The Dangerous Myth of Being a Good Person

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by Lewis Brogdon

There is something deeply unsettling about the moment in which we are living. Every day ordinary people participate in extraordinary forms of injustice while continuing to believe they are good people. Immigration officers separate families, believing they are simply doing their jobs. Government officials approve policies that inflict suffering while calling them fiscal responsibility. Corporate executives and managers make decisions that strip workers of dignity because “it is company policy.” Employers eliminate diversity initiatives and make hiring or promotion decisions that leave qualified women and racial minorities with fewer opportunities, explaining that they are simply complying with changing laws or adapting to a new political climate. Millions of vulnerable people remain in detention facilities operated for profit while contracts are renewed, budgets are approved and the machinery of government continues uninterrupted. Across the country, workers struggle to afford housing, healthcare, childcare, groceries and gas while others profit from systems that leave millions financially exhausted.

Most of the people involved in these decisions would never describe themselves as cruel. They would probably tell you they love their families, work hard, go to church, give to good causes and try to live decent lives. They believe they are “good people.” They don’t see themselves as moral monsters. They are good neighbors, coworkers, church members, public servants, business leaders and ordinary citizens. Yet together they participate in systems that diminish human dignity and exact monstrous violence on others every single day.

How is that possible? Or better stated, “why do we go along with these things?” It is tempting to answer that question by pointing to a president or political party. Political leaders certainly matter. They shape public priorities, influence culture, establish policies, and communicate what behaviors deserve approval or condemnation. Leaders can cultivate compassion, or they can normalize indifference. They can enlarge our moral imagination, or they can shrink it. Yet no president, governor, corporation, or institution can produce a morally compromised society alone. Every moral crisis ultimately depends upon the participation, silence, accommodation or indifference of ordinary people.

The most disturbing possibility is not that America is becoming a nation of bad people. It is that otherwise decent people are becoming increasingly comfortable participating in injustice without recognizing their own participation. We have become remarkably skilled at identifying evil in other people while remaining strangely confident in our own goodness. We assume that because we are not intentionally malicious, we cannot possibly be contributing to the suffering around us. Perhaps that assumption is one of the greatest moral illusions of our time.

Why I Keep Coming Back to Zimbardo

Social psychologist Philip Zimbardo devoted much of his career to understanding how ordinary people become participants in evil. In The Lucifer Effect, he argues that human behavior cannot be explained simply by dividing people into good and bad. Our choices are shaped not only by personal character but also by powerful situational and systemic forces that influence what we think, what we value, and what we consider acceptable. In the right conditions, ordinary people are capable of participating in extraordinary injustice and cruelty without ever believing they are caught up in the machinations of evil.

Zimbardo’s most unsettling contribution is not that evil exists. We already know that. It is his insistence that we consistently underestimate our own moral vulnerability. We like to imagine that if we had lived during slavery, we would have opposed it. If we had lived in Nazi Germany, we would have resisted. If we had witnessed segregation, we would have marched with Dr. King. Perhaps we would have. But perhaps we flatter ourselves. Zimbardo invites a far more uncomfortable question: Who do we become when the world around us begins rewarding conformity, fear, tribal loyalty, self-interest and indifference? That question leads naturally to one of the central assumptions of the New Testament.

The New Testament assumes that human beings are morally vulnerable. Jesus describes us as sheep in need of a shepherd. Paul warns believers not to be conformed to the patterns of this world, not to think more highly of themselves than they ought to, reminds them that they are easily “tossed to and fro by every wind of doctrine,” and insists that their struggle is against powers larger than themselves. Peter insists that we must be sober and vigilant with evil. Christian formation exists because the earliest Christians understood something we often forget: Left to ourselves, we are continually shaped by the people, institutions, and cultures around us.

Permission Structures

Permission structures deserve far more attention than they receive because they help explain how ordinary people become participants in injustice without ever thinking of themselves as unjust. Moral decline rarely begins with spectacular acts of cruelty. It begins with small accommodations that slowly reshape our consciences.

“It is the law.”

“It is our policy.”

“I am just doing my job.”

“I have no choice.”

“Everyone else is doing it this way.”

“That is what leadership wants.”

These are not merely excuses. They are ways of surrendering moral agency.

Political leaders, corporations, churches, universities and media organizations all create environments that influence what people consider acceptable. They communicate what is rewarded, what is punished, what is expected and what no longer requires moral reflection. In essence, they create environments in which people feel increasingly free to act in ways they might once have considered morally unacceptable. Under such conditions, actions that once troubled our consciences gradually begin to feel normal. This is what I mean by a permission structure for evil.

