what I was feeling. The echo and reverberations of that music become grief’s architecture. It makes the past sound enormous because the past was emotionally enormous.

Near the end of life, the diagonal reversals become irreversibly clear, as parents thought to be invincible when they survive to old age become shockingly dependent. And there is no going back; there is no future to look forward to as aid is given. There is only one direction, finally. The parent who fed and protected the child becomes utterly dependent. The child who once reached upward now bends downward, indebted, bewildered.

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Elder caregiving involves grieving long before death comes. We grieve the world in which our elders provided all the protection. When a parent declines, the architecture above us disappears like vapor. Earlier in life, hope and aspiration may concern education, marriage, work, children, books, and achievement. Near the end, hope becomes smaller: he walked 20 feet; he told a joke; he choked, but it was fine; she ate well today; she smiled; she was not frightened. Many good days are about enthusiastic eating, just like they felt for me a long time ago when she gave me my favorite Toll House chocolate chip cookie. There is something both terrible and sacred about life becoming this elemental. The child now feeds the mother who fed the child. Feeding the one who fed us is the final reversal of the diagonal, and it seems to bear a deeper meaning to life that remains elusive.

The song, “The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore,” then becomes more than a song of longing and love. I hear another sentence inside it: “The sun ain’t gonna shine anymore without her.” The mother is the original sun. She was warmth, food, worry, memory, irritation, and home. But she grieved so deeply, even as her mother did. A tradition of grieving as the deepest expression of the love of life, especially the life of children.

Sometimes writing is the only way I reach across time toward the person who once held my world together. The mental geography of life, the diagonal seesaw of caregiving, is something that helped me make sense of decades of elder care, parental care, and the reversal of care’s direction. What once felt like grieving music is now a familiar life arc. The mental map of elder care, and the music that evokes the early history of the entire arc, becomes the foundation of life’s meaning, life’s purpose. It becomes a direction for future life, and a commitment to a world where all the earth’s children flourish, are cared for, are safe, and, no matter the tragedies, are all beloved.

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Diagonality, Intergenerational Relations, and Caregiving

Bengtson, Vern L. “Beyond the Nuclear Family: The Increasing Importance of Multigenerational Bonds.” Journal of Marriage and Family 63, no. 1 (2001): 1–16.

Bui, Cindy N., Kyungmin Kim, and Karen L. Fingerman. “Support Now to Care Later: Intergenerational Support Exchanges and Older Parents’ Care Receipt and Expectations.” The Journals of Gerontology: Series B 77, no. 7 (2022): 1315–24.

DeRigne, LeaAnne, and Stephen Ferrante. “The Sandwich Generation: A Review of the Literature.” Florida Public Health Review 9 (2012): Article 12.

Elder, Glen H., Jr. “The Life Course as Developmental Theory.” Child Development 69, no. 1 (1998): 1–12.

Lei, Lianlian, Amanda N. Leggett, and Donovan T. Maust. “A National Profile of Sandwich Generation Caregivers Providing Care to Both Older Adults and Children.” Journal of the American Geriatrics Society 71, no. 3 (2023): 799–809.

Pashazade, Hakime, Masoomeh Maarefvand, Yadollah Abolfathi Momtaz, and Kianoush Abdi. “Coping Strategies of the Sandwich Generation in the Care Process: A Qualitative Study.” BMC Public Health 24 (2024): 3373.

Ward, Russell, Glenn Deane, and Glenna Spitze. “Life-Course Changes and Parent–Adult Child Contact.” Research on Aging 36, no. 5 (2014): 568–602.

Music, Autobiographical Memory, and Nostalgia

Barrett, Frederick S., Kevin J. Grimm, Richard W. Robins, Tim Wildschut, Constantine Sedikides, and Petr Janata. “Music-Evoked Nostalgia: Affect, Memory, and Personality.” Emotion 10, no. 3 (2010): 390–403.

Janata, Petr. “The Neural Architecture of Music-Evoked Autobiographical Memories.” Cerebral Cortex 19, no. 11 (2009): 2579–94.

The Walker Brothers. “The Sun Ain’t Gonna Shine Anymore.” Philips Records, 1966.

What We Have Learned from Studying Poverty

Let’s step back for a moment and look at what we have done. Decades of research have shown the damaging effects of poverty, which was a necessary prelude to interventions. There have been many good research questions leading to profound changes: What happens when people do not have enough food, housing security, health care, protection from violence, or any confidence that next month will be survivable? Psychologists and sociologists have studied poverty in terms of chronic stress and depression. Economists study scarcity, labor insecurity, income shocks, and mobility, all in terms of the effects of poverty. Public health research has repeatedly shown that poverty adversely affects the body. It worsens blood pressure, sleep, cardiovascular risk, developmental problems in children, and lifespans.

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Criminologists rightly study deprivation and crime increases that do not indict whole classes of people but do show why and how the increased pressure of poverty drives some people over the edge of legal obedience. Yet we have not done this kind of research with extreme wealth, just extreme poverty, which seems entirely irrational and unfair when you look at the deep causes of the wealth imbalance. Let’s then dive into the psychological dangers of extreme wealth.

Wealth can change the risk of certain character problems without defining everyone with wealth as having that condition. The literature on relative deprivation made the picture complicated because absolute want is only part of what people experience. People look around; they see who eats well and who does not, who gets protected, who has access, who receives respect. Festinger’s work on social comparison helped establish how much human beings measure themselves through other human beings. Poverty in a place where almost everybody is struggling can be psychologically different from poverty experienced within a few miles of spectacular wealth. But what does that research imply about wealthy reactions to the same comparisons? We don’t know.

We have been quite willing to ask searching questions about what happens to people at the bottom of economic comparisons. I keep wondering why the inquiry becomes so much thinner at the top.

What Happens When Ordinary Corrections Disappear?

What happens when somebody acquires enough power that the ordinary corrections of human life begin to disappear? Somebody saying no. Somebody walking away. Somebody is laughing at you. Somebody telling you that your idea is terrible. Somebody who can expose what you did without fearing that you will destroy her livelihood. Even waiting is part of this. Most of us spend a surprising amount of life waiting for people who do not care that we are waiting.

I am not suggesting that wealth produces mental illness. Some people become very rich and remain morally grounded for the rest of their lives. They keep old friends. They apologize like normal people. They hear criticism without devastating revenge. They do not lose their sense of humor about themselves. The same applies to political leaders, clergy, movement founders, and people who control large institutions. Many survive extraordinary power and maintain good relationships with family and old friends, good evidence for mental health. Some of them even seem to grow in generosity as their reach expands and as experience teaches them the terrible consequences of abuse of power that they have seen in their peers globally.

This begs the question, however. Why does one person of wealth with great power stay happily modest and unassuming, but another begins moving toward grandiosity, cruelty, entitlement, sexual exploitation, paranoia, contempt for ordinary limits? At some point, any disagreement itself can become intolerable to such aberrant personalities. Someone who once had colleagues begins to have mostly enemies, unless they are bought.

Wealth, Distance, and Insulation from Ordinary Life

Wealth does something psychologically interesting at very high levels of concentration because it can purchase distance from ordinary life. It purchases private travel, private security, private doctors, lawyers, schools, staff, residences, information flows. At a certain point, other people are employed to remove any inconvenience before you experience it. This sounds trivial and unimportant for our subject, but I disagree.

A person no longer waits for a table. He does not spend forty minutes trying to get through to a doctor’s office. He does not necessarily hear from the angry employee, or even 5000 employees, because someone else handles the employees in one of hundreds of owned companies. Problems arrive through assistants, lawyers, and chiefs of staff. A difficult person or entire labor force is moved aside or out. A painful interaction is converted into a memo. None of these changes announces itself as a psychological event each time it happens, but this gathers like a cancer-causing agent, and ten years of them may crash mental health.

Political power gets to a similar place without requiring the same amount of money. Religious authority can do it even in organizations that are not wealthy. Celebrity can do it. The founder of a social movement can experience it because people slowly become afraid of damaging something larger than themselves by challenging the person who symbolizes it. Insulation and accrued destruction of feedback mechanisms toxify a person’s character? We don’t know, but we have anecdotal evidence that something strange happens to too many people with absolute power and absolute distance.

Let’s take an example for balance from the totalitarian far left. A revolutionary leader might begin with comrades arguing around a table and end with everybody checking his expression before speaking at the risk of their lives. A spiritual teacher can move from a circle of students into something closer to a cult. The founder of a company may remember sleeping on the floor next to employees during the first year and not notice that, much later, an entire set of people is managing who gets close to him and how unpleasant information reaches him.

The Moral Value of Friction

The idea I keep coming back to is friction. I do not mean frustration as a grand psychological concept. I mean all the uneven contact between what I want and what actually happens. Other people are constantly creating friction for normal reasons. They refuse, complain, contradict, make us wait, decline invitations, leave jobs, leave marriages, have nervous breakdowns, publish criticism, vote against us, ignore us. Occasionally they humiliate us. Sometimes they simply do not care very much about us, but if we live normally, we have to deal with it as we manage frustration in our lives.

It is all useful information about our reality. The person with extreme power, however, can receive less and less of it. Keltner, Gruenfeld, and Anderson argued that power tends to activate approach behavior. People with greater power may become more attentive to rewards, more ready to act, less inhibited by threat, and somewhat less dependent on monitoring other people’s reactions (Keltner, Gruenfeld, and Anderson 2003). Some of that is necessary for leadership. A person who cannot act because every possible objection has to be resolved first will have great difficulty leading anything. But then it can be taken too far with absolute power.

Galinsky and colleagues found in experimental work that people induced to feel powerful showed reduced perspective-taking and poorer recognition of other people’s emotions (Galinsky et al. 2006). I do not think this establishes that power somehow removes empathy. It suggests another possibility that seems very familiar in ordinary life. People lower in a hierarchy often need to become better readers of the people above them. Thus, anyone without absolute power may necessarily have more emotional intelligence than those with absolute power. This can and perhaps should be seen as a handicap and a danger of super wealth, not just for the individual but for society as a whole, and perhaps even for the fate of the rule of law. We have to see this as a potential hazard to society, just as we do with extreme poverty.

Employees study employers by necessity, as do waiters watching customers. We see this with children living with an unpredictable parent, who may detect changes in mood long before anybody else does. The parent may have no idea how much attention the child is paying. Perhaps power changes the amount of attention that survival requires.

What Research Suggests About Power and Character

Piff and colleagues reported associations under some circumstances between higher social classes and their willingness to behave unethically; they identified attitudes toward greed as one possible part of the relationship (Piff et al. 2012). That literature has been argued over, and social-class research has all sorts of methodological difficulties. I would be very reluctant to build a moral theory of rich people out of it. The more useful issue is whether social position can alter opportunity and perception enough to affect behavior independently of someone’s original personality.

David Owen and Jonathan Davidson proposed something different, a ‘hubris syndrome’. They asked whether prolonged exposure to enormous political power could produce some change in personality: exaggerated confidence, contempt for counsel, preoccupation with image, identification with the nation, and a conviction that ordinary judgments no longer quite apply (Owen and Davidson 2009). Hubris syndrome is not an accepted psychiatric diagnosis, but historians have described something similar. The stories about Nero and Caligula are full of violence, sexual license, theatricality, cruelty, and the humiliation of subordinates. Some of those historical sources were hostile and politically motivated. They are not clinical records. Still, people in very different societies repeatedly noticed something about rulers who had become almost impossible to contradict.

Extreme Power as an Exposure and a Public Health Risk

I think we should study extremely concentrated power the way we study other diseases, and their risks to mental and physical health. We can also see this as occupational hazards. A miner inhales dust. Emergency room staff see catastrophic injuries all the time, and we look for danger in that.. A police officer may become hypervigilant. We do not say that every miner, surgeon, or police officer develops the same problem. We ask whether an exposure changes probability over time.

There might be useful ways of measuring power exposure that have almost nothing to do with net worth. How many years has a person lived without significant contradictions coming from any colleagues or superiors? How many people around her depend on her financially? Can an employee say “you are wrong” without calculating the consequences first? Can a partner leave without fearing economic ruin or professional damage? Does a board member remain genuinely independent? Are there people in the person’s immediate environment who have nothing to gain from keeping him pleased? Their simple net worth would not answer those questions. Power, like money, in itself cannot be treated as pathological. Doctors, parents, teachers, all require authority to execute their responsibilities. There is nothing inherently corrupting about the ability to act with power. The issue gets more complicated when the consequences of acting badly become fewer and fewer.

Opportunity, Personality, and the Loss of Consequences

Moral psychology often puts great emphasis on the ethics of intention and the effects of personality. We want to identify the cruel person, the narcissist, the person who enjoys domination. But who has the opportunity to even test that? Maybe we need to measure how much opportunity to express those traits comes from vast power and financial changes. Most people carry impulses they do not act on because they know something will happen if they do. What if consequences become fewer and fewer?

A key question is whether unchecked power and money can produce destructive behavior rather than simply uncovering bad personality traits. A person may have tendencies toward narcissism or exploitation before obtaining power. That person may also enter an environment that steadily rewards those tendencies. Perhaps the personality and the environment begin working on each other.

There is good reason to think that some narcissistic or dominance-seeking people are especially attracted to power in the first place. Qualities associated with narcissism can look quite attractive during ascent: confidence, boldness, charisma, a willingness to make large claims, unusual persistence in putting oneself forward. These traits can help people rise. The question is what happens when the person who already has them reaches a place where fewer people can say no.

Still, plenty of powerful people do not deteriorate into brutal or criminal behavior. Trevor Foulk’s review of power research argues against the simple idea that power always corrupts. Personality, setting, goals, social norms, and the meaning attached to power affect the outcome (Foulk 2020). Extraordinary power can also make extraordinary generosity possible. In some cases it clearly increases somebody’s felt responsibility rather than reducing it.

How Do the Powerful Learn Restraint?

This is where I think conflict analysis should become more engaged with the behavior of the super wealthy. Our field has spent decades asking how people who have been excluded or silenced can acquire power through nonviolent means. But how do people with great power learn restraint if external restraint is nowhere to be found? How can we study which people do not become tyrants despite the opportunity to do so?

For most people, freedom from unnecessary constraints is desirable. The person who has accumulated extraordinary freedom from consequences may have to think differently about constraint. Success can remove structures that were doing useful moral work. When are social constraints critical to nonviolent progress, conflict prevention and conflict management?

What happens when somebody lives for twenty or thirty years with fewer and fewer consequences? Does duration change personality? What happens when wealth combines with celebrity? What happens when political power is joined to religious sanctification? Does sexual exploitation become more likely where dependency is high? Can years of deference produce grandiosity in somebody who was not initially very grandiose?

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There are many interesting questions to ponder as we look for better safeguards on wealth. Which friendships survive wealth? Which institutional arrangements actually restrain leaders? Do some religious practices help and others make things worse? Does repeated contact with ordinary life protect people? We should know more about powerful people who had many opportunities for abuse and did not use them.

There is enough here for psychologists, sociologists, historians, anthropologists, and organizational scholars to approach the question very differently and creatively, each from their own vantage points. Anthropology alone contains enormous material about societies that created rituals around chiefs, elders, patrons, priests, and kings. History provides long cases that experimental psychology cannot reproduce. Organizational studies can examine how institutions gradually become courts.

The Conflict Resolution Question

Conflict resolution has another question because eventually all of this enters relationships. How do we construct forms of authority, wealth, and influence that allow people to accomplish extraordinary things without slowly making it harder for them to perceive the humanity of the people around them?

Restoring Contradiction and Honest Information

Perhaps there is an inherent value, from a mental and public health perspective, in every human person having somebody who can actually say no. Not somebody whose job description says “independent adviser” but whose livelihood depends on continued access. Perhaps mental health, public health, and social cohesion require that there have to be people who can contradict the powerful without immediately getting themselves fired or worse.

Information hygiene may be an important safeguard to power as well. Information has to reach the top without being completely sanitized. That is bad information, and it may make for bad behavior. If twenty people filter somebody’s suffering before the leader hears about it, what reaches the leader may be technically accurate and psychologically useless. There is a difference between being told that employees are afraid and experiencing a room in which people are visibly afraid to speak.

Compassionate Reasoning and the Problem of Power

Let me introduce Compassionate Reasoning analysis here, which I have developed in my OUP book of the same name. Compassionate Reasoning is an interdisciplinary framework for decision-making that integrates compassion-led thinking with principled moral reasoning, consequential analysis, and future-oriented calculations to identify shared principles and practices that lead to the best possible future moral outcomes.

Compassion is perhaps an essential part of a healthy society, but it is threatened by absolute power or absolute wealth. Compassionate Reasoning in this setting becomes an attempt to recover information that a hierarchy may hide or distort before it reaches the super-wealthy or powerful.

Training in Compassionate Reasoning for those who are or may become powerful, such as a CEO or a political leader, might suggest a set of cognitive practices and scenario analyses that repair some of the built-in handicaps of too much wealth or power. Training might help the person learn to ask many questions. For example, who will be affected by my decisions? Who is frightened of me? Who has learned that showing fear is dangerous? Who pays if I am wrong? Which people around me have a material interest in my being shielded from unpleasant information? Am I the cause of this insulation, and if so, exactly how? Which people are free to tell me the whole complicated truth about my actions? Which voices are no longer in the room due to my increased power?

Building Safeguards Around Power

Another question can be useful that involves empathic exchange. For example, would I behave this way if the other person possessed as much power as I do? This forces attention to every power asymmetry. Institutions need to do more than hope that powerful people remain virtuous. Boards can retain meaningful dissent. Junior employees can have reporting channels outside the ordinary hierarchy. Leaders can be evaluated anonymously from below. Founders can be prevented from turning boards gradually into circles of people whose careers depend on them.

