Will Smith Got it Right

Today's top celebrity news story was about Will Smith's comments regarding Hitler. Here's the quote:

He says, "Even Hitler didn't wake up going, 'Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.'

"I think he woke up in the morning and using a twisted, backwards logic, he set out to do what he thought was 'good.' Stuff like that just needs reprogramming."

There Are No "Bad Guys"

While it is hard to imagine anyone doing anything worse than the methodical torture and slaughter of six million people. But the truth is that he really thought he was helping the world. His fouled up ideology meant that the world needed to be rid of an entire race of human beings. But he loved dogs and was a vegetarian.

He was not born evil. He was not, in fact, purely evil, in spite of having ordered many evil deeds done. But he was like all of us in some ways, a human being trying hard to make the world a better place.

Our Human Nature

It is our human nature to look at people and events with an eye toward discovering who is to blame. We expect to find some kind of closure, some kind of understanding of what has happened by finding a culprit. It helps us reach a kind of conclusion about what happened. "Oh, this happened because of this" ends the discussion on a topic.

What If Things are Not that Simple?

Hitler had to be stopped, no question about that. What he was doing was horrid. And if he had survived to have faced the music, the international tribunals would undoubtedly have chosen to put him to death. Somehow the idea of justice comes with the concept of punishing those who have done evil. I can't see how killing a man for killing six million people is justice. Seems to me therapy would have helped him discover the wrongness of his deeds and then the remainder of his life he would have to live with the consequences of his actions.

But most of us are no Hitlers. While many of us do things that are horrible and must be stopped by someone if we can't stop it ourselves, it doesn't make us evil. Like Hitler we didn't wake up one morning and say, 'Let me do the most evil thing I can do today.' We do what we think is right at the time and then have to live with the outcomes. Sometimes we are right they are good, sometimes not so much.

What do you think?

Is a person evil if they do evil things? Are we good at core led to bad decsions by our life experiences?