This straight-up fact people won’t swallow

You know the Nazis? Those horrible, sadistic, evil mass murderers? The perpetrators of one of the worse violations of human rights in history?

They were people, just like you and me.

That is to say, the Nazis didn't have an “evil gene.” They weren't born with the exclusive propensity for mayhem, like us who are supposed to be the “good guys.” The Nazis were perfectly ordinary people, the types of people you would smile and wave at on the sidewalks before WWII.

I'm convinced this is some psychological mechanism we brewed up to avoid experiencing an existential crisis. We tell ourselves that the Nazis were a different species, seemingly from a different planet, that we could never become like them, that we're not capable of murdering so many innocent people in cold blood. But we are very capable of it. In terms of our mannerisms, behaviors, attitudes, and personality—the average person is no different than the average Nazi.

You want to know how you turn a normal, law-abiding citizen into an evil killer? Create an “Us vs Them” scenario with groups of people, convince them that the other side is immoral, and that the best way to improve the world is to get rid of that other side. That's the simple formula; that's how it's been for much of human history. Read Ordinary Men by Christopher Browning, which tracks the progress of how a unit of (you guessed it) ordinary, working-class men were led to round up and kill Jews, not out of blood lust or tribal hatred, but due to simple group pressure. You're not a good person just because you say you are; you're just mostly harmless, and you have neither the power nor the spine to commit the so-called evil deeds to get what you want.

The fact people won't swallow is this: if you were born in Nazi Germany, under the right circumstances, there's an overwhelming probability you would have become an Auschwitz guard—and be glad about it.