Religious organizations require particular caution because money, sexual license, and spiritual authority have become notoriously entangled, historically speaking. A believer may experience criticism of the leader as criticism of the faith itself. An institution can become quite dangerous once ordinary disagreement has been converted into betrayal or loss of faith.

Very wealthy families might teach children about these problems before they inherit control. They already teach trusts, philanthropy, tax planning and asset protection. Why not teach the psychology of self-examination and compassion? A young person who suddenly possesses far more money than everybody around him should probably understand that agreement itself can become unreliable information. The safeguards will never be perfect, but that is a good reason to start building and experimenting, just as we have done with antipoverty programs and safeguards.

A Compassionate Reasoning methodology of intervention or education would not be a guarantee of responsible behavior, but it might build obstacles into his environment. Independent people whom a leader cannot casually remove. Employees who can report around her. Friends who do not need her money. Unfiltered encounters with people affected by his decisions. Some part of life in which other people are not treating him as the central figure. There is no institutional arrangement that eliminates human weakness. But it is time to build financial and political institutions around the assumption that success may negatively affect human psychology and increase the possibility of dangerous misuse of power. The psychopathology of power is not built into every person, but perhaps it can become so the more constraints are lost by extreme forms of wealth and power.

Acquiring Power and Surviving Power

We need to engage more historians and biographers to study the ways in which healthy forms of power are managed, versus the times and circumstances in which power becomes damaging. We have become much more sophisticated about the harms caused by too little power. Civil rights, fair access to resources, legal protections and political representation are among the great achievements of modern moral and political life as a response to too little money and power in certain classes of people. Much of this work remains unfinished. But there is another human problem at the other end. I am increasingly convinced that acquiring power and surviving power are different human problems. Extreme concentrations of wealth and power deserve to be studied as a psychological and social hazard in their own right.

Compassionate Reasoning matters here because it can be trained against some of the negative psychological habits that great power may encourage. A person with enormous power can become increasingly absorbed in his own purposes, surrounded by people who accommodate him, accustomed to getting what he wants, and less exercised by the consequences for people he does not know. The answer cannot simply be to tell such a person to be nicer. Compassion training has to become a repeated practice of extending concern beyond the self and beyond the people whose approval or loyalty already matters to him.

The practice in compassion also requires moral reasoning. Powerful people need to be trained to ask what principles should apply even when those principles obstruct their own interests, and to calculate consequences beyond the immediate success of a decision. Who is harmed by this? What happens to people with no leverage? What happens five years from now? Are there obligations toward people I dislike, people who oppose me, people I will never meet?

Repetition matters because the danger is not only a bad decision. It is the gradual formation of a person for whom indifference, humiliation, domination, or even cruelty becomes easier. Compassionate Reasoning is meant to push development in the other direction, until concern for the welfare of others, including people outside one’s own circle, becomes part of the habitual way a powerful person thinks.

In very privileged classes of people, there is only one point of access to instill these values: education, from K-12 and university. If we want our civilizations to survive unprecedented concentrations of wealth and power, it is past time that we make this kind of compassion and moral education essential to academic success.

Bibliography

Foulk, Trevor A. 2020. “Power Corrupts (or Does It?): An Examination of the Boundary Conditions of the Antisocial Effects of Experienced Power.” Social and Personality Psychology Compass 14.

Galinsky, Adam D., Joe C. Magee, M. Ena Inesi, and Deborah H. Gruenfeld. 2006. “Power and Perspectives Not Taken.” Psychological Science 17 (12): 1068–1074.

Guinote, Ana. 2017. “How Power Affects People: Activating, Wanting, and Goal Seeking.” Annual Review of Psychology 68: 353–381.

Keltner, Dacher, Deborah H. Gruenfeld, and Cameron Anderson. 2003. “Power, Approach, and Inhibition.” Psychological Review 110 (2): 265–284.

Luthar, Suniya S. 2003. “The Culture of Affluence: Psychological Costs of Material Wealth.” Child Development 74 (6): 1581–1593.

Luthar, Suniya S., and Bronwyn E. Becker. 2002. “Privileged but Pressured? A Study of Affluent Youth.” Child Development 73 (5): 1593–1610.

Luthar, Suniya S., and Samuel H. Barkin. 2012. “Are Affluent Youth Truly ‘At Risk’? Vulnerability and Resilience Across Three Diverse Samples.” Development and Psychopathology 24 (2): 429–449.

Owen, David, and Jonathan Davidson. 2009. “Hubris Syndrome: An Acquired Personality Disorder? A Study of US Presidents and UK Prime Ministers over the Last 100 Years.” Brain 132 (5): 1396–1406.

Piff, Paul K., Daniel M. Stancato, Stéphane Côté, Rodolfo Mendoza-Denton, and Dacher Keltner. 2012. “Higher Social Class Predicts Increased Unethical Behavior.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 109 (11): 4086–4091.

Dougall, Isla, Milica Vasiljevic, Jack D. Wright, and Mario Weick. 2024. “How, When, and Why Is Social Class Linked to Mental Health and Wellbeing? A Systematic Meta-Review.” Social Science & Medicine 343: 116542.

We are overwhelmed these days in our attempts to understand the authoritarian power of malignant narcissism, wilful cruelty, and sadistic conquest. These have become key features of the major superpower leaders of this decade, and this leaves millions of us sleepless and worried for the future for good reason. This serious situation is not as new as it …

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The greatest obstacle to peacebuilding is not hatred. It is the widespread, unexamined belief that people can never change. For more than forty years, I have spent my professional life working between enemies. During that time, I have heard every imaginable explanation for why peace is impossible. Political leaders always blame a chosen enemy. Vote for me, and I will set you free from them. Religious leaders blame false gods of enemies. Citizens blame propaganda. Victims blame perpetrators, and perpetrators blame victims. Each explanation contains a measure of truth. Yet beneath almost every conversation lies a deeper assumption that is rarely examined because it has become almost invisible.

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People never change, it is often said. Once someone has become an extremist, he will remain an extremist. Once a society has embraced hatred, it will always embrace hatred. Once an enemy, always an enemy. We hear these assumptions expressed in countless forms. Russians will always submit to authoritarianism. Palestinians will always hate Israelis. Israelis will always oppress Palestinians. Republicans and Democrats can never understand one another. Religious fanatics cannot reform. Racists remain racists forever.

Generalizations are never supported by evidence, but they are usually conclusions based on mistaken beliefs and loss of hope in others. Sometimes they are born of an escape from responsibility, even if they were not true. Yet they profoundly shape our politics because they eliminate the very possibility upon which peacebuilding depends. If people cannot change, then dialogue becomes pointless, education becomes naïve, reconciliation becomes fantasy, and coercion becomes the only remaining instrument of history. The remarkable fact is that an extraordinary body of historical evidence contradicts this assumption.

History Is the Story of Moral Change

History is often taught as a succession of wars, revolutions, and political struggles. Yet another way of reading history is to recognize it as the record of repeated transformations in what large numbers of human beings considered morally acceptable.

Crimes against humanity once defended as natural eventually became unthinkable. Slavery, public torture, child labor, dueling, legally enforced racial segregation, the exclusion of women from public life, religious persecution, and countless other institutions were abandoned because people did change what seemed natural. They were abandoned because millions of people gradually altered their moral judgments.

The evidence of history contradicts the fatalistic belief that people never change. The radical changes in civilizations from one decade to the next are evidence that human beings repeatedly reconsider what they believe, what they tolerate, and how they wish to live together. Progress is never inevitable, and regression is always possible and happens regularly. Still, neither the positive nor negative eventualities make sense unless moral transformation itself is real, and that people change morally for the worse but also for the better.

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Germany: Twenty Years That Changed the Moral Landscape

Let’s take the example of Germany between 1940 and 1960. In 1940, millions of Germans supported, accommodated or failed to resist one of history’s most destructive examples of fascism. Certainly, a plurality voted for a maniacal, homicidal leader filled with hatred. The Third Reich had organized an entire society around racial hierarchy, authoritarian obedience, military conquest, and systematic persecution. These commitments were not confined to a handful of leaders. They were embedded within schools, youth organizations, workplaces, churches, bureaucracies, universities, and ordinary neighborhoods.

By 1960, the same nation turned into a constitutional democracy committed to elections, the rule of law, peaceful cooperation with former enemies, human rights for minorities, and participation in the emerging European project. The transformation was incomplete. Former Nazis still occupied positions of influence. Antisemitism had not disappeared, and there was some justice but not much for victims of the Holocaust. Public acknowledgment of the Holocaust developed slowly. Many individuals changed their behavior before changing their convictions, while others never changed at all.

Germany did not experience a miraculous conversion. It underwent a transformation brought about by military defeat, institutional reconstruction, democratic education, constitutional reform, economic recovery, international integration, and generational change. This in turn led to many new relationships that transformed old habits. Millions of the adults living peacefully in democratic West Germany during the 1950s had themselves lived under Hitler only a decade earlier. The same people became capable of different political lives; this contradicts the claim that human commitments are fixed. I also remember that several German citizens came up to me in Europe at different times and personally apologized for the Holocaust. Sometimes it was quite astonishing and touching. An old German woman once sat me down in Switzerland in the 1990s at a piano and started playing a Jewish song, looking at me. She would say this, I learned from my Jewish neighbor, and she looked at me intensely with apology in her eyes. I knew what she was saying to me.

Moral Transformations Without Violence

Germany is only one example of twentieth-century transformations that would once have seemed impossible to believe. For example, millions of Americans changed their attitudes toward interracial marriage from rejection during the 1950s to a much greater degree of acceptance within 30 years. Public acceptance of legal segregation started to change radically for millions of people across the country. It was a bitter, complicated struggle, but eventually integration became natural for a majority of Americans. Women’s participation in higher education, professional life, and political leadership expanded beyond anything imagined by earlier generations. Smoking moved from a socially celebrated habit, romanticized in film, to one increasingly regarded as a public health danger requiring smokers to become segregated and isolated outdoors. Domestic violence, once dismissed as a private family matter, became widely recognized as a serious crime. Physical punishment of children, once regarded as ordinary discipline, has increasingly become repudiated by science and by hundreds of millions of parents.

These transformations did not occur because an entirely new population replaced the old one. Millions of individuals changed their minds. Others changed their behavior because institutions, laws, and social expectations demanded it, and they obeyed new laws. Their children then internalized principles that their parents had accepted only reluctantly. The same is true of attitudes in Western countries toward homosexuality. The mechanisms differed from case to case, but the underlying fact remained constant. Human beings repeatedly revised deeply held moral assumptions. People repent of past behavior, and sometimes the change is very subtle and unspoken. A man once came up to me in Europe at a conference, looked me dead in the eye, and said, “I was a border guard in World War 2 on the Swiss border.” He looked at me intently, knowing full well that I knew the story of many thousands of Jews who were prevented from entering Switzerland and were then killed by the Nazis. He was apologizing; he was in deep remorse, and he was committed to a completely changed society.

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Former Enemies Becoming Partners

The phenomenon of peacebuilding as a human passion offers some of the strongest evidence for moral transformation. France and Germany fought repeated wars over generations before becoming the central partnership within the European Union. This took the active efforts of hundreds of thousands of former warriors working together in businesses and constant planning meetings. Protestants and Catholics in Northern Ireland moved from centuries of oppression and political violence toward institutions of shared government. Former IRA members, who once committed terroristic acts, entered democratic politics. Survivors of the bombings and killings actually met with perpetrators, and there were thousands of Catholics and Protestants working together for peace and shared prosperity by the 1990s. I remember being overwhelmed and moved when I spoke to a packed conference in Belfast in 1997 that was called the Boundaries and Bonds Conference, exploring how boundaries are a part of who we are but so are bonds. I could not believe the courage and creativity of hundreds of people at that conference alone. Religious leaders were never strongly associated with the conflict in Northern Ireland, but it helped that increasingly bold ministers and priests repudiated language that had once inflamed conflict. Communities that had defined themselves against each other through fear and hate slowly developed cooperation around practical interests. From Nigeria to Syria to Israel and Palestine, I have witnessed and learned from enemies who actually developed partnership and love.

None of these stories is a perfect exemplar of the best in humanity, as Prejudices have survived and sometimes metastasized. Trauma has remained even though great efforts have gone into addressing past trauma. Therapy for trauma and past pain has become increasingly acceptable as well, which few would have thought possible a few generations ago. If it were not so prohibitively expensive, far more people would be managing their anger and grievances through counseling. Violence occasionally returns. Yet perfection is not the standard by which people’s capacity for change should be judged. The relevant question is whether individuals and societies became capable of relationships that had previously appeared impossible. Again and again, the answer is yes.

What Science Has Learned About Human Change

Modern psychology and neuroscience have reached conclusions remarkably consistent with these historical observations. The adult brain is not fixed, unlike what was thought in previous generations, from Freud to Skinner, and what was preceded by religiously false beliefs in the inherently damned nature of children or women or people of color or Jews. Neuroplasticity demonstrates that experience, practice, relationships, and intentional reflection continuously reshape neural pathways throughout life. Character is neither infinitely malleable nor permanently frozen.

Building moral habits designed for future flourishing can change personal history and can change whole societies. The great wisdom traditions were never wrong about this. We are the ones who have not taken habits seriously, ignoring the wisdom of many civilizations that a good deal of education and training must be focused on moral habits. The research has shown that repetition shapes the evolution of character and identity, and that, through leadership, this evolution often affects millions of others who learn from these new habits. Studies of moral development show that adults continue to develop greater cognitive complexity throughout life. There have been decades of work and research on intergroup contact that demonstrate that some kinds of contact, what I argue is deep relationship building, reduces prejudice under appropriate conditions. Research on compassion training has shown measurable changes in emotional regulation, resilience, and prosocial behavior. Gratitude is not just a virtue; it is a practice people can engage in, and when they do, their mental health improves. People can and do change with such habits. Perspective-taking is another trainable habit, and so is disciplined self-reflection, which is fundamental to my own teachings and practices of conflict healing. All appear capable of strengthening psychological capacities essential to moral reasoning. Science therefore reaches a conclusion that echoes the wisdom traditions. Human beings become what they repeatedly practice. One could argue that this article in and of itself is an exercise in self-reflection. I am asking every person to look within and ask whether they really do believe that people never change, or whether there is an unexamined belief or wound that prompts a denial of the plain evidence all around us that people do change.

Why Polarization Depends Upon Fatalism

The tendency to polarize and fragment is quite persistent in humans. Polarization of attitudes survives by persuading us that other people possess permanent moral identities. It encourages us to confuse a person’s present convictions with his permanent character. Once that confusion takes hold, every disagreement becomes existential. There is little reason to persuade those who are incapable of learning. There is little reason to negotiate with those whose future has already been decided. Public humiliation becomes preferable to patient engagement because humiliation assumes that redemption is impossible.

This mentality of proxy warfare through humiliation and campaigns against opposing groups becomes self-fulfilling in terms of tribes of hate. We have yet to learn, as humanity, that investing in education, dialogue, institutions, and relationships capable of fostering transformation is essential for human growth and peaceful coexistence. We don’t see the need often because we naturally observe very little transformation in our limited lifespans. We generalize about others and miss the opportunity for change, the necessity of change, and the danger of not doing so. We then mistake the consequences of our own pessimism for evidence that pessimism was correct all along. History repeatedly demonstrates the opposite lesson. People often change because societies deliberately create conditions that make change more likely.

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Compassionate Reasoning Begins with Possibility

I developed the ethical methodology of Compassionate Reasoning, but it has never depended upon the belief that everyone is secretly good. History offers far too much evidence of cruelty, fanaticism, and moral blindness for such naïveté. Rather, Compassionate Reasoning suggests simply that human beings possess the capacity for reflection, self-criticism, learning, repentance, and moral growth. That capacity is neither automatic nor universal, but it is clearly possible and has happened again and again. It is sufficiently widespread to explain nearly every significant moral advance in human history.

Peacebuilding is the practical science of encouraging the clearly present but dormant capacities for moral transformations that all human civilizations possess. Compassionate Reasoning is an ethical methodology that asks what institutions, educational systems, leadership styles, community relationships, and personal practices can and do often increase the likelihood that individuals and societies will choose cooperation over domination, reflection over propaganda, and shared humanity over tribal certainty. We cannot even ask that question until we abandon the illusion that people never change.

The Evidence We Must Continue to Gather

One historical example can always be dismissed as exceptional. Ten examples begin to suggest a pattern. Fifty carefully documented examples require us to reconsider our understanding of human nature.

This is one of the great unfinished tasks before scholars of peacebuilding. We need a systematic body of evidence documenting societies, institutions, communities, and individuals who have undergone significant moral transformation. We need to identify not only that change occurred but how it occurred, under what conditions, over what period of time, and through which combinations of accountability, education, relationships, leadership, and institutional reform.

Such a project would do more than enrich academic knowledge. It would challenge one of the most destructive assumptions of our age. Every carefully documented case weakens the fatalistic conviction that enemies remain enemies forever. Every example enlarges the realm of political imagination. History has already answered the question of whether people can change. The real question is whether we are willing to learn from the evidence.

Selected References

Allport, Gordon W. The Nature of Prejudice. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley, 1954.

Bandura, Albert. Social Learning Theory. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice-Hall, 1977.

Doidge, Norman. The Brain That Changes Itself. New York: Viking, 2007.

Dweck, Carol S. Mindset: The New Psychology of Success. New York: Random House, 2006.

Gallup. “Approval of Interracial Marriage at New High.” 2021.

Haidt, Jonathan. The Righteous Mind: Why Good People Are Divided by Politics and Religion. New York: Pantheon, 2012.

Kegan, Robert. In Over Our Heads: The Mental Demands of Modern Life. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994.

