It’s impossible to keep in mind during a time of traumatic upheaval like our present moment in history — very few people are strictly good or irredeemably evil. Few people are undeniably good almost all the time, we think of them as highly evolved, wise, enlightened, righteous, bodhisattvas, saints. Few people are relentlessly evil, we think of them as dangerous psychopaths. All the rest of us are between these extremes, on a spectrum we move along according to our emotions. All of us are quite good sometimes, even exemplary although, when we feel victimized and completely justified, cruel, ruthless and unforgiving.

If you’re cruel and ruthless at times, does that make you an evil person? It depends on a lot of things. There is a time to be ruthless in this rough world we live in, sad to say. But as a permanent attitude, a tiny minority of us are ruthless all the time just as very few can be at our best in every moment. We aspire to be the best we can be in every moment.

Martin Luther King, Jr. said “forgiveness is not an occasional act, it is a permanent attitude.” A very tall order for the average earthling, because forgiveness always depends on the specific circumstances, and a sincere apology landing just right, but it states a great aspiration — a readiness to listen and forgive, which is a beautiful thing. It requires not hardening your heart against people who have done you wrong, if they sincerely try to make amends.

Hatred and division have actually been monetized, you can buy stock in lucrative corporations (like Palantir) that specialize in mining and analyzing personal data for the use of those who seek to exploit existing prejudices and make people hate and fear each other. Personalized messages influence millions to see the “other” as inhuman and evil.  AI can also easily be harnessed to this task, dividing people by removing elements like nuance and context that make humans compassionate and replacing it with relentless algorithms that make AI conform to the creators of AI’s money-driven, bottom line, black and white, good/evil worldview.

We are divided by the calculated, constantly repeated, transactional lie that some people, people like us, are good, and other people, people like them (fill in hated group) are evil. This lie is the creation of evil people, which is then magnified by millions of sometimes fine and sometimes shitty people who are neither evil nor good all the time, repeating it widely to people who agree, often just to be agreeable. The lies that enflame our division are all promoted by algorithms that monetize engagement. Engagement is driven by fear, lust, agitation, need for confirmation, isolation, anger, outrage, etc. Now fear, hatred, outrage and the lies that drive them can be instantly spread to hundreds of millions, like a pandemic.

I think of the klansman, acting out of a reflex to protect a helpless toddler, diving into a river to save a drowning child. I imagine him in that moment acting out of human instinct, not stopping to think the kid might be black or a member of some other group he hates. Maybe it’s the Anne Frank good in me, seeking the good in someone otherwise hateful to me, but I think humans defaulting to their higher human impulses happens more often than we are aware. What unites us as vulnerable humans is far more powerful than what divides us, things that are mostly lies anyway.

The genius of homo sapiens, the self-named Wise Ape, is our ability to organize on a massive level based on abstract beliefs (granted often irrational, destructive ones). No other animal is able to build cultures of millions of its own and harness that organized mass to radically change the actual planet we live on. Humans are capable of the greatest things ever done, as well as the most atrocious. Almost none of us are Good and very few of us are Evil. There has to be some path to keeping this in the front of our consciousness as we move through these dangerous times.