Hypocrites and “the greater good”
If you believe that somebody can rationalize sending their fellow-citizens to their deaths so as to get cheaper oil by which they can personally profit, then it should not be a problem believing that they could bankrupt their own country and plunge everybody into a dark age of poverty that the First World has never seen before. I am not saying that this is what is happening or has happened, I am just saying that if you believe they are amoral enough, evil enough to do one, it should not be a problem to believe that they would do the other.
We are talking about cognitive dissonance here, and the ability to deny the obvious contradiction between professed values and actions. When it is proven beyond a shred of doubt, you have to still be able to deny. You deny because admission would not suit you, and you know that if you deny long enough and fervently enough, people will start to consider the possibility that maybe you are telling the truth. Maybe your tortuous, tendentious retelling of the facts is the truth.
The thing about evil is that it never comes right out and admits to being what it is, it just goes along acting in it’s own best interest until everybody decides to stop it. If they are evil, merely telling them that is not going to change anything. Merely accusing them is pointless. People who rationalize have already worked out their actions with their conscience of whatever passes for one with them. In their minds they have twisted the nature of their actions to where they “had no choice” and “were for the greater good”. They love the greater good. The long-term good. You can do anything for the long term good. The term being as long as you like. You can make anything a “reasonable course of action given”, and fill in the space after “given” with any historical precedent that suits your immediate goals.