Klimecki, Olga M., et al. “Functional Neural Plasticity and Associated Changes in Positive Affect After Compassion Training.” Cerebral Cortex 23, no. 7 (2013): 1552–1561.

Merritt, Richard L., and Anna J. Merritt, eds. Public Opinion in Occupied Germany: The OMGUS Surveys, 1945–1949. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1970.

Pinker, Steven. The Better Angels of Our Nature. New York: Viking, 2011.

Singer, Tania, and Olga M. Klimecki. “Empathy and Compassion.” Current Biology 24, no. 18 (2014): R875–R878.

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More than sixty years ago, Hannah Arendt gave the modern world one of its most influential moral ideas: the banality of evil. Reporting on the trial of Adolf Eichmann, she argued that extraordinary evil need not arise only from extraordinary monsters. It can emerge from ordinary people who surrender their moral judgment to bureaucracy, ideology, careerism, and obedience. Evil, she suggested, is often frighteningly mundane. Her insight remains indispensable. Yet I have increasingly come to believe that it is only half of the story.

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By the banality of goodness, I do not mean that goodness is trivial or commonplace. I mean that the capacity for extraordinary goodness belongs not only to saints, prophets, or highly educated heroes, but to ordinary human beings. If ordinary people are capable of participating in extraordinary evil, they are equally capable of participating in extraordinary acts of compassion and moral courage. The same ordinariness that makes evil possible also makes goodness universally available. The difficulty is that we have spent far more time studying one possibility that emerges from leading cultural and political figures than the other possibility from among ordinary people. In so doing, we limit our imaginations and our educational vision.

There is more than one kind of saintly human that stands up heroically to our unfortunate human habit of conformity and obedience. Modern psychology has produced an extraordinary literature on obedience, conformity, authoritarianism, propaganda, bystander behavior, and moral disengagement. These studies have taught us crucial lessons and cautionary observations about our nature. Yet they have also left many people with an unintended impression: that, under sufficient pressure, ordinary people almost inevitably become obedient, passive instruments of bureaucratized moral catastrophe. But that is not true.

History tells another story when investigated completely, one filled with ordinary women and men who have quietly disrupted the machinery of evil. They were teachers, engineers, nurses, diplomats, accountants, police officers, soldiers, civil servants, business owners, railway workers, and neighbors. They rarely commanded armies against tyranny like a George Washington, or addressed great crowds like a Gandhi or a King, nor resisted at great risk with writing like a Bonhoeffer. Most never became famous, and yet by quietly refusing to surrender their conscience, they altered the lives of countless others.

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The Third Way

Anton Schmid was one of them. At the outset of World War II, Schmid was an Austrian electrician who rose to the rank of sergeant in the German Wehrmacht. Stationed in occupied Lithuania during the Holocaust, he did not confront the Nazi system through public speeches or organized rebellion. Instead, once tracing the evidence and becoming aware that all the Jewish workers were being worked to death and sent to death camps, he employed the tools already at his disposal. He arranged work permits, forged documents, organized military transportation, found safe houses, and manipulated bureaucratic procedures to rescue Jews from certain death.

Schmid’s instruments of saving innocent lives were not speeches or demonstrations but bureaucratic paperwork, logistics, relationships, and practical intelligence. These were all the tools of the banal bureaucracy of death exposed by Arendt. But this saintly man quietly redirected that very machinery entrusted to him so that it served life rather than death.

At first glance, there seemed to be nothing extraordinary about Anton Schmid. Born in Vienna in 1900 to a devout working-class Catholic family, the son of a baker whose parents had come from Nikolsburg in Moravia, he apprenticed as an electrician and eventually opened a small electrical business. He was not known as an intellectual, a prolific reader, or a political thinker. Those who knew him remembered a practical, hardworking man whose life revolved around family, work, and the quiet obligations of his Catholic faith. Yet perhaps we too readily assume that moral wisdom belongs primarily to the highly educated or culturally sophisticated. Schmid reminds us that profound ethical maturity may emerge just as naturally from ordinary family life, honest work, religious conviction, and daily habits of responsibility.

Anton Schmid’s upbringing also illustrates a lesson repeatedly confirmed by modern social psychology: sustained human contact is one of the most powerful antidotes to prejudice. Growing up in Vienna’s Brigittenau district, where Jews and Christians lived side by side, Schmid knew Jewish shopkeepers, tradespeople, customers, and neighbors long before Nazi ideology sought to label Jews as hated vermin. The people whom propaganda later defined as inhuman had already become, in his experience, fellow human beings. Even before the war, after the Nazi annexation of Austria, he reportedly intervened when a youth was vandalizing a Jewish-owned shop and later helped Jewish acquaintances escape persecution.

In retrospect, the moral decision Schmid made in the war zone of Lithuania had not begun there at all. He prepared for this for many years through ordinary acts of neighborliness, habits of decency, and relationships that made it impossible for him to forget the humanity of those whom others had learned to dehumanize. History remembers the heroic moments of larger-than-life figures. It often overlooks the ordinary life that makes heroic moments much more present in human nature, despite the agonizing pressure of compulsion and obedience.

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The more I have reflected on Schmid’s life in these past few days, the more I have come to believe that it represents something larger than the courage of one remarkable individual. It reveals an overlooked form of moral action.

Extraordinary figures have long dominated our moral imagination. We rightly honor Gandhi, Martin Luther King Jr., Nelson Mandela, Václav Havel, Sophie Scholl, and countless others whose courage transformed history. Their lives deserve our deepest admiration. Yet there is an unintended consequence to teaching goodness primarily through giants.

Most people do not imagine themselves becoming Gandhi or King. They will never write volumes and inspire millions. Their courage seems almost beyond the reach of ordinary humans. We admire them profoundly, but admiration does not necessarily produce imitation. What if our current cultural approach to heroes and the heroic life inspires us while, at the same time, persuading us that we could never become like those heroes??

Schmid offers another possibility. He did not think primarily like a prophet but rather an engineer. He did not ask how to awaken the conscience of millions. He asked a simpler question: What can I do with the simple skills and areas of control that I have in my life?

The answer did not require extraordinary charisma but practical ingenuity. His ticket to Heaven, to immortality, was made of simpler stuff, namely, the simple, elegant transformation of neutral bureaucracy into a scheme of compassion.

This distinction becomes especially important when confronting different forms of tyranny. Some political systems still possess a public conscience that individuals or groups can awaken through disciplined nonviolent resistance. Others literally murder public dissent almost immediately, as is often the case in totalitarian disasters, both fascist and communist. Against genocidal or totalitarian regimes, open resistance may simply guarantee one’s death without saving a single life.

The reality of tyranny invites another ethical possibility. Between passive obedience and public martyrdom lies a third way: the ethics of bureaucratic creativity and hidden rescue.

The Ethics of Hidden Rescue

The great wisdom traditions East and West, North and South, have long recognized that we possess moral obligations not only toward others but toward ourselves. Judaism, for example, does not regard preserving one’s own life as selfishness. On the contrary, safeguarding one’s health and preserving one’s life are themselves supreme religious ethical obligations. Yet the Jewish Torah also commands: “You shall not stand idly by the blood of your neighbor (Leviticus 19:16). At first glance, these two obligations clearly conflict in extreme contexts. If preserving one’s own life requires unquestioning obedience to murderous authority, morality could collapse into cowardice. Yet if every effort to save another requires immediate self-sacrifice, then the obligation to preserve one’s own life becomes almost impossible to fulfill. This kind of dilemma is well known in the relatively underdeveloped ethical literature of “lifeboat ethics”. But I don’t think enough of us regularly and dispassionately examine these horrific choices because it is rather horrible to contemplate. So we delay choices like this until it is too late to study them ethically and rationally.

Hidden rescue rejects both passive obedience and unnecessary self-destruction. It asks not only whether we are willing to die for another human being but whether we are clever enough to remain alive and still save many others.

The ethics of hidden rescue suggests that secrecy, prudence, and trickery are not expressions of fear but a moral responsibility to yourself and to your fellow human beings in trouble. Every additional day of life may become another day of forged papers, another family protected, another child hidden, another intervention, and another opportunity to treasure all human lives.

Anton Schmid did not seek martyrdom. He sought moral consistency in protecting innocent life. His tragic execution in 1942 does not diminish that truth. His purpose had always been to continue rescuing people for as long as circumstances allowed, and he lived a life of secret heroism to its fullest for as long as he could.

Perhaps a lesson is that compassion for the endangered, without the wisdom of self-care and self-preservation, can become self-defeating. But wisdom without compassion becomes indifference. The highest moral life joins the two.

This understanding also resonates deeply with my own experience. After more than forty years working in peacebuilding, I have become convinced that many of the most important acts of moral courage never become public. They consist of discreet introductions, confidential conversations, carefully timed interventions, bureaucratic adjustments, institutional redesigns, and relationships patiently cultivated over years. In extreme situations of violence, they also involve many people who, like Schmid, double-deal while undermining tyranny in quiet ways, and while quietly helping refugees and other victims. These acts of courage rarely appear in newspapers because they often prevent tragedies that never come to light. The absence of catastrophe seldom makes headlines. Yet preventing catastrophe is among the highest forms of public service. And saving a few lives here and there does not seem spectacular enough for history books and movies. But saving a single life is saving an entire world of one person’s history, lineage, and a precious future.

Ordinary People Quietly Change the Course of History

Perhaps this is why stories like Anton Schmid’s deserve a far more central place in our imaginations for a better human future. They enlarge our sense of what is possible, of what human beings could be and do as they haltingly evolve into a kinder future.

They remind us that goodness is not reserved for saints, prophets, or Nobel laureates. It can emerge from ordinary competence faithfully applied to extraordinary circumstances. Every special set of human skills possesses its own equivalent of Schmid’s work permit. Every occupation contains opportunities to redirect a harmful process, challenge an unjust decision, protect a vulnerable person, build an unexpected relationship, or quietly weaken a destructive system. This, I believe, is the true meaning of the banality of goodness.

Goodness becomes historically powerful not because extraordinary people occasionally perform extraordinary deeds, but because ordinary people, through their moral reasoning and calculations, repeatedly transform ordinary responsibilities into opportunities for compassion. History changes not only through dramatic revolutions. It also changes through thousands of quiet decisions that never appear in textbooks. If we want to strengthen and magnify this human capacity for the good, then we need to revamp our educational system to reflect the lessons of banal goodness and humble heroism.

The modern citizen has been taught two contradictory stories. One says that history belongs to presidents, dictators, billionaires, generals, celebrities, and charismatic leaders. The other persuades ordinary people that they are largely spectators, capable of reacting to history but rarely capable of shaping it. Both stories are incomplete because the opposite of evil is not simply goodness. The opposite of evil is morally awakened agency in the millions of us.

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Anton Schmid possessed neither wealth, political power, nor public influence. He possessed something far more widely distributed: practical intelligence, professional competence, relationships, a conscience that refused to surrender itself to authority, and the wily ability to circumvent unjust systems. In other words, he possessed exactly the resources already available to millions of ordinary people today.

That is why his story belongs so profoundly to the twenty-first century. We now inhabit a world of more than eight billion human beings, connected through institutions and networks unlike anything previous generations could have imagined. Power still accumulates in the hands of leaders who often neither deserve nor wisely exercise the authority entrusted to them. Yet the capacity of billions of ordinary citizens to influence institutions, circumvent injustice, reshape relationships, create new norms, and subtly and safely redirect the course of events has never been greater.

The future may depend less upon discovering better heroes than upon multiplying millions of moral actors. This essay is therefore a celebration of the average person—not average in moral aspiration, but average in circumstance. History is also in their hands, not just in the hands of elites and the famous few.

The question is not whether such people will become famous. The question is whether they will use their skills and the authority already entrusted to them to make their fellow human beings safer and freer, no matter the limitations of the political systems in which they find themselves.

The lesson is this: great moral acts are usually the fruit of years of unnoticed character formation rather than sudden heroics. And history should no longer be narrated as the work of heroes but as the cumulative achievement of morally awakened ordinary people. Popular history remembers the heroic moment, but it often overlooks the ordinary decent lives that made the moments possible.

The greatest challenge of the twenty-first century, then, is not simply to restrain the extraordinary power of those at the top. It is to awaken the extraordinary moral power already present within ordinary people. The future may depend more upon millions of remarkable neighbors who never become famous, who secretly refuse to surrender either their conscience or their compassion, and who discover that the ordinary skills they already possess can and will become instruments of moral transformation. That is the true banality of goodness, and that is how ordinary people change the course of history.

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Selected References

1. Arendt, Hannah. Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil. New York: Viking Press, 1963; rev. ed., New York: Penguin Classics, 2006. Arendt examines Eichmann’s surrender of independent judgment to ideology, administrative routine, careerism, and obedience. “Banality of goodness” deliberately answers and complements this formulation rather than rejecting it. Penguin Random House

2. Wette, Wolfram. Feldwebel Anton Schmid: Ein Held der Humanität. Frankfurt am Main: S. Fischer, 2013. This is the major scholarly biography of Anton Schmid. Wette reconstructs Schmid’s ordinary Viennese life, his service in the Wehrmacht, his rescue activities in Vilna, his cooperation with Jewish resistance figures, and his execution in April 1942. It is presently available primarily in German, but it is the strongest single source for the life around which your essay is built. Wikipedia

3. Yad Vashem. “Anton Schmid.” The Righteous Among the Nations. Jerusalem: Yad Vashem.This authoritative biographical account documents Schmid’s protection of Hermann and Anita Adler, his use of military employment papers and transportation, his assistance to Jews escaping Vilna, and his recognition as Righteous Among the Nations. Yad Vashem also preserves Schmid’s final letter to his wife, an unusually powerful primary source for his own understanding of what he had done. Yad Vashem

4. Adler, Hermann. Gesänge aus der Stadt des Todes [Songs from the City of Death]. Zürich: Artemis, 1945. Adler, whom Schmid personally sheltered, produced one of the earliest literary testimonies concerning Schmid. His work is valuable not merely as later commemoration but as the testimony of a Jewish survivor who knew Schmid and benefited directly from his actions. Wikipedia

5. Oliner, Samuel P., and Pearl M. Oliner. The Altruistic Personality: Rescuers of Jews in Nazi Europe. New York: Free Press, 1988. Based on extensive interviews with rescuers, nonrescuers, and survivors, this remains one of the foundational studies of why ordinary people helped Jews during the Holocaust. Its emphasis on empathy, inclusive moral identity, family formation, relationships, and a sense of personal agency directly supports the argument that heroic acts often emerge from years of ordinary character formation. Yad Vashem

6. Fogelman, Eva. Conscience and Courage: Rescuers of Jews During the Holocaust. New York: Anchor Books, 1994. Fogelman’s psychological and historical study examines how rescuers came to perceive intervention as a personal obligation. It is especially useful for my claim that rescuers were not necessarily extraordinary personalities but ordinary people whose identities, relationships, moral formation, and immediate circumstances prepared them to act.

7. Tec, Nechama. When Light Pierced the Darkness: Christian Rescue of Jews in Nazi-Occupied Poland. New York: Oxford University Press, 1986.Tec carefully analyzes the backgrounds, motives, social positions, and behavior of rescuers. Her work is particularly valuable because it resists romantic simplification: rescuers differed greatly in personality and motive, yet many possessed a degree of independence from surrounding social expectations that allowed them to refuse the moral consensus of the majority.

8. Monroe, Kristen Renwick. The Heart of Altruism: Perceptions of a Common Humanity. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1996. Monroe argues that extraordinary altruism often flows from a rescuer’s perception of other human beings as belonging within the same moral community. This strongly supports my observation that Schmid’s earlier contact with Jewish neighbors and customers may have made Nazi abstractions less capable of erasing their humanity.

9. Monroe, Kristen Renwick. The Hand of Compassion: Portraits of Moral Choice During the Holocaust. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 2004.Through detailed interviews and moral biographies, Monroe studies how rescuers understood their own actions. Many did not describe themselves as heroes making dramatic choices; they experienced helping as the natural or unavoidable response to another human being in danger. That finding belongs at the heart of the “banality of goodness.”

10. Staub, Ervin. The Roots of Goodness and Resistance to Evil: Inclusive Caring, Moral Courage, Altruism Born of Suffering, Active Bystandership, and Heroism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2015. Staub develops a broad psychological account of how caring, moral courage, active bystandership, and resistance to destructive systems can be cultivated. His work has inspired me to lean into the practical question of how societies can prepare ordinary people to intervene.

11. Rochat, François, and André Modigliani. “The Ordinary Quality of Resistance: From Milgram’s Laboratory to the Village of Le Chambon.” Journal of Social Issues 51, no. 3 (1995): 195–210. This article is especially suited to my thesis. It challenges the assumption that resistance requires an inherently heroic personality and examines how social context, moral community, small initial commitments, and ordinary relationships can encourage resistance to destructive authority.

12. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum. “Choosing to Act: Stories of Rescue” and “Rescue during the Holocaust.” Washington, DC: USHMM. These concise institutional resources place Schmid among the broader range of rescuers who used occupations, relationships, documents, transportation, homes, and bureaucratic access to save others. They are particularly useful for substantiating the concept of hidden rescue and practical moral creativity. United States Holocaust Memorial Museum

I have spent over forty years trying to put peacebuilding into practice by shuttling between enemies. During that time, I have encountered countless people of goodwill who sincerely desired peace, less violence, and greater justice. Many were courageous, and many had sacrificed greatly. Many possessed an intense compassion for innocent people who had suffered terribly.

