• ChunkMcHorkle@lemmy.world
    link
    fedilink
    English
    arrow-up
    1
    ·
    12 hours ago

    P.S. This may also contribute. It’s something by Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn I read probably forty years ago, and it put into words what I had been suspecting anyway, that organizations are NOT inscrutable entities made of their own special something but merely groups of individual humans.

    Thus, when an organization does something shitty, it’s because some shitty individuals inside it think it’s a grand idea and the head shit signs off on it and then at that point, all the individuals inside that organization are then faced with a choice to either ride along or get off altogether, because there are rarely any choices in between those two poles. But there’s always a subset who would gladly throw a wrench in the works if they thought it would make any difference, because they think it’s ass and they resent it all, never having wanted it to begin with.

    So I don’t believe in organizations anymore, only the individuals within it. And the line between good and evil crosses not between people, but across the heart of every person. That’s what I got from Solzhenitsyn.

    From The Gulag Archipelago, Part 4, Chapter 1, “The Ascent”:

    "It was granted me to carry away from my prison years on my bent back, which nearly broke beneath its load, this essential experience: how a human being becomes evil and how good…

    Gradually it was disclosed to me that the line separating good and evil passes not through states, nor between classes, nor between political parties either—but right through every human heart—and through all human hearts. This line shifts. Inside us, it oscillates with the years. And even within hearts overwhelmed by evil, one small bridgehead of good is retained. And even in the best of all hearts, there remains… an unuprooted small corner of evil. "