Edmund Burke said
"for evil to triumph all that is required is for good men to do nothing".
Alas, he could not foresee how as societies evolve
through technology the future would prove him wrong.
For evil to triumph in the 21st century
all it takes is for enough 'good people'
(everyone wants to be seen as good)
to set themselves tasks that match
their aspirations and for each act to be so slight
that it can only be seen as good in itself, or at worst harmless.
Because of the slightness of the tasks they credit themselves with
the effect becomes an active collective passivity,
where the individual good becomes a collective evil.
When I wrote this the most immediate situation I reflected upon was the way competitive banking pushed traders to break laws, and the errant traders lose but their bosses still earn six or seven figure sums, but equally I thought of civil society in the Third Reich where people knew a lot more than it was safe to share about how others were persecuted. http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2011/jan/07/hans-fallada-alone-berlin-rereading
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