Yet, again and again, I encountered the same obstacle. Too many otherwise compassionate people could identify only one party to the conflict as morally responsible. Their complaints, demands, visions, and proposed remedies were directed almost entirely toward an adversary. The injuries caused by that adversary were vivid, intimate, and unbearable. There was an inability to sidestep that injury, as the world often failed to see the depths of their pain. Therefore, the injuries caused by their own community remained distant, qualified, minimized, justified, or simply invisible.

This is not necessarily because the people I worked with were dishonest. Often, they have been exposed overwhelmingly to the suffering of their own community. They know the names of all of their own dead. They know the grief of the families. They have seen their own frightened children, their own destroyed neighborhoods, their own historical humiliations. Empathy makes these injuries emotionally immediate. But that same empathy, when confined almost entirely to one’s own group, may deepen moral partiality. We see the innocence of our own people and the aggression of others. We see the circumstances that explain our conduct and the character defects that explain theirs.

The deepest obstacle, however, is not simply selective empathy. It is the extraordinary difficulty of looking honestly at one’s own community as anything other than innocent. To criticize an enemy ordinarily brings approval from one’s peers. To criticize one’s own people may cost friendships, reputation, institutional standing, employment, influence, and sometimes physical safety. A person may become a pariah, a family may become a target, and a lifelong record of loyalty may be erased by one act of public dissent.

This has led me to a difficult conclusion: peacebuilding does not begin with exposing the failures of one’s enemies; that is, with advocacy and justice work. It begins when human beings acquire the moral courage to confront the failures of their own communities.

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The path of self-confrontation must be traveled carefully, with as little animus as possible. Many good people cannot take that path. Humanitarian workers, protectors of civilians, human rights champions, contribute enormously to human decency but without becoming critics of their own societies. Nevertheless, no durable path to ending or even slowing down violence can succeed unless members of every community involved become willing to confront the cruelties and destructive habits of their own side. It takes two to tango. It also takes two to repent, two to examine themselves, and two to construct a future. And when you really get into conflict, there are far more than two sides that need to slow down a dance of death and begin a dance of life instead. You can’t dance for life unless everyone is studying their own moves.

The Decisive Test of a Peacebuilder

The easiest form of moral engagement is condemning an adversary. Almost every partisan can identify the enemy’s crimes. Doing so usually strengthens one’s standing within the group. It confirms one’s identity, reassures one’s allies, and protects the collective narrative of innocence.

The decisive test of a peacebuilder is different. It is whether that person can confront the wrongdoing of the community upon whose affection, approval, and protection he or she depends.

This does not mean assigning equal blame where the evidence does not support it. Conflicts are rarely symmetrical in every period, action, or dimension. Often, the conflict is menacingly asymmetric only in moments, veering and swaying between different kinds of destructive uses of hurtful power. One side may possess far more power. One side may have initiated a war in this round, committed a massacre, or organized systematic repression. Then it may change 10 years later. Moral seriousness requires accurate, dispassionate distinctions concerning responsibility.

But moral asymmetry does not create moral exemption. Even a profoundly injured community can mistreat innocents, distort history, indulge fantasies of revenge, dehumanize outsiders, protect extremists, or refuse opportunities for repair. Even a just movement can become cruel. Even a democratic society can silence internal critics. Even victims can and often do produce new victims. Peacebuilding, therefore, requires a universal standard. We must judge comparable acts by comparable moral principles, whether those acts are committed by enemies, allies, or ourselves.

Why We Become Ambassadors for Our Own Tribes

There is a powerful psychological pressure to become an ambassador for one’s own group. People enter intergroup conversations imagining that their task is to present the best possible case for their community’s past and present. They become attorneys at a trial rather than examiners of a problem or visionaries of a possible future; they are representatives and therefore cannot change anything. The impulse is understandable. Communities under attack need defenders, while false accusations must be answered. But peacebuilding cannot consist of competing public relations campaigns.

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The peacebuilder needs a more clinical approach: compassion for suffering wherever it occurs, careful examination of facts and causes, and consistent moral reasoning applied to every party, including and especially one’s own. That is the essence of the moral methodology that I have been advocating since Compassionate Reasoning: Changing the Mind to Change the World (New York: OUP, 2021). Compassionate Reasoning completes peacebuilding by requiring a form of divided consciousness: I must be able to love my community while also examining it. I must understand my community’s fears without letting them justify everything. This is true compassion in its totality, and it is expected of every true peacebuilder. I must defend my side against falsehood while refusing to defend what is morally indefensible. I must remain connected enough to influence my community but independent enough to resist it.

Political psychology offers a helpful distinction between blind patriotism and constructive patriotism, akin to blind compassion versus constructive compassion. Blind patriotism demands unquestioning allegiance and treats criticism as disloyalty. Constructive patriotism combines attachment with a willingness to challenge the group in order to improve it. This is the kind of loyalty peacebuilding requires. I criticize my community not because I despise it, but because I care what it becomes. I refuse to abandon it to its most frightened, narcissistic, or violent tendencies.

The Distinctive Power—and Danger—of the Internal Critic

Research on what psychologists call the intergroup sensitivity effect helps explain why internal critics are so important. Studies have repeatedly found that people generally respond more defensively when criticism of their group comes from an outsider than when substantially similar criticism comes from a fellow group member. Outsider criticism is more likely to be interpreted as hostility or prejudice; an insider may be granted greater credibility and be presumed to have a concern for the group’s future. This gives insiders a distinctive form of moral access. They know the language, the memories, the sacred symbols, the hidden fears, and the accepted justifications of their community. They may be able to challenge a group within its moral universe in ways outsiders cannot.

This access creates responsibility, but it also creates danger. Groups sometimes punish internal dissenters more severely than external opponents because the insider poses a threat beyond reputation. The insider demonstrates that conformity was not inevitable. The dissenter’s courage implicitly asks everyone else why they remained silent. The authentic internal critic, therefore, occupies an agonizing position. To retain influence, one must remain visibly connected to the group. But to retain integrity, one must refuse the demand that belonging requires moral surrender.

A society serious about peace must protect these people. Religious reformers, whistleblowers, dissident soldiers, critical patriots, journalists, historians, and victims — and peacebuilders — who refuse the authorized narrative are not irritants to be expelled. They are part of a community’s moral immune system.

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Why Groups Cannot See Themselves Clearly

Human beings do not ordinarily approach evidence as detached observers. We are motivated to preserve coherent identities, favorable self-images, and secure membership in communities. When information threatens the goodness of a group we depend upon, the mind has many defenses at its disposal.

We raise the standard of evidence. We question the victim’s motives. We demand more context. We emphasize our prior suffering. We describe our violence as an unfortunate necessity and the adversary’s violence as a revelation of their essential character. We remember provocations and forget consequences. We insist that acknowledgment must wait until the enemy acknowledges everything first.

The literature on collective narcissism is particularly relevant. Collective narcissism is not ordinary love of one’s community. It involves an exaggerated belief in the group’s greatness combined with resentment that outsiders do not sufficiently recognize it. Research associates it with heightened sensitivity to criticism, defensive protection of the group’s image, moral favoritism toward insiders, hostility toward outsiders, and resistance to confronting an ingroup’s harmful past.

One study examining reactions to historical wrongdoing found that collective narcissism was associated with defensive strategies that reduced collective guilt and with fewer actual donations benefiting survivors of the group’s past violence. This does not mean that guilt by itself produces peace. Guilt can become manipulative, indiscriminate, or paralyzing. The more constructive concept is responsibility: members of a community need not hate themselves or accept inherited personal guilt in order to acknowledge harms committed, protected, or denied in their name. The authentic statement is not, “Our group is evil.” It is, “Our community has caused or permitted harm, and we bear some responsibilities concerning truth, repair, institutional reform, and prevention.” That is a hard pill to swallow for any group with keen memories of persecution, which really means most people.

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Reciprocal Rather Than Unilateral Confession

There is another danger that peacebuilders must understand. Self-examination cannot mean that the most conscientious person in the room confesses endlessly for his own community while everyone else preserves a posture of innocence.

I have seen people attempt this. They imagine that by taking extraordinary responsibility for their own side’s wrongdoing, they will inspire others to reciprocate. Sometimes that happens, but more often it does not. Instead, the confession is absorbed into the adversary’s narrative. The person becomes proof that all responsibility belongs to one community in a spiral of reverse propaganda. The other participants feel no corresponding pressure to examine themselves. What was intended as moral courage becomes unilateral disarmament of the conscience. This is not helpful to social change. It does not create enlightenment, repentance, apology, or a shared vision. It may simply reinforce an unequal moral drama in which one side performs self-criticism while the other performs accusation.

Peacebuilding, therefore, requires reciprocated and compassionate self-examination. Every community must be invited—and eventually expected—to confront its own failures. No party should be required to accept all blame, and no party should be permitted to claim permanent innocence. The standard must be universal, but the responsibilities need not be equal in number. Each party must examine what it has actually done, what it continues to justify, and what it alone has the internal power to change.

The Ancient Discipline of Examining the Self

The idea that human beings must examine themselves before attempting to correct the world is not new. It lies near the center of many of humanity’s great ethical traditions that we should review.

Socrates made self-examination fundamental to moral life. Socratic questioning was not merely private introspection. It exposed contradictions between what people claimed to value and how they actually reasoned or behaved. Sincerity was not enough. A person could sincerely imagine himself courageous, just, religious, or patriotic while remaining governed by fear, vanity, resentment, or ignorance.

The peacebuilding version of the Socratic question is unavoidable: Are we truly seeking peace, or have we merely translated the demands of our own side into the language of universal justice?

The Stoics transformed examination into a daily practice. Seneca described reviewing his conduct at the end of the day, considering which impulses he had resisted and where he had failed. Marcus Aurelius repeatedly interrogated his judgments, resentments, ambitions, and reactions. The underlying principle was that character is formed through repeated moral accounting. The Stoics and their followers at least attempted to instill this virtue in themselves, though it was hard for them to face built-in, society-wide, and culture-wide blind spots such as slavery, sexual abuse of children, or the engagement in perpetual conquest, like Marcus Aurelius. But they at least set the stage for habits that, when applied fully, can lead to real psychological and cultural evolution.

A social movement that, by contrast, practices accusation every day becomes accusatory. A community that rehearses only its injuries becomes unable to perceive the injuries it causes. What we practice, we become, as I have argued in previous Substacks.

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Confucian ethics places self-cultivation at the foundation of social and political order. The person is formed within relationships, and the moral quality of individuals extends outward into families, institutions, and government. A ruler cannot repair society through coercion while remaining personally disordered, the Confucians averred. Self-cultivation is therefore not merely private refinement; it is a form of governance.

Judaism developed the practice of cheshbon hanefesh, a counting or accounting of one’s life. The financial metaphor is revealing. We would not responsibly manage an institution by relying on vague impressions of its accounts. Moral life also requires a literal inventory of conduct, obligations, motives, debts, and failures. That is why Judaism’s holiest prayers on atonement and entire days of atonement are so endlessly detailed and numerous. The very act of enumerating becomes a weight of something that needs to change, something that needs to be lifted off of one’s life consciousness.

Judaism’s liturgy of repentance goes further by speaking largely in the plural: ‘we have betrayed’, ‘we have spoken falsely’, ‘we have acted violently’, ‘we have hardened our hearts’. This does not mean that every worshipper personally committed every transgression. It recognizes that moral identity is also communal. We participate in institutions, benefit from collective arrangements, inherit narratives, tolerate abuses, and remain silent in the face of harms committed by people with whom we identify. This truth of ancient Jewish practice may have contributed to antisemitic habits of collective guilt of the Jewish people as a whole, a tragedy with horrific historical consequences, but the importance of collective responsibility in human change remains a basic truth of peacebuilding and social change.

The Hebrew prophets embody an internal critic, as it were. Nathan confronted the major Jewish King David, while Elijah condemned the Jewish leader of the north, Ahab. Isaiah, Jeremiah, Amos, and Micah did not establish their moral credibility by condemning foreign nations. They spoke where truth was most dangerous: within their own political and religious community.

Christian traditions inherited Jewish repentance and developed intensive practices of examining conscience, intention, temptation, pride, and complicity. The Ignatian Examen is particularly creative because it commonly begins with gratitude rather than accusation. Only after recognizing what has been given does the practitioner examine how freely, lovingly, or destructively he responded.

Islamic ethics developed muhasaba, the accounting of oneself, together with repentance and careful attention to niyya, or intention. At a deeper level, an outwardly righteous act may be corrupted by pride, reputation-seeking, hatred, tribal superiority, or the desire for revenge. This is profoundly relevant to activism. People may defend justice while also seeking permission to hate and avenge.

Buddhist traditions contribute disciplined observation of attachment, aversion, and delusion. One can experience anger without treating anger as infallible knowledge. One can belong to a group without identifying with every thought, grievance, or narrative circulating within it. This introduces a small but morally decisive interval between feeling and blind obedience to a class, a community, or a mob.

Across their enormous differences, these traditions share a warning: human beings cannot reliably correct others while remaining blind to their own motives, loyalties, rationalizations, and participation in harm.

Compassion Takes Brutal Honesty and Makes it Loving

Self-examination alone is not sufficient. It can deteriorate into shame, obsessive guilt, defensiveness, humiliation, or self-hatred. Communities that are told that acknowledgment requires surrendering all dignity will usually deny, counterattack, or collapse.

Compassion is what makes honesty psychologically healthy. Compassion toward oneself or one’s community cannot mean saying that wrongdoing was unavoidable or that trauma excuses everything. It means creating enough psychological safety to acknowledge the truth without treating the self or the group as irredeemable. Compassionate self-examination combines truthful acknowledgment with the conviction that change and repair remain possible and even an act of loving care.

Modern research offers partial support for the psychological mechanisms involved. Self-distanced reflection—examining an experience from a broader or more observer-like perspective—can reduce emotional reactivity and rumination while encouraging reinterpretation and pattern recognition. Mindfulness-related practices can strengthen the capacity to notice thoughts and feelings without immediately acting upon them.

The Double Movement of Peacebuilding

A genuine peacebuilder must practice two forms of compassion simultaneously. The first is compassion directed inward, toward oneself and one’s own community. It allows people to face what they have done, what they have refused to see, and what they must change. The second is compassion directed outward, toward the adversary, the stranger, the wounded, and even the person who has caused harm. This does not eliminate accountability or excuse violence. It means that confrontation remains oriented toward safety, transformation, and a viable future rather than humiliation, annihilation, or revenge.

These two movements must remain joined. The peacebuilder must be capable of saying two things at once: We must face honestly what our community and we have done, and we must continue to desire the safety, dignity, moral development, and flourishing of everyone involved.

Why Gratitude May Come First

Among the scientifically studied reflective practices, gratitude has produced some of the clearest and most consistent findings, although the average effects remain modest and vary across interventions and outcomes. A 2023 systematic review covering 64 randomized trials found improvements in gratitude, positive affect, and several measures of mental health. A larger 2025 meta-analysis covering 145 studies across 28 countries concluded that gratitude interventions produce small but measurable increases in well-being (See References below). This provides intriguing support for traditions, such as the ancient 18-benediction, the 3-times-a-day Standing Prayer of Judaism, and the later Ignatian Examen, which begin moral review with gratitude.

Gratitude may establish life as a gift rather than a burden. It reminds the person that existence is not exhausted by failure and injury. It recalls courage, protection, friendship, restraint, repair, beauty, and goodness that have survived even under terrible conditions. This may provide the emotional security necessary for honest acknowledgment.

A person who begins self-examination in shame may conceal, justify, or collapse. A person who begins in gratitude may be more able to admit failure without feeling the entire self is worthless.

That specific sequence—gratitude followed by morally demanding self-examination—has not yet been established by controlled research as a reliable method of producing responsibility. It is, however, a serious hypothesis worthy of investigation.

Gratitude is equally important for peacebuilding because grievance cannot be allowed to become the total description of reality. In every long conflict, there are also people who protected neighbors, refused illegal orders, crossed communal lines, prevented revenge, preserved friendships, cared for the wounded, or told the truth when silence was safer. Remembering them is not sentimental. It preserves evidence that another moral future remains possible.

What if we had a world of peacebuilders and justice seekers who framed all of their critiques and remonstrations in the context of praise and gratitude for all parties? This sounds like a fantasy in our current environment of endless righteous ridicule. And yet, much ancient wisdom embedded in prayer systems seems to suggest that gratitude is fundamental to mental health, and perhaps specifically to the mental health of self-examination. Perhaps this is a formula to replace the polar opposite of the current endless political cycles of withering ridicule met with collective narcissism in every country.

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Prayer and Blessing as Ancient Rehearsals of Benevolent Attention

For thousands of years, human beings have begun and ended their days by giving thanks and wishing health, mercy, protection, peace, and blessings upon themselves and others.

These practices can be understood as ancient rehearsals of benevolent attention. They repeatedly make another person’s welfare mentally present. They ask the mind to imagine conditions that do not yet exist: the sick healed, the mourner comforted, the frightened protected, the hungry fed, the enemy reconciled, and the community at peace.

Buddhist loving-kindness and compassion practices make this process especially explicit by extending wishes for well-being from oneself and loved ones toward strangers, difficult people, and ultimately all beings. Reviews find evidence of benefits for positive emotion, compassion, empathy, and some forms of prosocial behavior, but the effects are variable and become less certain under stricter methodological conditions. (See References below)

Scientific caution is essential. Repeating benevolent wishes does not automatically produce justice, courage, or changed institutions. Prayer may coexist with passivity, prejudice, domination, or selective concern. Yet the persistence of blessings for health, peace, mercy, and universal welfare across civilizations suggests that human beings have long understood the importance of rehearsing the good they wish to see.

Prayer for another’s welfare may therefore be understood as moral imagination in primordial form. It says: May this person live. May this person heal. May this person be protected. May peace become possible.

