Contemporary Westerners constantly underestimate a human's ability to commit unthinkable atrocities under the right conditions. I don't know if it's our education's fault. Maybe we just don't bother to ever emphasize this point. Maybe it's too uncomfortable of a subject to deal with.

This last century has presented a rich buffet of historical options to choose from when looking for examples of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter. Western Europe, Eastern Europe, Africa, Asia, you name it. Maybe even a relative or a next door neighbor in our very own US of A, sent to the wrong Vietnamese village at the wrong time. That seed of pure horror is in all of us, and it's ready to rear its ugly head when the conditions are right.

I don't think as a species we've quite figured out how to suppress it.

>This last century ... example of ideologies that allowed otherwise perfectly normal, God-fearing, salt of the earth folk to turn into horror-machines of rape, mutilation and slaughter.

well, just off the top of the head - today we have Yemen, Rahingya, Syria - the places where large number of innocent people/civilians suffer and die as direct result of other, reasonably normal, people just doing their job of inflicting that suffering and death in the name of the cause that is presented as a pretty good cause in all these cases - fighting terrorism.

Pinker’s “Better Angels of our Nature” is a masterwork on the subject. It’s also a terrific read and will change your view of history and make you happy to be alive in the present!

https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Nat...

I've been meaning to read it, however the criticism from historians about it has made me somewhat uncomfortable about it: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Better_Angels_of_Our_Natur...

Is there anything conclusive about how cherry-picked the numbers in the book are?

> Were the slave traders all sociopaths?

No. Just people who were willing to tolerate things being done to other people that they didn't care about. Sometimes even people they did care about. People forget that the 45 year old Tom Jefferson took a 14 year old child, Sally Hemmings to France as his sex slave. He fathered 6 children with her and did not free them. That's right. He kept those 6 children as slaves. Was he sociopath? Or just a product of a toxic culture that enabled him to commit such actions and still sleep well?

While the crews of slave ships surely tended to be somewhat self-selecting, it seems highly unlikely that they were all or mostly sociopaths. The reality is that it's quite easy for a perfectly normal person to convince themselves that bad things that happen to a group of people of radically different physical appearance, culture, language and religion don't really count. When their society already has a cultural consensus to that effect, and when their job depends on it, it's ridiculously easy. The two universal and constant features of human nature are stupidity and evil. Radical evil is more or less always here now, but people always and everywhere choose to believe that it is only in the past or in the village over the next hill. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7445240

Racism makes tyranny easier. Yes. But it is not necessary for tyranny.

If you ever find yourself in need, or on the wrong side of injustice, especially perpetrated be a greater authority, you will quickly realize how terrible really a lot of people out there are.

I agree: that is precisely my argument. It takes fairly little to turn people against you; and the African slaves sadly had a great deal going against them.

Consider how the men who toiled on the ships of that era lived: https://www.newworldexploration.com/explorers-tales-blog/lif...

Those who have power will always subjugate those who don't.

I'm not defending it, not at all. But mankind has been beating on his fellow man since the dawn of time. We truly are a horrific species.

Most evil is done by ordinary people, who have great capacity for it. It is a critical error, I think, to suppose that evil is done by the 'bad guys' and that I and my group, whoever that is, are somehow invulnerable to it. Instead, we must realize there is nothing different or special about us, and be ever on guard for its symptoms and the things that lead to it (IMHO, ideology and intolerance, and anything that puts my power and my desires above those of others').

Germany was arguably the cultural and scientific heart of the world in the 1920s and 1930s. The Nazis murdered 11 million people. That isn't done by a few evil people; it requires the labors and cooperation of large numbers, and the passive acceptance of millions more.

I think you'll find that plenty of people are willing to not think so hard about such problems as long as it's in the course of a legal business. I'm sure it was also easy to find justification from commentators at the time when slavery was legal. You could just go about your slavery business and point at some guy's essay as to why you shouldn't feel guilty at all.

The popular opinion is that it was all evil white devils. The historical answer is that African tribes and kingdoms had been trading slaves for thousands of years. It was a nice source of income for them. When England abolished slavery there was a lot of resentment among the African elite.

I'd ask you to think about pretty much any of the recent wars that have happened... Innocent people died, sometimes in extreme pain, in each of them.

I think that covers just about every war in history