A permission structure does not necessarily create prejudice or cruelty from nothing. More often, it lowers the moral barriers that once restrained them. It assures people that they no longer need to question what they are doing because respected authorities have already done the questioning for them. The result is not always dramatic acts of violence. More often it produces quiet participation in systems that steadily diminish human dignity while allowing participants to preserve the comforting belief that they are simply doing their jobs.

The Slow Work of Moral Erosion

Yet people rarely adjust to a changing moral climate all at once. Our consciences are seldom abandoned in a single dramatic decision. They are reshaped through countless small accommodations that gradually redefine what feels acceptable. We tell ourselves that a small deception is harmless. We take advantage of someone because we can. We overcharge a customer. We laugh at a degrading joke instead of challenging it. We remain silent when someone is treated unfairly because speaking up might cost us something. We become impatient with those who slow us down, dismissive of those with less power, indifferent to suffering that does not touch our own lives. Individually these actions may seem insignificant. Collectively they form us.

This is how moral erosion works. It rarely begins with spectacular acts of cruelty. It begins with ordinary compromises that dull the conscience one decision at a time. Every rationalization makes the next one easier. Every silence becomes practice for another silence. Every act of indifference trains us to look away again. By the time we are asked to participate in something much larger, we have already spent years becoming the kind of people for whom such participation no longer feels morally troubling.

By the time we encounter a significant moral test, our response is rarely determined in that moment alone. It has been shaped by hundreds of smaller decisions that came before it. Character is formed gradually. So is compromise. We become the kind of people who either resist injustice or accommodate it long before history places us in front of its largest moral questions.

Three Everyday Ways We Explain Ourselves

Permission structures shape the environment around us. Moral erosion reshapes the person within us. Eventually both become visible in the stories we tell ourselves about why we cannot, should not or need not act differently.

“I don’t have time”

We express concern, perhaps even outrage, but rarely allow another person’s suffering to interrupt our schedules or rearrange our priorities. The suffering of immigrants, children trapped in poverty, victims of war, lonely neighbors, exploited workers and forgotten communities becomes background noise.

“I am just following policy.”

At other times we surrender our moral responsibility by replacing ethical judgment with institutional compliance. Throughout history countless injustices have been defended with the language of law, policy, procedure and order. People stop asking whether something is right and begin asking only whether it is permitted. They stop asking whether a policy reflects justice and begin asking only whether it satisfies legal requirements. The law can become an excuse for abandoning conscience.

“I am just one person. I can’t make a difference.”

Finally, many of us excuse ourselves through resignation. We convince ourselves that our efforts cannot possibly matter. One church cannot solve poverty. One citizen cannot transform immigration policy. One employee cannot challenge an unjust workplace. One community cannot reverse generations of inequality.

All of those statements contain some truth. But they also contain a dangerous temptation, a giving in to a hopelessness that is a permission for inaction.

Conclusion

Permission structures that erode the conscience and allow ordinary people to participate in cruelty while believing they possess the moral high ground may be every empire’s most dangerous gift. If that is true, then the challenge before us is not simply political. It is moral and spiritual.

America’s crisis will not be solved simply by electing different leaders or defeating opposing political parties. Those battles matter, but they cannot be a substitute for the deep soul work needed in this nation. The fight for the soul of this nation continues. Every generation imagines it is immune to the moral failures of those that came before it. Every generation eventually discovers it is not. Every lasting renewal begins with people who refuse to surrender their consciences to the surrounding culture and with people with enough humility and wisdom to learn from history, not seek to erase it.

We never seem to learn from history, and this worries me because the greatest tragedies of human history have rarely depended upon a handful of evil people acting alone. They have depended upon millions of ordinary people who gradually accommodated themselves to injustice. Some remained silent. Others simply followed orders. Many convinced themselves that someone else is responsible. Still others accepted the suffering of their neighbors because challenging it seemed inconvenient, dangerous, or futile. History reminds us that societies do not descend into moral darkness simply because evil people gain power. They descend because ordinary people gradually adjust to what they once would have rejected. So, the question facing us is not whether we believe ourselves to be good people. It is whether we are becoming the kind of people who can recognize evil before it becomes ordinary, resist conformity before it becomes instinctive, and remain faithful when the culture invites us to surrender our moral imagination for the comfort of belonging.

The most dangerous words in a moral crisis may simply be: “But I’m a good person.”

Dr. Lewis Brogdon is the Executive Director of JustFaith Ministries in Louisville Kentucky. He is a frequent contributor to Christian Ethics Today.