Compassionate Reasoning as Prospective Compassion

Psychologists use the term prospection to refer to the capacity to represent and evaluate possible futures. Martin Seligman and his colleagues argued that prospection is a central organizing feature of human cognition, emotion, motivation, and action. We are not merely pushed forward by the past. We continually imagine possible outcomes and select present actions in relation to them, and there seems to be a great many neural pathways in our minds dedicated to just that. That is a very exciting prospect for revising our conception of peacebuilding, and it has strongly influenced my theory of Compassionate Reasoning.

Prospection can serve any purpose, however. Human beings can plan domination, conquest, profit, revenge, security, reconciliation, or shared flourishing. I argue that it is compassion and its dedicated neural pathways that determine what futures are imagined, and whose suffering and welfare matter. Reasoning examines facts, causes, contradictions, consequences, and trade-offs. Prospection imagines possible futures and constructs pathways toward them. This is why I understand Compassionate Reasoning as prospective compassion.

Compassion identifies the suffering and flourishing that matter. Reasoning tests what is true, what is causing harm, what principled alternatives are realistic, but also how the moral values can be fair and consistent to all. Prospection asks what future might emerge and what present choices could move us toward it. In this sense, Compassionate Reasoning extends prayer, blessing, gratitude, and ancient contemplative practices, moving from benevolent intention to disciplined social construction. It moves from blessing to responsibility, from hope to foresight, and from the imagined good to the practical work of creating it. This is not something alien to ancient wisdom practices of good deeds, but the science of it for the mind is becoming increasingly persuasive as a compelling alternative to human cycles of anger that lead to violence.

What the Science Shows—and What It Does Not

Controlled studies provide evidence that mindfulness, self-distancing, gratitude, self-compassion, self-affirmation, and structured reflection can influence attention, emotional regulation, rumination, receptivity to threatening information, self-related processing, and prosocial valuation.

But science has not established that these practices reliably produce the outcomes most necessary for peacebuilding. We have not conclusively demonstrated, in controlled settings, that daily reflection will make people more willing to criticize their own political, national, ethnic, or religious group. We know from experience that, in controlled settings, it will reduce partisan double standards, protect internal dissenters, or lead to reparative action.

Philosophers and religious traditions prescribed moral self-accounting for centuries, but modern experimental science has often studied practices that are easier to standardize: gratitude lists, secular mindfulness, loving-kindness phrases, expressive writing, or brief self-affirmation.

A serious experiment might randomly assign participants to several weeks of one of four practices: structured ethical examination of one’s own conduct and group loyalties; daily criticism of an opposing group; unstructured personal journaling; or neutral factual recording, all of them either accompanied or not accompanied by compassion training. There are many possible combinations of variables.

Researchers could then measure acknowledgment of verified ingroup wrongdoing, consistency in judging equivalent acts by allies and adversaries, cognitive complexity, intellectual humility, collective narcissism, willingness to protect internal dissenters, support for restitution, and behavior during actual intergroup encounters. The question is whether we can, through mindful practices, encourage people in their devoted communities to become more capable of self-critique combined with loving kindness.

From Personal Virtue to Institutional Practice

Peacebuilding organizations should not demand self-examination from societies while exempting themselves. Every movement and institution should be able to answer difficult questions. How do we examine our own failures? How do we protect people who criticize our leadership or constituency? Do we apply the same standards to allies and adversaries? Have we acknowledged the harms our strategies cause? What practices have we changed as a result? Organizations could institutionalize self-examination by protecting dissenters, documenting harms committed by their own members, correcting cherished falsehoods, conducting independent reviews, or inviting injured parties to speak. This would transform self-examination from an occasional moral gesture into a civic practice.

The Future of Peacebuilding

Peace is not built solely by opposing injustice. It is built by creating communities capable of moral self-correction while continuing to desire a viable future for everyone involved. The deepest division in public life may not be between left and right, religious and secular, East and West, or nation and nation. It may be between those who can examine themselves and those who can examine only their enemies.

The authentic peacebuilder speaks first where speaking is most costly. The peacebuilder confronts the injustices in their own community without surrendering their love for it. The peacebuilder confronts adversaries without stripping them of humanity. The peacebuilder remembers the good that has survived, gives thanks for every act of courage and restraint, and continues imagining futures that do not yet exist.

It takes multiple communities to make peace because it takes multiple communities to face themselves. No reconciliation can be sustained by the permanent innocence of one side and the permanent confession of another. Every side must recover the truths it has suppressed, protect the witnesses it has punished, acknowledge the suffering it has caused, and reform the institutions that reproduce harm.

The future may belong to societies that make compassionate self-examination a civic virtue: societies able to confront themselves without self-hatred, confront others without dehumanization, and convert their most ancient wishes for healing and peace into disciplined plans for shared flourishing.

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Selected References and Primary Sources

Ayduk, Özlem, and Ethan Kross. “From a Distance: Implications of Spontaneous Self-Distancing for Adaptive Self-Reflection.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 98, no. 5 (2010): 809–829.

Diniz, Gabriel, et al. “The Effects of Gratitude Interventions: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis.” Einstein (São Paulo) 21 (2023): eRW0371.

Falk, Emily B., et al. “Self-Affirmation Alters the Brain’s Response to Health Messages and Subsequent Behavior Change.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 112, no. 7 (2015): 1977–1982.

Golec de Zavala, Agnieszka, Aleksandra Cichocka, Roy Eidelson, and Nuwan Jayawickreme. “Collective Narcissism and Its Social Consequences.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 97, no. 6 (2009): 1074–1096.

Gopin, Marc. Compassionate Reasoning: Changing the Mind to Change the World. New York: Oxford University Press, 2022.

Hornsey, Matthew J., Tina Oppes, and Alicia Svensson. “‘It’s OK If We Say It, but You Can’t’: Responses to Intergroup and Intragroup Criticism.” European Journal of Social Psychology 32, no. 3 (2002): 293–307.

Kazarovytska, Fanny, et al. “Too Great to Be Guilty? Individuals High in Collective Narcissism Demand Closure Regarding the Past to Attenuate Collective Guilt.” European Journal of Social Psychology 52, no. 4 (2022): 748–762.

Luberto, Christina M., et al. “A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of the Effects of Meditation on Empathy, Compassion, and Prosocial Behaviors.” Mindfulness 9 (2018): 708–724.

Monin, Benoît, Pamela J. Sawyer, and Matthew J. Marquez. “The Rejection of Moral Rebels: Resenting Those Who Do the Right Thing.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 95, no. 1 (2008): 76–93.

Nadler, Arie, Thomas E. Malloy, and Jeffrey D. Fisher, eds. The Social Psychology of Intergroup Reconciliation. New York: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Schatz, Robert T., Ervin Staub, and Howard Lavine. “On the Varieties of National Attachment: Blind versus Constructive Patriotism.” Political Psychology 20, no. 1 (1999): 151–174.

Seligman, Martin E. P., Peter Railton, Roy F. Baumeister, and Chandra Sripada. “Navigating into the Future or Driven by the Past.” Perspectives on Psychological Science 8, no. 2 (2013): 119–141.

Staub, Ervin. Overcoming Evil: Genocide, Violent Conflict, and Terrorism. New York: Oxford University Press, 2011.

Representative Wisdom Sources

Confucius. The Analects. Translated by Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis: Hackett Publishing, 2003.

Ignatius of Loyola. The Spiritual Exercises of Saint Ignatius. Translated by George E. Ganss. Chicago: Loyola Press, 1992.

Lefin, Menachem Mendel. Cheshbon HaNefesh: A Guide to Self-Improvement through Character Refinement. Translated by Shraga Silverstein. Jerusalem and New York: Feldheim, 1995.

1. Dystopia as Warning

Dystopian literary genres and art forms have a moral purpose. They warn human beings about what we are capable of becoming. The corruption of elites, the weaponization of law, the seduction of crowds, the conversion of fear into obedience, and the destruction of conscience by ideology are permanent human possibilities. I heard it said somewhere that art sometimes becomes dark to protect us from a greater darkness.

George Orwell’s 1984 warns about surveillance, propaganda, torture, loneliness, and the destruction of truth by political power. William Golding’s Lord of the Flies warns about fear, hierarchy, ritual, charisma, and moral collapse. At its best, dystopia is vigilance against domination. The heart of darkness belongs in art when it functions as a warning. It helps a culture examine cruelty, restrain power, and recognize the early signs of moral collapse.

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2. Darkness as Product

The danger begins when a warning becomes a claimed statement of fact, and worse, a commodity for the manipulation of fear. A dark story can expose cruelty, so we restrain it. A commodified dark story turns cruelty into an addictive and corrosive stimulant of the popular imagination. Fear, sadism, sexual violation, collapse, and despair become habit-forming entertainment rather than deep art. Just look at your Netflix feed.

Commodification changes the purpose of artistic darkness. The market asks what keeps people watching. So fear captures attention, sexuality captures attention, betrayal, humiliation, sadistic villains, mass death, and shock all capture attention. Once attention becomes the commodity, the nervous systems of your children and elders become the marketplace for profit, while the story becomes the delivery mechanism.

Competition, over time, escalates this brain stimulus. One villain becomes cruel, so the next has to become something worse, perhaps sadistic. One catastrophe destroys a city, so the next ups the ante and destroys worlds. One series sexualizes power, so the next series intensifies the sexualization. Yesterday’s success becomes today’s baseline.

Culture creates a narrative tolerance of sickness and barbarity, and this is true across the political spectrum of art production. On the left-wing side, for example, Lenny Bruce is a trailblazer in using f*ck to become a form of artistic and social liberation. The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel updated that to Jewish and queer women, where the liberation was the use of the crass imaginative act of copulation. But today, using f*ck is a form of communication so habituated that it demeans everything we say and do. Like the biological tolerance that is produced by addictive substances, the first shock seems revolutionary and life-changing. But then it loses force and becomes a habit, while stronger stimuli are needed to produce the same effect. The audience is trained by escalation, while the imagination comes to expect more abusive language and brutality, sexual violation. These become casualties of the war for our imaginative space. Profits are driving this destruction, in part, but so is our own lack of self-examination about the habits we form while seeking liberation from one form of social ill or another.

The glorification of deeper and more horrific forms of killing in the right-wing end of Hollywood is self-evident with the passage of decades since the peace-focused 1950s and 60s. Just look at the course and direction of ‘heroic’ action moves, depictions of law enforcement, and militaries.

3. Utopia and the Refusal of Human Complexity

Utopian fantasies have their own problems. They distort judgment by promising perfect worlds and unlimited expectations. When they demand a perfect system, they set themselves up for disappointment, fragmentation, and self-destruction. Every chant for justice can turn into oversimplification and a lack of nuance in building change. Moral movements become self-righteous when they stop examining themselves and become one-dimensional cries. Utopian certainty can make people cruel in the name of goodness. Healthy hope, unlike utopianism, accepts human complexity, but it, too, needs humility and self-examination. The future needs people who believe in repair and resist perfection.

History is filled with failed utopias that began with dreams of justice and ended in coercion, violence, or collapse. The French Revolution promised liberty and the rights of man. Still, the Reign of Terror produced over sixteen thousand official death sentences, with roughly another 10,000 people dying in prison or through executions without trial. The Russian Revolution promised equality and liberation, but the Soviet system created one-party dictatorship, purges, forced collectivization, famine, and the Gulag. Roughly 18 million people passed through the Gulag system, and historians estimate that about 1.6 million died in the camps, with some broader estimates placing total Gulag-related deaths higher. The Chinese Communist Revolution promised a classless socialist future, but the ironically labeled “Great Leap Forward” or “Cultural Revolution” produced one of the worst famines in human history. Commonly cited estimates place the death toll around 30 million, with scholarly ranges often running from about 23 million to 55 million. The Cambodian communist revolution under the Khmer Rouge promised an agrarian classless society, but between 1.5 million and 3 million people died through execution, starvation, forced labor, and disease between 1975 and 1979. Fascist dreams of national purification produced World War II, genocide, and industrialized mass murder. The pattern is clear: when the perfect future becomes more important than imperfect human beings, utopia turns into coercion, and salvation becomes mass murder.

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4. The Old Civic Myth and the New Cynicism

Turning to the USA for a moment, post-World War 2 popular culture often gave audiences a cleaner world than reality. Adam-12, The F.B.I., early Superman, early Batman, and the original Star Trek often portrayed authority, science, law, and heroism in idealized ways. Police officers, federal agents, scientists, judges, astronauts, and heroes appeared as essentially good people doing essentially good work.

The dystopian critiques of the 1960s exposed the darker realities beneath these civic myths. Law enforcement, intelligence agencies, corporations, patriarchal power, Hollywood, and political institutions were all scrutinized, and this had an important corrective role--up to a point. American history does contain racism, corruption, secrecy, violence, propaganda, abuse of power, and hypocrisy. A society that tells only wholesome or dystopian myths becomes morally childish, losing the ability to see itself clearly.

The danger of a negative dystopian direction is total cynicism. A culture trained only on dystopian stories begins to expect corruption everywhere. Decency looks naïve, all authority looks abusive. Innocence looks doomed, and institutions look like masks for domination. Hope looks like propaganda, and it becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy in the popular imagination. Politicians can indeed become corrupt when the popular imagination expects them to be. Of course, corrupt decisions like Citizens United are the major cause of corruption. Still, it is also the case that dystopian cynicism makes too many people just shrug rather than expect better of their elected officials. The old myths of American innocence were false in one direction. The latter myths of universal corruption, however, created their own nightmare of fatalism and cynicism. We are now faced not with a reactionary set of leaders who took over, but rather with a nihilistic movement that is very hard to defeat, as positive future visions have been smashed on both sides of the political spectrum by dark visions. A mature imagination must criticize illusion while preserving the capacity for hope.

5. Science Fiction, Superheroes, and Descent

Science fiction reveals this pattern because the genre once carried immense moral and intellectual possibilities. Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, Ray Bradbury, Ursula K. Le Guin, Gene Roddenberry, and many others used speculative worlds to ask civilizational questions. What is humanity? What is freedom? Can science survive without ethics? Can civilization restrain violence? Can different people encounter one another without conquest? Can law, compassion, and intelligence survive technological power?

Older science fiction included empires, wars, invasions, monsters, nuclear dread, colonial assumptions, and blind spots. Yet much of its deepest energy was exploration, curiosity, moral experiment, and future-building. The future could be dangerous, but it remained a place of possibility.

Many contemporary adaptations drag speculative imagination into absolute darkness. Worlds that once raised questions about civilization become arenas for mass killing, dynastic cruelty, sexualized power, torture, sadistic spectacle, and endless betrayal. The transformation of Asimov’s Foundation into a much darker television universe illustrates this pattern. The television version may be intelligent and visually powerful, but its intensified and sadistic cruelty, sexuality, destruction, and imperial trauma, embodied in the leaders known as Empire, reflect contemporary streaming incentives more than Asimov’s original philosophical concerns.

Superhero stories show the same trajectory. Earlier Superman and Batman stories often lived inside a hopeful moral universe. The hero restored order, while the villain threatened society. Later superhero universes became addicted to apocalypse. The death of millions of civilians becomes casual background scenery. Heroes become more damaged, violent, and morally ambiguous. Saving humanity becomes a spectacle of destruction. This intensified stimulation of heroic tragedy creates the veneer of moral seriousness, but it is not serious at all; it is just voyeuristic violence. It does not necessarily create a wiser imagination of the future.

6. Human Nature Under Different Conditions

The human mind is malleable. The importance of art and culture is that repeated stories shape expectations, emotions, fantasy, and moral perception of billions of people. A civilization can become habituated to cruelty, cynicism, and despair long before it names the change. My life was changed by the research I did on Lord of the Flies in high school, for example. But looking back, I realize that I was absorbing Golding’s obsession with the dark side of human nature, and that we both came out of a post-World War II, Holocaust world with the need to understand organized and gleeful mass murder and genocide. The book does show why human nature must be understood carefully. Golding gives us a powerful warning about mob psychology and moral collapse.

Here is the reality, however. The real Tongan boys stranded on ʻAta in 1965 give us a completely different picture! Cooperation, shared labor, conflict management, ritual, prayer, friendship, music, sport, and practical intelligence; boring things that Hollywood and book publishers may abhor. I needed at that moment of the twentieth century to process genocide and pure evil, with the very teachers in my school being Holocaust survivors. But I was, with Golding’s help, imposing horror on all of human nature, and thus cutting off faith in future possibility.

The fact is that human beings are morally malleable, and vulnerable to the unpredictable accidents of charismatic leaders who can be utterly good, or utterly corrupted, or utterly sociopathic. Under certain leadership conditions, we become cruel. Under other conditions, we become cooperative. The future depends on the vagaries of political leadership, as well as on the moral, institutional, spiritual, economic, and cultural variables that shape us over time.

Commercial dystopian genres thus need massive scrutiny. We need warnings, yes, but we also need a realistic assessment of the world, and this demands examples of courage, decency, mutual aid, reform, forgiveness, institution-building, and survival through cooperation.

A culture that imagines only collapse destroys its capacity to prevent collapse.

7. Dystopia by Way of Oligarchic Corruption

The corruption of wealth and power, the subject of so many popular genres, adds another layer. Contemporary culture is haunted by stories of elite sexual predation, private islands, trafficking networks, Hollywood abuse, institutional cover-ups, and powerful men who treat vulnerable people as consumable objects.

Jeffrey Epstein and Harvey Weinstein became symbolic figures because they revealed how wealth, fame, secrecy, institutional dependence, and access can create protected zones of predation. When society becomes completely purchasable, power creates private worlds where ordinary moral law disappears.

