Captain G. M. Gilbert, a psychologist assigned to observe defendants at the Nuremberg trials, surmised that the source of Evil was related to the absence of empathy.

He got this wrong.

This is a superficial observation.

I often speculate that what is actually going on is a contagious disfunction of the human capacity to be captured by false authority, and simply obey instructions ‘from above the command chain’—especially when such instructions require total defection from human compassion.

It’s our capacity to be captured by false authorities, and simply ‘carry out orders’.

But those orders are not actually coming from human beings.

They are coming from »processes, that are dead inside, and thus actively despise the existence of anything alive, human or ‘not under manipulable control’. Those processes intend apocalypse and murder, and they are as compelling as they are invisible to historical and common analysis.