Toward a Solution to a Psychological Mystery, Or, How People Can Embrace Evil (and Not Even Know It)

This piece appeared as a newspaper op/ed in early February, 2025. It was also published on Daily Kos under a different title: How People Can Embrace Evil (and Not Even Know It).

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Toward a Solution to a Psychological Mystery

Many times here in recent years, I’ve expressed my wonderment at a psychological phenomenon I’ve witnessed in these times.

The mystery can be stated this way: How is it possible for people who seem sincerely devoted to various good values to also give their fervent allegiance to a political force that is quite clearly animated by the very opposite of those values?

(Those values might be grouped as 1) the moral teachings of Christianity, 2) the founding principles of American Democracy, and 3) the qualities of good and honorable character.)

As someone who has lived in the Shenandoah Valley for decades, I have known many people who have come to embody that contradiction– between one set of values that governs them in most of the domains of their lives – in their neighborhoods, churches, and other communities – and another that, in this era, governs their political choices.

Psychological “Modules”?

In my ongoing efforts to understand this by now quite stark contradiction, I once ventured the image of “modules”—as if there were somehow different “wiring,” or different “programs” that get “plugged in” depending on what aspect of their lives people are engaged in. While that’s how it looks, it seems strange to conceive of human psychology in such terms, as though we can have a different personality, with different feelings and values, for different arenas, as if people had interchangeable electronic modules that “switch on” to govern how they’ll conduct themselves.

But however strange it seems to imagine human psychology working in that manner, there is a body of evidence from the human world –- in psychological phenomena unrelated to politics — that something of the sort actually does happen.

The Roles People Play

It can be easily shown that people act differently in the various roles they play in their lives: e.g. in their roles as child of their parents, parents of their children, friend to their friends, worker in their workplace, etc.

Social psychologists have long noted this (e.g. in Irving Goffman’s The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life.) To one degree or another, most of us can recognize that we are not the same person all the time, regardless of the situation we’re in and the role we’ve learned to play within it.

Sometimes these differences are quite dramatic. E.g. people have marveled at how the Germans who operated extermination camps by day could be loving family men when they went home at night. And I had an unpleasant experience once, when people who conducted their personal relationships with kindness and integrity operated by very different rules in their roles within their organization, as they conformed to the culture of the institution.

But whatever the degree of difference in the “personalities” that people bring to their different roles, the fact that people can be observed operating as if by different “programs” in those different roles proves the basic point: it is possible for people to contain within them more than one way of being, more than one set of rules, that enables them to be — in some way — “different people” depending on the situation they perceive themselves to be in.

Multiple Personalities, or “Dissociative Identity Disorder”

Another proof-of-concept is still more dramatic. This is the rarer phenomenon of multiple personalities.

It is a fact that some people undergo such dramatic transformation of their individual selves that they end up containing more than one distinct identity within that single human person. (E.g. in the film, Three Faces of Eve.)

• These different identities may have different names.
• They can have apparently different physiologies (e.g. one identity having allergies that another does not).
• They may or may not be aware of each other’s existence. (Their relations with each other can be complex, sometimes quite hostile.)

(This break-up of the one person into such distinct identities is often the result of trauma, which means experience so severe the person cannot integrate it with the rest of their consciousness.)

What such “multiples” seem to prove is that the psyche has the capacity to have more than one “operating system.”

(I have no idea how that can operate in neurological terms. But clearly somehow different patterns can get engaged, depending on what part of a person’s repertoire of “personalities” gets triggered in a given circumstance.)

If a person can even contain multiple identities, which act and feel differently from each other, then surely we humans are also capable of the less dramatic division of applying different values to different domains of our lives.

History is full of examples of “decent” people adopting a less “decent” way of acting process as a result of their membership in a group-culture that’s taught them less decent ways of being. (E.g. a lynch mob.)

Which suggests a way of understanding what I’ve observed for more than thirty years: i.e. the operation of a propagandistic campaign that has been teaching millions of Americans certain ways of perceiving things in the political realm, and ways of feeling about what they have been taught to perceive.

By this means, it seems that a lot of “good” people have been “trained” to operate by different rules, and be governed by different values, in the political realm.

While, in other realms, their goodness remains largely undiminished.