Art and reality mirror one another. Dark fiction reflects corruption, and repeated exposure to it can normalize the expectation of corruption. The powerful become monsters, the innocent become prey, and domination becomes the imagined truth beneath civilization. It is deeply sad that Harvey Weinstein could be responsible for so much of American popular culture and beloved movies.

While it is important to expose such people, it is also crucial to emphasize the alternatives and the very good artists that exist at all levels of the movie industry. A healthy imagination of the future exposes predation while preserving the ever-present possibility of justice, goodness, and repair. It confronts corruption while refusing to let corruption become the only story available to us. A healthy brain needs a healthy imagination for the future. It must see danger, grief, betrayal, and corruption while still asking, “What can I do to repair, protect, renew, and build?” The future, therefore, needs people who can face evil without worshiping darkness and believe in repair without worshiping perfection.

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8. Compassionate Reasoning as Antidote

I have developed two methodologies of moral engagement with failure in the past couple of decades, and I have used them for training in conflict zones. One is Compassionate Reasoning. When it comes to the subject at hand, the main point is that human beings are capable of either cruelty, courage, fear, love, domination, repair, self-deception, and compassion. The future depends on the institutions, stories, relationships, and disciplines that shape these capacities.

Compassionate Reasoning’s emphasis on self-examination centers on how to ask the right questions about the complex legacy of civilization, its cultural genres, and its effects on the popular psyche. You have to ask questions about your culture, like, ‘What is dangerous?’ What is wounded? What is repairable? What remains good? What must be restrained? What must be protected? What future remains possible? Compassionate Reasoning sees danger clearly but preserves the possibility of repair. It practices vigilant hope. It exposes cruelty and warns of dystopia through the principled logic of moral reasoning and consequentialist calculations. It resists utopian fantasy, however, as counterproductive. It strengthens confidence in the human capacity to grow, forgive, organize, reform, and build.

Conflict Healing belongs here as well. It refuses the fantasy that evil lives only in the other person, tribe, class, religion, nation, or political enemy. It examines the human heart honestly while building practices of repair.

9. The Human Story in Between Dystopia and Utopia

The task of our time is to recover the moral purpose of storytelling. Stories should help us see danger clearly enough to resist it but possible futures clearly enough to build something better. Dystopia should warn. Utopia should inspire. Both must serve life.

The heart of darkness must remain a warning, but the dream of a better world must remain the main calling. Between nightmare and fantasy lies the human task: to recover hope, faith, and a healthy imagination of the future. We need methodologies of moral intervention and repair that hold this whole truth together.

The future will be shaped by people willing to examine the human heart honestly, reason compassionately, heal conflict patiently, and build institutions, stories, relationships, and cultures that call forth our greatest human potential.

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Bibliography

Adorno, Theodor W., and Max Horkheimer. “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception.” In Dialectic of Enlightenment. 1944/1947.

A foundational source for thinking about entertainment as industrialized consciousness, where culture becomes standardized, commodified, and shaped by commercial and administrative power.

Anderson, Craig A., et al. “Media Violence Effects on Children, Adolescents and Young Adults.” 2016.

Anderson’s work supports the claim that exposure to media violence can be a risk factor for aggression. The essay should use this carefully and avoid reducing media effects to a simple one-to-one causal mechanism.

Applebaum, Anne. Gulag: A History. New York: Doubleday, 2003.

A major historical study of the Soviet forced-labor camp system. Winner of the 2004 Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction.

Apple TV+. Foundation. Created by David S. Goyer and Josh Friedman. Beginning in 2021.

The Apple adaptation is a contemporary case study in how older speculative fiction can be remade through the idiom of streaming-era darkness, including more direct cruelty, sexualized power, sadism, and visual spectacle than the original books.

Asimov, Isaac. Foundation series. New York: Gnome Press / Doubleday / later editions, beginning 1951.

Asimov’s Foundation offers a contrast between speculative civilization-level thinking and later screen adaptations’ trends toward more explicit violence, dynastic trauma, and prestige-TV darkness.

Bregman, Rutger. “The Real Lord of the Flies: What Happened When Six Boys Were Shipwrecked for 15 Months.” The Guardian, May 9, 2020.

This article popularized the story of six Tongan boys stranded on ʻAta in 1965–1966 who reportedly survived through cooperation rather than savagery, making it a crucial counterpoint to Golding’s pessimism.

Center for Humane Technology. “The Attention Economy.” Issue Guide.

This source is useful for explaining how the value of attention shapes product design and how financial incentives in digital products can create harm for individuals and society.

Conrad, Joseph. Heart of Darkness. Blackwood’s Magazine, 1899; book form, 1902.

Conrad’s work is useful for the phrase and distinction between “the heart of darkness as warning” and “the heart of darkness as commodity,” though the essay should acknowledge postcolonial critiques of Conrad’s portrayal of Africa and empire.

COVE Collective. “Reign of Terror in the French Revolution.” COVE Editions. https://editions.covecollective.org/content/reign-terror-french-revolution-france

A useful reference for the Reign of Terror, including execution figures and the political radicalization of the French Revolution.

Debord, Guy. The Society of the Spectacle. Paris: Buchet-Chastel, 1967.

Debord’s idea that modern society converts social life into spectacle, representation, and consumption supports the essay’s concern that suffering can become a marketable image.

Gesa, Meleika. “The ‘Real Lord of the Flies’ Story Erased Our Tongan Values.” The Spinoff, May 17, 2020.

This piece corrects simplified retellings of the Tongan boys’ survival story by emphasizing the cultural context, values, and knowledge systems that enabled them to survive.

Golding, William. Lord of the Flies. London: Faber and Faber, 1954.

Golding’s novel is useful as a symbolic warning about group violence, charisma, fear, fascist ritual, and the collapse of moral restraint, even though real-world cases of stranded children complicate its anthropology.

Gopin, Marc. Compassionate Reasoning: Changing the Mind to Change the World. Oxford University Press, 2022.

A foundational source for thinking about compassion as a disciplined form of moral reasoning, where ethics, neuroscience, public health, and peacebuilding come together as practical skills for transforming individuals and societies.

Gopin, Marc. Healing the Heart of Conflict: Eight Crucial Steps to Making Peace with Yourself and with Others. Revised and updated edition. CreateSpace Independent Publishing Platform, 2016.

This work supports the claim that conflict resolution requires more than argument or negotiation. The book emphasizes listening, observation, emotional repair, self-examination, and practical steps for healing destructive conflict in personal, communal, and social life.

Gulag Online. “Gulag Online — Virtual Museum.” https://gulag.online/en

A public-history resource on the Soviet forced-labor camp system, useful as a supporting source alongside Applebaum’s historical study.

Hitchcock, Alfred. Psycho. Paramount Pictures, 1960.

Hitchcock is useful as a counterexample showing that darkness in art is not new, and that earlier suspense often worked through implication, guilt, psychology, and restraint rather than continuous spectacle.

Hitchcock, Alfred. Alfred Hitchcock Presents. CBS/NBC, 1955–1965.

The television series is useful for showing how earlier popular darkness could explore crime, guilt, irony, fear, and moral consequence within a more restrained narrative form.

Mrug, Sylvie, Madan M. Madan, and Michael Windle. “Emotional Desensitization to Violence Contributes to Adolescents’ Violent Behavior.” Journal of Abnormal Child Psychology, 2016.

This study is useful for the argument about habituation and desensitization, especially the claim that repeated exposure can alter emotional responsiveness to violence.

Orwell, George. Nineteen Eighty-Four. London: Secker & Warburg, 1949.

Orwell’s novel is the central modern dystopia about totalitarian power, propaganda, surveillance, language control, torture, and the political destruction of truth. It supports the essay’s distinction between dystopia as moral warning and dystopia as despair.

PBS NewsHour. Coverage of Jeffrey Epstein document releases.

Epstein is relevant as a symbolic case of wealth, impunity, trafficking, institutional failure, and elite access. PBS summarized released emails as revealing a network of wealthy and powerful contacts despite Epstein’s sex offender status.

Peng, Xizhe. “Demographic Consequences of the Great Leap Forward in China’s Provinces.” Population and Development Review 13, no. 4 (1987): 639–670. Available through PubMed Central. https://pmc.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/articles/PMC1127087/

This source supports estimates of the demographic catastrophe caused by the Great Leap Forward and is useful for grounding scholarly claims about famine deaths.

Reuters. Coverage of Harvey Weinstein’s New York retrial and California conviction.

Weinstein is relevant as a symbolic example of Hollywood power, sexual abuse, institutional enabling, and the collapse of accountability in elite cultural industries. Reuters coverage is useful for grounding the essay in legal history rather than rumor or generalized accusation.

Roddenberry, Gene. Star Trek: The Original Series. NBC, 1966–1969.

Roddenberry’s original Star Trek is a key example of science fiction that includes danger and conflict while preserving a future-oriented moral imagination of cooperation, reason, diversity, and institutional hope.

University of Minnesota, Center for Holocaust & Genocide Studies. “Cambodia.” Holocaust and Genocide Education Resource Guides. https://cla.umn.edu/chgs/holocaust-genocide-education/resource-guides/cambodia

A useful source for the Cambodian genocide under the Khmer Rouge, including the broad death toll range and the mechanisms of execution, starvation, forced labor, and disease.

U.S. Surgeon General. Social Media and Youth Mental Health: The U.S. Surgeon General’s Advisory. Washington, DC: U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, 2023.

This advisory is useful for the youth-development part of the argument. It reports that up to 95 percent of youth ages 13–17 use social media, more than a third say they use it “almost constantly,” and nearly 40 percent of children ages 8–12 use social media despite common minimum-age rules.

Wall Street Journal. Coverage of Jeffrey Epstein reporting and document releases.

The Wall Street Journal reporting is relevant for documenting Epstein’s elite networks, institutional access, and the broader problem of wealth, secrecy, and impunity.

Zuboff, Shoshana. The Age of Surveillance Capitalism: The Fight for a Human Future at the New Frontier of Power. New York: PublicAffairs, 2019.

Zuboff’s argument that behavioral data serve as the basis for “behavioral futures markets” helps connect entertainment commodification to the wider digital economy of prediction, manipulation, and behavioral modification.

SUMMARY:

In an age of propaganda, viral misinformation, and endless competing claims, one principle can help protect both democracy and our own minds: never trust one study—trust the pattern of evidence. Human progress has never been built on a single expert, headline, politician, or research paper. It has advanced because thousands of independent researchers have tested, challenged, replicated, and refined ideas until the truth became too strong to ignore. This is how we defeated myths about smoking, uncovered environmental dangers, built modern medicine, and are transforming our energy future. The antidote to manipulation is not blind trust or cynical distrust—it is disciplined, Compassionate Reasoning that asks better questions, follows the evidence wherever it leads, and seeks truth together rather than victory for our tribe. Shared truth is the foundation of freedom, democracy, and hope.

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BULLETED SUMMARY:

Never Trust One Research Study, But Do Trust the Pattern: Winning the War Against Disinformation

• Better questions are our strongest defense against disinformation.

• Never trust one study—trust the pattern of evidence.

• Truth grows through replication, criticism, and accumulated research.

• Propaganda thrives by creating confusion and doubt.

• Ask what systematic reviews and meta-analyses conclude.

• Follow the evidence, not the loudest voice.

• Beware of claims driven by money, ideology, or tribal loyalty.

• Science advances by correcting its own mistakes.

• Compassionate Reasoning helps us logically examine evidence together with greater compassion.

• Shared truth strengthens democracy, public health, and peace.

1. How Evidence Becomes Stronger Than Propaganda

Human progress has surged whenever evidence rose above manipulation. Billions now live longer, more sustainable lives—thanks to the courage of people who ask questions, experiment, and insist on truth. Advances in clean energy, public health, and thriving communities began when societies collectively valued evidence-based reasoning over persuasive propaganda. This transformation is not the work of isolated individuals or studies but of a persistent, shared commitment to proven, replicable truth.

Change resulted not from a single scientist, politician, activist, or research paper but from countless contributions that formed undeniable patterns. Knowledge moved from scattered findings to settled consensus as measurements, experiments, and lived experiences accumulated. Once evidence patterns became overwhelming, they shifted public perception, driving shifts in funding, policy, law, technology, and commerce. Investors now profit from these shifts because the weight of evidence drove real change.

This then is one of the great moral lessons of our time: human beings can learn together, even after decades of delay. We can be lied to, confused, divided, and manipulated by industries with enormous profits at stake, but we are not helpless. When evidence is gathered, compared, tested, reviewed, replicated, and explained, ordinary people begin to escape the propaganda trap. This is not only how science advances; it is how civilization matures.

Rachel Carson understood this before most of us did. In Silent Spring, published in 1962, she warned the public about the reckless use of pesticides, especially DDT, and about a chemical industry that was selling control over nature without fully admitting the hidden costs. She was attacked, mocked, and dismissed, yet she made complex science morally intelligible to ordinary people. She showed that nature was not an inert object for chemical conquest but a living web, and that poison placed in one corner of that web could travel through soil, water, insects, birds, animals, and human bodies. Carson was not the end of the science struggle, and science has advanced far beyond her time, but she modeled something indispensable: moral courage joined to evidence.

2. The New Age of Confusion

Today, we find ourselves in a different but related age to Carson’s. The landscape has shifted: propaganda moves faster, money is larger, the media ecosystem is more chaotic, and the public is more exhausted. In this environment, a misleading claim can circle the world before a careful correction has even been written. Every interested tribe can find its favorite expert, every industry can fund its favorite report, and every political movement can elevate the one study that flatters its worldview. In such an environment, truth is not defeated by lies alone. It is defeated by fragmentation, by the scattering of facts into isolated weapons.

That fragmentation leaves the ordinary citizen surrounded by contradiction. One study says this, another says that; one scientist sounds confident, another sounds skeptical; one agency says the risk is low, another says catastrophe is near; one company says its product is safe, another says the whole system is corrupt. After a while, people do not simply disagree. They become suspicious, overwhelmed, and unsure of whom to trust. That confusion is not an accident; it is a goal, if not the goal.

For decades, the fossil fuel industry and its allies did not need to prove that climate change was false. They only needed to keep the public in the dark. They only needed to create the impression that the science was permanently unsettled, repeating that scientists disagree, models are uncertain, more research is needed, and alarmists are exaggerating. The strategy was not always a direct denial. Often, it was a strategy of ‘delay through doubt’, and this is one of the most effective propaganda methods in the modern world.

Over time, the public learned better questions: Is dissent credible, or industry-funded? What does the full body of evidence reveal? Instead of, “Can one winter disprove global warming?” we ask, “What does the long-term pattern show?” Rather than weighing an industry-funded doubt, we ask where broad scientific consensus lies. This shift, from isolated to aggregated evidence, shaped a more unified global perspective.

3. Why One Study Is Never Enough

Relying on one research study risks error. Instead, true understanding emerges when we verify claims through an observed pattern across studies. A single study can warn or discover, but it may also mislead or be manipulated. Only by looking for a consistent pattern in the full body of evidence can we resist being misled and move toward real progress.

The wiser alternative is to ask for studies of studies. A systematic review asks what happens when we gather the relevant studies on a question and examine them together. A meta-analysis asks what happens when we combine data from many studies to estimate the overall effect. A consensus report asks what the best-qualified investigators conclude after years of accumulated evidence, public criticism, replication, and revision. These tools are not perfect, but they are far better than letting one corporation, one agency, one activist, one influencer, one professor, one political party, or one charismatic expert define reality alone.

It is especially vital to apply this method wherever profits are enormous. Consider industries such as fossil fuels, pesticides, pharmaceuticals, processed food, social media, artificial intelligence, weapons, and addictive technologies—all of which exert intense pressure on knowledge. When billions of dollars are at stake, research may be funded selectively, negative results may be buried, regulatory agencies may be weakened, and public relations firms may dress propaganda in scientific language. Activists and journalists can distort too, sometimes by exaggerating, simplifying, or turning uncertainty into moral theater, to gain attention or funding. So the solution cannot be naïve trust in government, markets, rebels, or single experts. The solution is better public reasoning.

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4. The Public Questions That Make Us Harder to Manipulate

Better public reasoning begins with a few simple questions that ordinary people can learn to ask. Is this claim based on one study or many studies? Has the finding been replicated? Who funded the research? Are there independent reviews? Is there a systematic review or meta-analysis? Do researchers from different countries and institutions converge? Are the effects large or small? Are there serious dissenting findings? Has the conclusion survived criticism over time? These questions do not require every citizen to become a scientist. They require citizens to become harder to manipulate.

At the same time, the method itself must be examined honestly. Bad studies can be aggregated into bad reviews. A meta-analysis can be distorted by publication bias, poor study quality, hidden assumptions, or the exclusion of inconvenient evidence. A “consensus” can sometimes be manufactured by institutions that exclude dissent too quickly. Scientific communities can be slow, arrogant, politically cautious, or susceptible to financial influence. These dangers are real, but they do not justify abandoning science. There are reasons to improve our standards for public truth.

The alternative to scientific consensus building is cynicism, and cynicism is surrender. Cynicism says everyone lies, so believe whatever your tribe believes. Cynicism says all institutions are corrupt, all experts are bought, all evidence is political, and all that remains is power. That is exactly what propaganda wants. It wants the public to become so disgusted and exhausted that people give up on the possibility of a shared truth.

5. Studies of Studies is a Manifestation of Moral Reasoning

Studies of studies are not only academic tools. They are democratic tools and peacebuilding tools. They give opponents a way to engage in a shared investigation. Instead of saying, “You are stupid,” we can say, “Let us look at the pattern.” Instead of saying, “Your side is evil,” we can say, “Let us examine the evidence together.” Instead of saying, “My expert defeats your expert,” we can ask, “What happens when all the serious evidence is placed on the table?”

