We like to pretend that evil is rare. We tell ourselves that monsters are freaks of nature—isolated anomalies tucked away in history books, completely separate from everyday life. Carl Jung understood a terrifying truth that modern society tries desperately to ignore: to understand the dark side of human nature, you have to look at the Nazis. Not because they were a different species, but because they were ordinary people. And we just watched that exact same psychological machinery run live on global television.
Jung called the unacknowledged, repressed part of the human psyche “the shadow.” It’s the capacity for cruelty, rage, and destruction that every person carries inside them. Under normal conditions, polite society keeps that shadow locked in the basement. But give people an institutional excuse—a panic, a mandate, a government-approved enemy—and the basement door flies wide open. Look at what happened during the COVID-19 pandemic.
Overnight, the social contract tore apart. People who pride themselves on being “tolerant” and “kind” turned into vicious enforcers of conformity. The unvaccinated were systematically cut off from polite society, losing jobs, homes, lifelong friends, and family ties, while hospitals locked doors on them and denied basic medical treatment. Pundits and citizens alike openly screamed for them to be fired, starved, or rounded up, with some seriously arguing for public mandates requiring yellow stars to mark the unclean. It wasn’t a fringe movement; it was mainstream mass hysteria dressed up as public health.
When the state tells a terrified population that a specific group is a biological threat, the crowd doesn’t just go along with it—they volunteer for the job. They get a massive, intoxicating dopamine hit of moral righteousness. They aren’t bullies anymore; they are “heroes” protecting the public good, getting to project all their internal fear and shadow onto an out-group, punishing them with a clear conscience. The chilling reality is this: Had they rolled out the concentration camps, people wouldn’t have just watched—they would have called to fill them up. They would have cheerfully pointed fingers, checked papers at the gates, and patted themselves on the back for being on the “right side of history” while loading their neighbors into the trucks.
History doesn’t repeat itself because people are evil by default; it repeats because the human operating system hasn’t changed. We are all wired with the capacity for tribalism, projection, and compliance under fear. The moment you surrender your critical thought to collective panic and let authority dictate who the enemy is, you become the mob. Until we have the courage to look at our own shadow—and refuse to hand over our humanity to the next state-sponsored panic—the machinery of atrocities will always be ready to spin right back up.
Just something to think about…