People have always done the devil's work under the illusion that they are doing good.
John Leake
Iago
very precisely identifies his purposes and his motives as being black
and born of hate. But no; that’s not the way it is! To do evil a human
being must first of all believe what he’s doing is good . . .
Macbeth’s
self-justifications were feeble—and his conscience devoured him. Yes,
even Iago was a little lamb too. The imagination and the spiritual
strength of Shakespeare’s evildoers stopped short ad a dozen corpses.
Because they had no ideology.
Ideology—that
is what gives evildoing its long-sought justification and gives the
evildoer the necessary steadfastness and determination. That is the
social theory which helps to make his acts seem good instead of bad in
his own and others’ eyes, so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses
but will receive praise and honors. That was how the agents of the
Inquisition fortified their wills: by invoking Christianity; the
conquerors of foreign lands, by extolling the grandeur of their
Motherland; the colonizers, by civilization; the Nazis, by race; and the
Jacobins (early and late), by equality, brotherhood, and the happiness
of future generations. Thanks to ideology, the twentieth century was fated to experience evildoing on a scale calculated in the millions.
—Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, The Gulag Archipelago
Stuck around St. Petersburghttps://genius.com/565101/The-rolling-stones-sympathy-for-the-devil/Stuck-around-st-petersburg-when-i-saw-it-was-a-time-for-a-change-killed-the-tsar-and-his-ministersWhen I saw it was a time for a changehttps://genius.com/565101/The-rolling-stones-sympathy-for-the-devil/Stuck-around-st-petersburg-when-i-saw-it-was-a-time-for-a-change-killed-the-tsar-and-his-ministersKilled the Tsar and his ministers
Anastasia screamed in vain
I rode a tank, held a general's rankhttps://genius.com/565108/The-rolling-stones-sympathy-for-the-devil/I-rode-a-tank-held-a-generals-rank-when-the-blitzkrieg-raged-and-the-bodies-stankWhen the Blitzkrieg raged and the bodies stank
—Mic Jagger, “Sympathy for the Devil”
During the 19th and 20th centuries, much of the literature on the devil came out of Russia. Dostoevsky’s Demons, published
in 1871-72, tells the story of young revolutionaries, possessed by
ideas coming into Russia from Germany, who bring anarchy, chaos, and
murder to a provincial Russian town.
Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag Archipelago and Mikhail Bulgakov’s The Master and Margarita, are expositions of the nature of evil and how it may possess anyone at any time.
Mic Jagger was inspired by the latter novel to write the lyrics of his 1967 hit, “Sympathy for the Devil.”
As
has long been observed, the easiest people for the devil to possess are
precisely those who are least aware of their capacity for doing
evil—shallow people who walk around with the unexamined assumption that
they are “the good guys.” Their moral blind spot combines with their
ordinary vanity and ego, making them easy instruments for doing the
devil’s work.
In 1978, Solzhenitsyn gave an address at Harvard in
which he warned that the shallowness of American culture put the nation
in danger of losing its way and its freedom. At the time I first read
his speech (back in 1989) I didn’t understand what he was talking about.
After all, I thought, he had fled from the Soviet Union, while we
Americans had defeated it.
Now I understand Solzhenitsyn’s warning.