Compartmentalized

 It is well-documented that Nazi officers could run a concentration camp during working hours, and commit the most heinous crimes against humanity imaginable, and then go home and serve as loving, sweet, moral, decent husbands and fathers to their wives and family members. How is it, it is asked, that we can compartmentalize the evil that we do, from the good that we do, all in the same person?

It seems that we have an amazing ability so live with varying levels of cognitive dissonance, the syndrome of existing with wildly conflicting mental outlooks, all within a functioning personality.

It could be that moral growth for a morally ambitious striver would be the ever-expanding capacity to see oneself as one is, to ever narrow the gap between how one acts and how one sins less and less so that one’s self-conception of oneself as a praiseworthy individual is a self-appraisal that is deserved and not a lie. This decomparmentalization of how one sees oneself in line with how one is becoming overall more loving, holy, and blameless may be an accurate measure of personal moral growth.

If the wild inconsistency (how people wall off the evil they do from their positive self-conception) is shared with most people, they are horrified at the prospect, and regard it as a rare and exceptional state of existing. 

I do not find compartmentalizing the good we do from the evil that we do, in our personal lives, at all unusual. In fact, it is universal and common, though not to such wild extremes as evinced by a German concentration camp administrator.

To minimize the comparmentaliztion of our personal good, bracketed off from the evil that we do, we must accept that we are all born sinners, and that any of us and most of us would operate successfully and willingly, with minimum guilt felt, as a Nazi concentration camp administrator, and this is Jordan Peterson's take on such things, and he is both wise, truthful and accurate here.

If we refuse to lie to ourselves, and love the truth, and God, then we will be much more self-aware, and much less likely to compartmentalize the evil we do, bracketed off from the good that we do, and the good that we do is how we see ourselves as existing and being.

By being brutally honest with ourselves, it is much easier to decompartmentalize the evil we do from the good we do, and we will do much less evil over time.

Let me offer several moral axioms that further our explanation as to why all we naturally cruel humans so easily comparmentalize the good that we do from the evil that weare and commit.

First, Ayn Rand is correct: generally: selfishness is virtue, and selflessness is evil.

Second, to be moderate is to be and do good, and to be extreme is to be and do evil.

Humans, as individuals and individuators, are self-interested, but not much inclined to seek to control or attack others. Such control and campaigns of assault, systemic prejudice, even institutionalized genocide against minorities and outgroups are altruistic, selfless, collective activities.

We are naturally pro our ingroup and tribe, and we are just accepting that we insiders are without flaw or sin, and if there is ever a conflict, the fault belongs with the outgroups or rival tribes. They are without honor, worth, dignity or rights.

We will comparmentalize and treat ingroup members according to our cultural and religious ethos, but outliers are subhuman, not people like ingroup folk, we can justify setting morality aside, and hurting, raping, attacking, even killing those monsters as they deserve to be maltreated. This ingroup kindness versus outgroup cruelty makes compartmentalizing the good that we do, separated from the bad that we do and repress--it makes it all something that we can engage in and justify to our neighbors and ourselves.

Where we are immoderate, extreme, violent, enraged and completely frenzied, intolerant true believers in defense of expanding our cause, we can justify doing whatever to any infidel in any outgroup out there that we can think of doing.

Extremism and lying, groupism and viciousness all go together, so we are able to lie to ourselves and to each other so that the whole society is a web of lies and mass deception--at that point it is easy and convenient to compartmentalize the good that we do to ingroup people while hurting savagely outgroup victims, and proudly claiming the right to so act.