This is how constructive approaches to conflict begin to mature. The study of studies does not remove moral urgency, but it disciplines it. It does not eliminate disagreement, but it makes disagreement more honest. It does not force people to trust institutions blindly, but it prevents every disagreement from collapsing into tribal suspicion. It helps us distinguish between what is proven, what is probable, what is uncertain, and what is still being investigated, and that distinction is essential for coexistence.

Compassionate Reasoning, as a discipline of thinking, becomes indispensable due to the limitations of human ability to deal with uncertainty, potential threats, and probabilities. Daniel Kahneman helps us see how quickly the mind reaches for shortcuts, and Mercier and Sperber help us see how often reasoning becomes a social weapon: not a search for truth, but a way to defend the group, win the argument, and justify what we already wanted to believe. Compassionate reasoning answers this human weakness by changing the conditions of conversation itself. People cannot usually reason well when they feel humiliated, endangered, mocked, or forced to betray their group. In those conditions, the mind moves into threat-defense, and the higher powers of reasoning are recruited to serve fear, resentment, loyalty, and self-protection. But when compassion sets the tone, people can become safe enough to admit uncertainty, name their real loyalties, and examine evidence without feeling that honest inquiry is a form of surrender. The goal is not to erase group commitments, religious commitments, political commitments, or moral passions. The goal is to bring them into the open, where they can become part of honest moral reasoning rather than hidden agendas that distort the search for truth. A mature democratic conversation must therefore ask not only, “What evidence do we have?” but also, “What emotional and moral conditions would allow us to face that evidence together?” Only then can people move from tribal reflex to disciplined inquiry, from defensive cleverness to shared truth-seeking, and from using reason to win toward using reason to discover what reality requires of us.

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6. The Great Religious Traditions Can Deepen the Moral Consensus

To further solidify the steady progress of science and rational inquiry, there needs to be a conscious effort in free societies to engage the religious community in evidence seeking and scientific inquiry. The great religious and spiritual traditions need not fear science when it is practiced humbly and ethically. At their best, they teach reverence for truth, protection of life, care for the vulnerable, and suspicion of arrogance, greed, and deception. That is why spiritually serious people should prefer tested knowledge over rumor, probability over wishful thinking, and disciplined inquiry over propaganda. Faith may ask questions science cannot answer, but when the question concerns disease, climate, toxins, vaccines, engineering, ecology, or public danger, love of neighbor requires love of evidence. Falsehood is not made holy because it is emotionally comforting, politically useful, or wrapped in religious language. A better world requires both moral purpose and factual discipline. That is why I have provided below a special annotated bibliography of interfaith commitment to evidence gathering and science.

7. From Rachel Carson to Renewable Hope

The global shift toward renewable energy is one of the most hopeful examples of evolutionary consensus-building based on evidence across the global community. It did not happen because humanity suddenly became wise. It happened because millions of researchers and practitioners gathered and produced evidence that became impossible to ignore, while technology improved and costs fell. Scientists measured the atmosphere, engineers improved solar panels and wind turbines, economists tracked energy prices, activist citizens demanded change, investors saw opportunity, and governments slowly began to respond. The pattern became clearer than the propaganda, and the pattern began to change the world.

This does not mean the battle is over. Fossil fuels remain powerful. Climate damage is still accelerating. Renewable energy has its own environmental and justice problems, including mining, land use, labor exploitation, grid fragility, and political backlash. But compared with the world Rachel Carson faced, we now have extraordinary tools of knowledge and cooperation. We can measure the planet from space, compare thousands of studies, track energy systems across continents, expose disinformation networks, share scientific knowledge instantly, and build a planetary conversation about survival. The question is whether we will use these tools wisely.

A wiser public culture would teach every citizen a simple discipline: never trust one headline without asking for the review, never trust one expert without asking what the field has found, never trust one industry claim without following the money, never trust one activist slogan without asking what the evidence can actually support, never trust your own side so completely that you stop checking, and never become so cynical that you stop believing human beings can learn.

Shared truth is not a luxury. It is a condition of coexistence. Without shared truth, democracy collapses into manipulation, public health into suspicion, environmental policy into delay, conflict resolution into accusation, and compassion into pity for our own side and contempt for everyone else. With shared truth, we can argue better, repair mistakes, change policy, protect children from toxins, protect communities from pollution, protect workers from exploitation, and protect future generations from preventable disaster.

Rachel Carson gave the public a warning, climate science gave the public a pattern, and renewable energy gives the public a sign of hope. Now we need to make the method ordinary. When a politician wildly claims that one man is responsible for a global virus outbreak, when he waves one study in your face, when someone tells you all experts are corrupt, or when someone insists that only their side sees the truth, we can pause and ask the democratic question, the scientific question, and the Compassionate Reasoning question: what do the studies of studies by thousands of great researchers actually show? What do the patterns of human knowledge show? Posing these questions calmly and confidently may be the simplest way for ordinary people to escape the propaganda trap, and once the pattern becomes clear, we will not only believe it but also act on it. We will act.

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ANNOTATED BIBLIOGRAPHY

Carson, Rachel. Silent Spring. Houghton Mifflin, 1962.

Carson’s classic work belongs near the beginning of this essay because it models the union of science, moral reasoning, and public communication. She did not merely report data about pesticides; she translated ecological evidence into a warning ordinary citizens could understand. Her work is especially useful for the essay’s claim that one courageous book may begin a public reckoning, but the deeper authority comes from accumulated evidence, later research, and democratic response. Carson also helps connect science to compassion for living systems rather than to mere technical mastery.

Oreskes, Naomi. “The Scientific Consensus on Climate Change.” Science, 2004.

This article is one of the clearest sources for the essay’s central phrase: “trust the pattern.” Oreskes examined the peer-reviewed literature on climate change and showed that the public impression of deep scientific division was not reflected in the scientific literature. The source is useful because it demonstrates how consensus can be studied rather than merely asserted. It also helps distinguish genuine uncertainty inside science from manufactured uncertainty in public debate.

Oreskes, Naomi, and Erik M. Conway. Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming. Bloomsbury, 2010.

This is probably the single most important book for the essay’s argument about “delay through doubt.” Oreskes and Conway show how the same tactics used to confuse the public about tobacco, acid rain, ozone depletion, and climate change were repeatedly deployed to slow regulation and protect powerful interests. The book is especially valuable because it explains that propaganda does not always need to prove the opposite of science; it often only needs to keep the public uncertain long enough to prevent action.

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Climate Change 2023: AR6 Synthesis Report. IPCC, 2023.

The IPCC report is essential for showing what global scientific consensus looks like at scale. It is not one study, one laboratory, one nation, or one ideological faction. It is a massive assessment process that synthesizes work from many scientific fields and many countries. This source strengthens the essay’s democratic argument: mature public reasoning should ask not only what one expert says, but what the best international evidence assessment concludes after years of review, criticism, and revision.

Cook, John, Dana Nuccitelli, Sarah A. Green, Mark Richardson, Bärbel Winkler, Rob Painting, Robert Way, Peter Jacobs, and Andrew Skuce. “Quantifying the Consensus on Anthropogenic Global Warming in the Scientific Literature.” Environmental Research Letters, 2013.

Cook and colleagues provide another useful empirical basis for the essay’s discussion of climate consensus. Their study examined thousands of climate-related abstracts and found that rejection of human-caused global warming accounted for only a very small share of papers taking a position in the peer-reviewed literature. This source is useful because it helps the essay move from rhetoric about “consensus” to measurable patterns in published research.

Ioannidis, John P. A. “Why Most Published Research Findings Are False.” PLOS Medicine, 2005.

Ioannidis is crucial because the essay should not sound naïve about science. His article explains why small studies, weak statistical power, bias, flexible methods, conflicts of interest, and publication pressures can produce unreliable findings. This source supports the essay’s warning that one study is never enough. It also gives the essay intellectual humility: science deserves trust not because every paper is true, but because better scientific communities build methods for correction.

Merton, Robert K. “A Note on Science and Technology in a Democratic Order.” Journal of Legal and Political Sociology, 1942.

Merton’s famous norms of science—communalism, universalism, disinterestedness, and organized skepticism—offer a philosophical and sociological foundation for the essay. They explain why, when at its best, science is not private revelation or tribal authority but a public discipline of checking, sharing, criticizing, and correcting claims. This source would help deepen the essay’s claim that science is not only a method of discovery but also a moral culture of humility before evidence.

Longino, Helen E. Science as Social Knowledge: Values and Objectivity in Scientific Inquiry. Princeton University Press, 1990.

Longino is useful for a more sophisticated account of objectivity. She argues that objectivity is not achieved by pretending scientists have no values; it is strengthened through public criticism, diverse perspectives, and disciplined communities of inquiry. This source fits beautifully with the essay’s democratic theme because it shows that knowledge becomes more reliable when it is exposed to criticism from many standpoints rather than guarded by closed authority.

Kitcher, Philip. Science in a Democratic Society. Prometheus Books, 2011.

Kitcher addresses the relationship between expert knowledge and democratic life. He is valuable for the essay because he does not reduce science to either technocracy or populism. Instead, he asks how scientific inquiry can serve human flourishing while remaining accountable to public values. This source would help develop the essay’s idea that science consensus is not the enemy of democracy; properly understood, it is one of democracy’s tools for responsible collective action.

Kahneman, Daniel. Thinking, Fast and Slow. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2011.

Kahneman’s work gives psychological depth to the essay’s account of disinformation. Human beings are not naturally good at probability, uncertainty, base rates, or slow statistical thinking. We are easily moved by vivid stories, fear, identity, and recent examples. This source supports the essay’s practical warning that propaganda succeeds not only because bad actors deceive us, but because ordinary human cognition is vulnerable to misleading patterns.

Mercier, Hugo, and Dan Sperber. The Enigma of Reason: A New Theory of Human Understanding. Harvard University Press, 2017.

Mercier and Sperber argue that reasoning often evolved and functions socially: people use reasons to argue, justify, persuade, and defend group positions. This source can help explain why one study is so easily weaponized. People do not always seek the whole truth; they often seek the piece of evidence that helps their side win. The source is useful for connecting scientific literacy to conflict resolution: better reasoning requires better social conditions for honest disagreement.

Lewandowsky, Stephan, John Cook, Ullrich Ecker, Dolores Albarracín, Michelle A. Amazeen, Panayiota Kendeou, Doug Lombardi, Eryn Newman, Gordon Pennycook, Ethan Porter, David G. Rand, David Rapp, Jason Reifler, Jon Roozenbeek, Philipp Schmid, Colleen M. Seifert, Gale M. Sinatra, Briony Swire-Thompson, Sander van der Linden, Emily K. Vraga, Thomas J. Wood, and Maria S. Zaragoza. The Debunking Handbook 2020. 2020.

This handbook is highly relevant to the essay’s practical purpose. It summarizes research on misinformation, why myths persist, how falsehoods spread, and how corrections can be made more effective. It is especially useful for turning the essay from diagnosis into civic practice. The essay’s call to ask better questions—Who funded this? Has it been replicated? What does the full evidence show?—fits directly with the handbook’s emphasis on media literacy and careful correction.

World Health Organization. “Infodemic.” WHO, health topic page.

The WHO’s concept of an “infodemic” is useful because it names the modern crisis of too much information, including false or misleading content, especially during public health emergencies. This source would allow the essay to show that disinformation is not only an intellectual problem. It can become a public-health, a democratic, and a social-trust danger. It also helps connect the essay’s argument to COVID-era confusion, vaccine mistrust, and the need for reliable institutions.

Mill, John Stuart. On Liberty. 1859.

Mill belongs in the moral reasoning section because he gives a classical liberal defense of open discussion rooted in human fallibility. His argument is not that every opinion is equally true, but that people should remain humble about their own certainty and allow serious criticism to test public belief. Mill helps the essay avoid authoritarian uses of “consensus.” Scientific consensus should guide public judgment, but it should never become an excuse to silence honest inquiry or evade evidence.

Dewey, John. The Public and Its Problems. Henry Holt, 1927.

Dewey is useful for the essay’s democratic side. He understood democracy not merely as voting but as a way of collective inquiry, communication, experimentation, and public problem-solving. This source would help frame the essay’s deeper claim: when citizens learn how to examine evidence together, democracy becomes wiser; when they are trapped in manipulation and fragmented media, democracy deteriorates.

Bronner, Stephen Eric. A Rumor About the Jews: Reflections on Antisemitism and the Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion. Oxford University Press, 2000.

This source could be used selectively if the essay wants one historical example of disinformation before the digital age. Bronner’s work on the Protocols shows how fabricated documents can become politically powerful when they feed fear, prejudice, and conspiracy thinking. This would broaden the essay beyond climate and science, showing that disinformation has long been a weapon against vulnerable groups and democratic coexistence.

Sunstein, Cass R. On Rumors: How Falsehoods Spread, Why We Believe Them, What Can Be Done. Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2009.

Sunstein’s book helps explain the social spread of rumors, especially when people live inside networks of trust, suspicion, and group identity. It is useful for the essay’s claim that truth is defeated not only by lies but by fragmentation. The book can help connect disinformation to reputational damage, polarization, and the collapse of shared reality.

van der Linden, Sander. Foolproof: Why Misinformation Infects Our Minds and How to Build Immunity. W. W. Norton, 2023.

Van der Linden’s work is useful for the essay’s practical democratic purpose because it develops the idea of “prebunking” or inoculation against manipulation. Instead of merely correcting false claims after they spread, citizens can learn common disinformation techniques in advance. This source would support the essay’s hopeful conclusion: people can become harder to manipulate when they understand the structure of deception.

A good final bibliography for the essay would probably use Carson, Oreskes & Conway, IPCC, Ioannidis, Merton, Longino, Kitcher, Kahneman, Mercier & Sperber, Lewandowsky/Cook, WHO, and Mill. That combination gives you history, science, philosophy, democracy, psychology, and a practical anti-disinformation strategy.

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Interfaith Commitments to Scientific Truth

Catechism of the Catholic Church. “Faith and Science,” section 159. Vatican / Vatican Observatory.

Catholic teaching gives a clear theological basis for respecting scientific truth: “there can never be any real discrepancy between faith and reason,” because truth cannot ultimately contradict truth. This is useful for the essay because it shows that, at least in one major Christian tradition, science is not the enemy of faith. Falsehood, superstition, and anti-rational manipulation are the real enemies of faith. A spiritually serious person, therefore, should prefer disciplined inquiry over propaganda because truth-seeking is part of reverence for reality. (Vatican Observatory)

Dalai Lama. “Our Faith in Science.” 2005.

The Dalai Lama offers one of the strongest religious statements in favor of scientific humility. He says that if science proves a Buddhist belief wrong, Buddhism must change, because both Buddhism and science share “a search for the truth and for understanding reality.” This is valuable for your essay because it models the exact moral posture you are describing: spiritual seriousness does not mean defending inherited claims at all costs. It means humbly facing reality, even when reality corrects tradition. (The 14th Dalai Lama)

Bahá’í International Community / Bahá’í writings on the harmony of science and religion.

The Bahá’í tradition is especially explicit that religion and science must be harmonized. Bahá’í teaching holds that truth is one, and therefore, genuine religion cannot require the rejection of scientific fact. This source is useful because it frames science and religion as two partners in civilization: science protects religion from superstition, while religion can help direct knowledge toward moral purpose, unity, and human betterment. (BahaiTeachings.org)

Union for Reform Judaism. “Resolution on Mandatory Immunization Laws.” 2015.

This is a practical Jewish example of religious ethics choosing science over misinformation. The resolution grounds support for vaccination in pikuach nefesh, the Jewish duty to preserve life, and refu’ah bedukah, tested or verified healing. It explicitly argues that protecting the medically vulnerable and the community as a whole takes precedence over religious exemptions from mandatory immunization. This is useful because it shows that religious commitment to life can require trust in verified medical science rather than private rumor or ideological suspicion. (urj.org)

Reform Judaism. “Jewish Views on Bioethics.”

This source states that preserving life and promoting health are central Jewish responsibilities and that these values inform Jewish commitment to medical science. It is a helpful citation for the broader claim that spiritual ethics should not retreat from scientific evidence when human life is at stake. In Jewish moral reasoning, truth-seeking is not abstract; it becomes a duty when accurate knowledge protects the vulnerable. (Reform Judaism)

World Council of Churches. “Webinar explores faith, justice, and science behind vaccines.” 2021.

The World Council of Churches offers a Christian ecumenical example of science being translated through faith communities for the sake of public health. In this framing, vaccines are not merely technical interventions; they are connected to dignity, trust, and care across the lifespan. This source would help your essay show that faith communities can serve democracy by helping people move from fear and rumor toward responsible scientific understanding. (World Council of Churches)

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Capitalism is perhaps the most powerful force shaping contemporary human society. It shapes our food, medicine, housing, technology, energy, politics, media, imagination, and even our fears. Because capitalism exerts such a powerful influence on our lives, ethics cannot remain on the sidelines as a set of private virtues or religious abstractions. Ethics must help us evaluate corporate society, discipline it, pressure it, and move it as far as possible toward repair, truth, accountability, and a more humane future.

The question, then, is not whether corporations can become saints, as they cannot. The question is whether corporations that have done proven harm can be pushed toward a minimum standard of repentance. That minimum standard does not require moral purity, and it may not even require the full traditional language of confession, because corporations are surrounded by lawyers, boards, shareholders, and liability concerns. But it does require something concrete: repair where repair is possible, an end to the defense of the old harm, and a measurable commitment to a far healthier and different future.

