Solzhenitsyn on evil

From "The Gulag Archipelago":

If only it were all so simple! If only there were evil people somewhere insidiously committeing evil deeds, and it were necessary only to separate them from the rest of us and destroy them. But the line dividing good and evil cuts through the heart of every human being. And who is willing to destroy a piece of his own heart?

During the life of any heart this line keeps changing place; sometimes it is squeezed one way by exuberant evil and sometimes it shifts to allow enough space for good to flourish. One and the same human being is, at various ages, under various circumstances, a totally different human being. At times he is close to being a devil, at times to sainthood. But his name doesn't change, and to that name we ascribe the whole lot, good and evil.

Socrates taught us: "Know thyself."

Contronted by the pit into which we are about to toss those who have done us harm, we halt, stricken dumb: it is after all only because of the way things worked out that they were the executioners and we weren't.

From good to evil is one quaver, says the proverb.

And correspondingly, from evil to good.

Solzhenitsyn goes on to mention the case of some Soviet officials who used holy icons for target practice. We prefer to think people so given over to evil can't exist, he says. The problem, the author continues, is how literature depicts classic evildoers: they are conscious at some level of their evil. In reality, though, the real evildoer has to be convinced that he's doing good, "or else that it's a well-considered act in conformity with the natural law." Otherwise, the conscience will restrain the evildoer before his evil gets too out of hand. Shakespeare's evildoers, he cites as an example, stopped after a few corpses because they lacked ideology.

Ideology -- that is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the social theory wihich helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in his own and others' eyes, so that he won't hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the conquererors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race, and the Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness of future generations.

Ideology, Solzhenitsyn writes, made the 20th century the century of mass murder on a previously inconceivable scale. He speaks of a rumor that during one period immediately after the Bolshevik Revolution, the secret police in Petrograd supposedly fed those condemned to death to the animals in the city zoos. Solzhenitsyn says he can't prove it was true, but how else would they have kept zoo animals alive during those famine years? "Those enemies were going to die anyway, so why couldn't their deaths support the zoo economy of the Republic and thereby assist our march into the future? Wasn't it expedient?"

That is the precise line that the Shakesperean evildoer could not cross. But the evildoer with ideology does cross it, and his eyes remain dry and clear.

...Evidently evildoing also has a threshold magnitude. Yes, a human being hesitates and bobs back and forth between good and evil all his life. He slips, falls back, clambers up, repents, things begin to darken again. But just so long as the threshold of evildoing is not crossed, the possibility of returning remains, and he himself is still within reach of our hope. But when, through the density of evil actions, the result either of their own extreme degree or of the absoluteness of his power, he suddenly crosses that threshold, he has left humanity behind, and without, perhaps, the possibility of return.