A little while ago I read Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning which is about Frankl’s time as an inmate in the Auschwitz concentration camp. It’s a very intense book where Frankl attempts to analyze both the inmates and the guards from a detached, psychologist perspective, but it’s certainly hard to even listen to and be detached. Frankl detailed so much cruelty and injustice I was constantly at the crossroads of rage and sadness, but what was odd to me was the part I had the most trouble listening to didn’t have to do with any of that. It was Frankl talking about how there were “good” Nazi guards and “bad” Jewish inmates.

Now, this is counter to anything we want to believe. Those being subjected to oppression are good and those inflicting the oppression — especially Nazis — are extremely evil. But if you’ve ever been around people before, you know things are not that simple. Not everyone in Nazi Germany was this horrible monster unlike everyone you’ve ever met before. But despite how sophisticated we like to think we are, we tend to gravitate toward black and white thinking on good and evil. And this seems to be the natural state of things judging by children.

A while ago, I was watching Pokemon with my daughter, and the evil Team Rocket got in trouble and the good guys — Ash and his team — ended up saving them from death. My daughter wondered why the good guys would save the bad guys. I told her that Jesus says we should love our enemies, and her eyes went wide. “What?!” That’s definitely not a natural inclination. It was also notable to me that the reaction of both my daughter and my brother’s daughter to the big reveal at the end of The Empire Strikes Back was to ask whether that was really true. Up until Darth Vader’s reveal, Star Wars had a very black and white morality, but finding out Darth Vader used to be good was the first bit of gray. And again, from a kid’s perspective, there’s only good and evil and the two don’t mix.

Anyway, I mention all this because I see a lot of push toward simplistic thinking on both sides these days, and all that does is block understanding. We have to recognize the good and the evil in everyone, which means looking for the good in those you oppose and the bad in those on your side. And the most important subject to identify the bad in is yourself. There’s a great danger in continuing to treat Nazis as some special, exceptional evil because they weren’t — they were people all like us. And those worst impulses that led to those horrors are impulses in each and everyone one of us. We think trying to stop the next Nazis means finding the special evil people in society and loudly identifying them, but what’s needed most is vigilance on ourselves.