Interfaith values shared by many religions and spiritually minded people can and should be sought after as a guide to a moral future, along with many wisdom and philosophical traditions. For example, in classical Jewish thought, repentance is not merely a feeling, regret, or public relations. Repentance has stages: there is acknowledgment of wrongdoing, remorse, repair or restitution, and a commitment to a different future, proven by changed behavior when the same temptation or opportunity returns.

Traditional repentance, as just described, is a demanding standard for individual human beings, and it is even more difficult to apply to corporations, because corporations in a capitalist system are not structured like ordinary moral persons. They are built to pursue profit, protect shareholders, avoid liability, satisfy boards, and survive politically, and their lawyers will almost always prevent a full confession, while their executives will rarely speak in the language of sin, remorse, or repentance.

If, however, we are going to speak seriously about corporate repentance, we need a minimum standard that is both morally meaningful and realistic. We may not get full confession, genuine remorse, or the language of sin, but at the very least, we can demand repair and a demonstrable commitment to a different future. After all, talk is cheap when it comes to repentance, but actions loom much larger. A corporation that has done serious harm must materially reduce the harm it has caused, stop defending the machinery that produced the harm, and show through budgets, policies, pricing, lobbying, research, and product strategy that it is moving in a different direction. Corporate repentance cannot be measured by beautiful words in an ESG report, but by future consequences.

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Eli Lilly and How Change Affects Millions of Lives

This is why Eli Lilly’s insulin scandal and its later course correction deserve a morally complicated but serious evaluation. The outrage around insulin pricing was not abstract, because insulin is not a luxury product and it is not an optional convenience. For people with diabetes, insulin is the difference between life and death, and the fact that patients in one of the wealthiest countries in the world were rationing insulin because they could not afford it was a moral disgrace. People were stretching doses, skipping prescriptions, living with terror, risking hospitalization, organ damage, coma, and death because a life-sustaining medicine had become financially unreachable. The pharmaceutical industry, including Lilly, participated in a system in which dependency became a source of profit, and people who needed medicine in order to live were trapped. That is not simply a pricing mistake, but a violation of human dignity.

Yet, when Lilly capped many patients’ out-of-pocket insulin costs at $35 per month and reduced list prices on major insulin products, that was not nothing. It did not erase the past, and it did not bring back the suffering, fear, debt, or deaths associated with years of unaffordable insulin; it also came after lawsuits, political pressure, public outrage, and reputational damage. But here is the most important point: in corporate ethics, pressure is often how course correction happens, and the question is not whether the company achieved moral purity, but whether it made a concrete change that materially improved the future for vulnerable people.

A $35 monthly insulin cap was a serious repentance move because it immediately changed the lives of millions of patients, reduced fear, reduced rationing, and made survival more predictable. In a world where diabetes affects hundreds of millions of people globally and is one of the major chronic illnesses of aging, access to insulin is not a marginal issue but a civilizational health issue, and that is why Lilly’s change mattered morally, even if it came late and under pressure.

Denial is Death by a Thousand Cuts

This is very different from industries that have not merely done harm, but have continued to organize society around the denial of that harm. The tobacco industry is one example, because for decades, tobacco companies concealed, minimized, and distorted the truth about smoking and disease. There were settlements, payments, and public health campaigns, but the business model remained tied to addiction and illness. A truly repentant tobacco industry would not merely pay damages, but would devote itself aggressively to helping people stop smoking, preventing youth addiction, reducing the future market for its own most harmful products, and aggressively developing healthy products. Anything less is at best partial accountability, because real repentance would require future-oriented repair.

The fossil fuel industry is an even deeper case, because the harm is not only environmental but epistemic. What I mean is that this is a harm to human knowledge itself, to what we think we know, and to the vital importance to human survival and the caretaking of the planet embedded in common knowledge. We cannot exist without common knowledge, and when common knowledge is invaded and shattered by corporate interests, when political parties are destroyed by the invasion of extremist ideas for corporate profit, then that is a different level of moral damage. It is a cancerous damage to the future itself. Let’s delve into this.

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Exxon and the broader fossil fuel world did not merely sell a product that contributed to planetary warming. They had access to a serious scientific understanding of climate change, yet they participated in decades of doubt, delay, political manipulation, and public confusion. They not only damaged the atmosphere but also compromised democratic societies’ capacity to understand reality and respond to danger. That is why fossil fuel wrongdoing belongs in a different moral category from ordinary greed, because it is not merely that they profited from carbon, but that they helped corrupt public reason to keep profiting from it. They shifted politicians, voters, media ecosystems, and whole segments of society into denial or delusion, and they helped make science itself look suspect while turning the future into an enemy of the present balance sheet.

The same pattern appears in the gun lobby and the weapons industry. Many responsible gun owners know the difference between ownership and extremism, and many have left the NRA in disgust precisely because it ceased to represent a healthy culture of responsibility and became a machinery of fear, absolutism, and political radicalization. A morally serious gun culture would cooperate with rational safety measures, background checks, safe storage, training, and limits on the most dangerous forms of access, because it would understand that rights and responsibilities belong together. But the dominant political machinery around guns has often done the opposite, framing even modest public safety efforts as tyranny, turning reasonable regulation into apocalypse, and helping to destroy the possibility of rational public conversation about how to reduce shootings, accidents, suicide, and terror while respecting legitimate ownership.

That is why the NRA and the gun industry belong in an essay on corporate repentance. Repentance would not require the NRA or the weapons industry to renounce every form of gun ownership, because that is not the point. The point is that real repentance would require a measurable break from extremism and a serious commitment to public safety. It would require saying that rights live inside duties, that ownership requires training, storage, responsibility, and limits, and that self-defense cannot be separated from the obligation to reduce suicide, domestic violence, accidental shootings, school shootings, and mass terror.

A repentant gun culture would help create the safest gun-owning society in the world. It would support universal background checks, serious training, safe-storage requirements, research on gun violence, and keeping weapons away from people with histories of domestic violence, credible threats, extreme instability, or violent behavior. It would distinguish responsible owners from political extremists, and it would not allow fear to become its business model. Instead, the dominant political culture around guns has often refused even the minimum gesture of repentance. It has not said, “We must protect lawful ownership while reducing preventable death,” nor has it said, “We must cooperate with public health, schools, families, and law enforcement.” Instead, it has too often doubled down on absolutism, suspicion, and grievance.

This is why many responsible gun owners themselves have become disgusted. They know the difference between a firearm and an ideology, between ownership and worship, between self-defense and fantasy, and between freedom and recklessness. When an organization that once could have represented safety, training, and responsibility becomes a machinery of fear, it betrays not only the public but also responsible gun owners themselves. In the framework of repentance, the NRA and the weapons industry fail because they have not shown the minimum requirements of repair. They have not admitted the social consequences of their absolutism, expressed serious remorse for the ways in which their rhetoric has intensified fear and blocked reasonable safety, made reparations in the form of sustained public-health cooperation, or committed themselves to a different future.

That last point is crucial because, in classical repentance, the test is not only what a person says after the harm, but what happens when the person faces the same temptation again. Does he return to the old behavior, or does he choose differently? For corporations and powerful institutions, the same test applies. When faced with the opportunity to profit from fear, do they continue to inflame it, and when faced with the chance to block regulation, do they block it reflexively? When faced again with public grief after another massacre, do they offer repair, or do they simply repeat slogans?

By that standard, the NRA has not repented, and the gun industry has not repented. They have not broken free from the machinery of harm, helped the country achieve a responsible balance between rights and safety, or cooperated in building a future in which fewer people die. This is where the comparison with Lilly matters. Lilly harmed people through insulin pricing, and that harm was serious, but a $35 monthly cap is a concrete, future-oriented correction. It changes the lives of patients. It does not erase the past, but it changes the direction of the future. The NRA and the gun industry have offered no comparable shift, because they have not said, in effect, “We will remain connected to lawful ownership, but we will now dedicate ourselves to preventing preventable death.”

There is also a historical shadow here, because in the twentieth century, corporations and industrial interests were not merely innocent bystanders to the machinery of human destruction. Some were directly implicated, through subsidiaries, production systems, financial relationships, and forced labor, in the Nazi war economy. The Ford-Werke case is especially important because Ford’s German subsidiary in Cologne became part of wartime production under the Nazi regime and used forced labor, even though Ford later argued that it had lost effective control of the subsidiary during the war. The Ford Motor Company Archives’ own report, Research Findings About Ford-Werke Under the Nazi Regime, published in 2001 and cataloged by the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, examined these questions of ownership, wartime production, and forced labor, which means the moral question cannot simply be dismissed as propaganda or rumor. (Holocaust Museum Collections⁠)

The larger accusation, made by historians and critics of wartime corporate capitalism, is that some American and multinational corporations did business in or with Nazi Germany when profit opportunities were available, and that their subsidiaries or business networks later became entangled with the Nazi war machine. In Working for the Enemy: Ford, General Motors, and Forced Labor in Germany during the Second World War, Reinhold Billstein and colleagues examine how Ford-Werke and Opel, General Motors’ German subsidiary, became suppliers to the German war effort and used thousands of forced laborers, including POWs and civilian detainees deported by Nazi authorities. (Berghahn Books⁠) Jacques Pauwels’ essay “Profits über Alles!: American Corporations and Hitler,” published in Labour/Le Travail in 2003, makes the broader argument that major American corporate interests, including automotive, industrial, and financial actors, profited from relationships with Nazi Germany and were often not punished afterward. (Labour / Le Travail⁠)

This matters for the question of corporate repentance because opportunistic adaptation is not repentance. If a company changes after a war and only because the regime falls, the market disappears, the war is lost, or the legal environment changes, that is not a moral transformation. Repentance requires more than the thought, “We no longer do that because the opportunity no longer exists.” It requires an honest reckoning with what was done, who was harmed, which systems of profit enabled the harm, and what future commitments would prevent the same kind of collaboration if a similar opportunity returned under a different political form.

That is why we need a new minimum standard for corporate repentance in a capitalist age. We cannot simply ask whether a company has sinned, because many have, and we cannot simply ask whether executives have spoken the right words, because they often will not. We need to ask whether the company has stopped defending the conditions that produced the harm, whether it has made material repair, and whether it is investing in a different future. A corporation that has done great harm must stop lying about the harm, stop funding political systems that protect the harm, stop attacking science, journalism, public reason, or democratic regulation, and compensate or repair where repair is possible. It must change pricing, access, safety, environmental behavior, or product strategy in measurable ways, and it must show in its future investments that it is no longer committed to the old destruction. And finally, these standards must be applied universally, and not used politically to harm one side or another of the political spectrum.

Lilly is not innocent, but it has made a serious corrective move on insulin. Tobacco made partial settlements but never fully transformed itself into a healing industry. ExxonMobil and the fossil fuel world have not repented as long as they continue to defend a carbon future while using green language as camouflage. The gun lobby and weapons industry have not repented as long as they radicalize fear and block reasonable safety in order to protect sales and power.

The conclusion is that, in corporate ethics, we cannot presently demand purity, but neither should we accept public relations as a substitute for repentance. The moral test is not whether a corporation can polish its past, but whether it can break from the machinery of harm and materially change the future toward doing far less harm and even creatively discovering profits through doing the right and the healthful, such as healthy, affordable, lifesaving drugs or healthy energy, or healthy forms of self-defense. Repentance, even at the corporate level, must mean less lying, less harm, more repair, more creative imagination, and a real commitment to a better future.

Annotated Bibliography

Eli Lilly and Company. “Lilly Cuts Insulin Prices by 70% and Caps Patient Insulin Out-of-Pocket Costs at $35 Per Month.” March 1, 2023. Source: Eli Lilly investor news release, investor.lilly.com.
This source documents Lilly’s major insulin-pricing course correction, including the 70% list-price reductions for commonly prescribed insulins and the $35 monthly out-of-pocket cap. It is useful as evidence that Lilly made a concrete, measurable change in future patient access, even if that change came after years of public pressure, lawsuits, and moral outrage.

Lown Institute. “1.3 Million Americans Forced to Ration Insulin, New Study Estimates.” November 8, 2022. Source: Lown Institute, lowninstitute.org.
This source helps establish the seriousness of the harm caused by insulin pricing. It reports estimates that roughly 1.3 million U.S. adults rationed insulin because of cost, making clear that unaffordable insulin was not an abstract pricing issue but a life-threatening public health crisis.

International Diabetes Federation. IDF Diabetes Atlas / “Diabetes Facts & Figures.” Source: International Diabetes Federation, idf.org and diabetesatlas.org.
The Diabetes Atlas provides the global scale of the diabetes crisis, estimating hundreds of millions of adults worldwide living with diabetes and projecting major increases by 2050. This supports the argument that insulin access and GLP-1/metabolic medicine are not niche issues but central questions for global health and aging societies.

Supran, Geoffrey, Stefan Rahmstorf, and Naomi Oreskes. “Assessing ExxonMobil’s Global Warming Projections.” Science, January 2023. Source: Science, science.org.
This study shows that ExxonMobil’s own scientists produced climate projections that were largely accurate, even while the company later contributed to public doubt, delay, and confusion about climate science. It is central to the argument that fossil fuel wrongdoing was not merely environmental but epistemic: an attack on public truth and scientific reasoning.

California Office of the Attorney General. “Master Settlement Agreement.” Source: California Department of Justice / Office of the Attorney General, oag.ca.gov.
This source summarizes the tobacco Master Settlement Agreement, including major payments, marketing restrictions, anti-smoking funding, and disclosure of internal industry documents. It is useful as a comparison case because tobacco faced legal accountability and partial repair, but the industry did not fully transform itself into a healing or prevention-oriented enterprise.

Michael Waldman. “How the NRA Rewrote the Second Amendment.” Brennan Center for Justice, May 20, 2014. Source: Brennan Center for Justice, brennancenter.org.
This source is useful for understanding the NRA’s historical transformation, especially the shift away from its older focus on hunting, marksmanship, and gun safety toward a more aggressive political defense of gun rights. It supports the argument that the NRA did not simply represent gun owners, but helped reshape constitutional and political culture around firearms.

Johns Hopkins Center for Gun Violence Solutions. “Annual Gun Violence Data 2023.” Source: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, publichealth.jhu.edu.
This source provides the basic public-health context for the essay. It reports that 46,728 people died from gun violence in the United States in 2023, making clear that gun policy is not an abstract ideological dispute but a mass public-safety crisis affecting families, schools, communities, suicide prevention, domestic violence, and everyday civic life.

RAND Corporation. “Effects of Background Checks on Violent Crime.” Source: RAND Gun Policy in America, rand.org.
RAND’s gun-policy research is valuable because it reviews evidence across many studies rather than simply making an advocacy claim. Its assessment of background checks and violent crime provides support for the argument that rational gun-safety measures can be studied empirically and should not be treated as enemies of freedom or science.

New York Attorney General Letitia James. “Attorney General James Wins Trial Against NRA and Wayne LaPierre.” February 23, 2024. Source: New York State Office of the Attorney General, ag.ny.gov.
This source documents the 2024 civil trial in which Wayne LaPierre and other NRA leaders were found liable for financial misconduct and governance failures. It is relevant because the NRA’s public rhetoric about responsibility and freedom was accompanied by internal misconduct and self-dealing, strengthening the essay’s argument that the organization failed even basic standards of institutional responsibility.

The Guardian. “NRA and Wayne LaPierre Found Liable in Lawsuit Over Misspending of Funds.” February 23, 2024. Source: The Guardian, theguardian.com.
This news account provides a readable summary of the civil corruption trial and the jury’s findings against LaPierre and other NRA officials. It can help illustrate how the organization’s leadership used the language of public mission while engaging in private enrichment, a key example of the gap between institutional rhetoric and repentance.

Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health. “Guns Remain Leading Cause of Death for Children and Teens.” September 12, 2024. Source: Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health, publichealth.jhu.edu.
This source is important for the moral urgency of the argument. It documents the continuing centrality of firearms in deaths among children and teens in the United States, reinforcing the claim that the NRA and gun industry cannot be judged only by abstract rights language while ignoring the consequences for young lives and families.

Ford Motor Company Archives, with independent assessment by Simon Reich. Research Findings About Ford-Werke Under the Nazi Regime. 2001. Source: United States Holocaust Memorial Museum catalog record, collections.ushmm.org.
This report is one of the most directly relevant sources on Ford’s German subsidiary, Ford-Werke, during the Nazi period. It examines Ford’s ownership, wartime production, and the use of forced labor at the Cologne plant, while also addressing Ford’s later claim that it did not control the subsidiary under Nazi rule. It is useful for this essay because it shows the complexity of corporate responsibility when a multinational corporation’s foreign subsidiary becomes integrated into a criminal war economy.

Jacques R. Pauwels. “Profits über Alles! American Corporations and Hitler.” Labour/Le Travail, vol. 51, Spring 2003, pp. 223–249. Source: Labour/Le Travail, available through Érudit, erudit.org.
Pauwels’ essay offers a broad historical argument about American corporate investment, industrial relations, and business collaboration with Nazi Germany, including firms such as Ford, General Motors, and IBM, as well as financial interests connected to Wall Street. It is more interpretive and critical than a company-specific archival report, but it is valuable for framing the larger ethical issue: opportunistic business adaptation is not the same as repentance.

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An Interfaith Perspective on the Bare Minimum Standards for Corporate Repentance: Lilly Versus the NRA

• Corporations shape society too powerfully to escape ethical judgment.

• Repentance cannot mean public relations.

• Real repentance requires repair and future change.

• Lilly harmed patients through insulin pricing.

• The $35 insulin cap is a meaningful course correction.

• Tobacco made payments but did not become a healing industry.

• Exxon distorted the truth, undermined science, and failed to take responsibility for climate change.

• The NRA turned safety into tyranny and fear.

• Corporate harm becomes worse when it corrupts public reason.

• The minimum standard is evidence of less lying, more repair, and a better future.

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